Dinos and Turkeys

ALIVE!!!: Last night before retiring, the kids left their newly acquired dinos on the kitchen island, convinced they wouldn't move overnight, despite what they'd heard about Dinovember, the month toy dinosaurs come to live in the wee small hours of the morning.

Upon upping, the first thing they each did was make a beeline for the island, to check on the dinos, which had disappeared.

CJ did a cursory look around and found nothing. A bit later, when Annabelle got up, she went to the pantry for something and found the scene above.

The kids were quite tickled, and our first day of Dinovember was a success.

TURKEY TIME: It's been too long since we've done a formal art session, and waaay too long since we've enjoyed a Bruce Blitz cartooning tutorial.

We used to follow Blitz's tutelage fairly often, when it was "On Demand" on our cable provider, Comcast. However, it disappeared  months back. At the time I discovered its disappearance, I searched for it online, but to no avail.  I decided to give it another go today, and had better results, happily.

I found a Comcast page where the old Activity TV videos are listed - in a rather unorganized 'order' - but we'll take what we can get!
http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/watch/Activity-TV%3A-Cartooning-%26-Art/6483543376148648112/full-episodes#episode=6483543376148648112
I read through the list hoping to find a Thanksgiving-themed tutorial. I spied one for a Native American girl, but the kids completed that drawing a couple years ago. Later down the list was a a turkey tutorial, with the letter T as the basis for the drawing. Perfect!

And good news for non-Comcast people. At no point did it ask me to sign in, so it looks like it's available to everyone - at least as of this writing. (I should warn people, though, that it took two browsers and two computers to get it going. It didn't like my Chrome [saying something about an 'Incognito window, which was a setting I didn't have on] and it didn't like my IE, saying my Flash was out of date [it isn't]. Mercifully, it worked on CJ's laptop on the first try.)

The kids had no trouble following the steps, and used acrylic chalks to color their drawings after the video was over. Annabelle gave CJ some pointers in the fine art of blending.

 Here's his finished product. Pretty cute!

 And here's Annabelle's turkey. I like its eyelashes. :)

MORNING WALK: It wasn't particularly nice this a.m. - oppressive gray. But we needed to get some motion in to our morning, and the doggies were overdue for a walk.

We headed for one of our favorite destinations, Fishermen's Terminal. It's always interesting to check out the working boats there.

SHUNTING: We had more fun today working out a bear of a challenge in "The Amazing Mathematical Amusement Arcade." It involved a train engine, a having to swap the places of two cars on a round about, with a stipulation being the engine could fit under a foot bridge over the round about, but the cars couldn't.

You know me, Ms. Hands on Learner, I immediately set about finding props to use. We settled on Disney Pixar "Cars" characters for our train cars, Annabelle drew the track on the white board, and I made us a pseudo-footbridge (which all of our cars fit under, but it served as a reminder during our attempts at solving it).

It was a toughie, and we helped ourselves by repeating the phrase "no one ever said you can't ..." while trying new solutions. That's akin to Gpa's comment on last night's post noting, "When a problem stumps you, step back and try to uncover your Unconscious Assumptions."

Eventually, they figured it out. One turning point was realizing that you could haul two cars at a time.

MOM'S OK: Some of you may recall I posted last week about India launching its first ever interplanetary mission, a spacecraft headed for an eventual Martian orbit. MOM has instruments on board to return color images of Mars' surface, study the Red Planet's composition and survey its atmosphere for methane.

What I've neglected to post, however, is that said spacecraft had a worrisome hiccough a few days back.

MOM was designed to orbit Earth for a spell, picking up speed before its flight to Mars. Once in Earth orbit, there were to be a series of rocket firings to boost it in orbit. The first three went as planned, but last Sunday, on what was the fourth firing, there was an abort when a rocket firing failed.

A number of the space-y pages I frequent were pretty much predicting the mission a failure at that point.
However, according to a report today, corrective measures were a success and MOM is back on track. Let's hope that's the case and that MOM's on her way to Mars in short order.