Vision On!

Early on Friday morning I read an email from Pinterest.  I registered with Pinterest quite some time ago, but have to admit that I haven't really done anything with it. Anyway, there was an interesting link in this email.  The skeletons reminded me of the 70s children's programme Vision On, and the character that Tony Hart made by writing and mirroring the programme name.  In 1981 I was in the 4th year of middle school, and we did a piece of art work inspired by this, where we wrote our names, mirrored them, and then painted each little section in a different shade of the same colour.  I seem to remember mine was various shades of red and pink.

Then this morning my six year old downloaded yet another app for her Android tablet.  It's called Doodle Toy, and she showed me how you can make mirrored writing with it.  So, instead of doing the work which I really need to do, I have been having a play with Doodle Toy, and thinking about how it could encourage Year 3 in particular with their writing of single words, as specified in the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages.

Using this app it's easy to create an image of, for example, an animal name, and then embellish it to make it look even more like that animal.  I have done the French animals lapin and lion.  I have also created one of my own name, about which I could write something like "Me llamo Clare.  Soy un insecto." because of the shape my name makes.  It was straightforward (after a few false starts!) to save the images to my tablet's Album for later use.

I hope it gives you some ideas for having fun with text.  I'm going to put this on my old Android tablet, which I let the children use, and see what they come up with.