Main Lessons with Moving Pictures

When we began using the Enki materials, there was the assertion that the school time would work from a three-fold process: open intake, artistic digestion, and mastery.  The intake is the easy part--the child simply listens to the story.  The artistic digestion and mastery leave lots of room for creativity.  One can simply draw pictures or paint, play games, work with manipulatives, model beeswax, work on building projects, perform puppet plays, or work on the plays using the scripts provided in the materials.

While Enki has/had schools, their main focus has been homeschooling.  The materials they set forth are generally for home use, though the games and some videos include a classroom element.  Some footage shows movable pictures, though these, as far as I know, were not given much mention in the homeschool materials.  That's where Making Picture Books with Movable Figures comes in.

This is wonderful fun for the children and another option that can be used for both digestion and mastery.  Roan is working on quality of numbers right now, so he has more picture work for the story above, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon."  I think it is interesting to see how light his drawing is, compared with Willow's.  She did "Owl and Rabbit" from Christopherus.  It reminded me of some of the trickster tales from last year.

The premise of this book is to use poetry to create picture books for children, often referring to Rudolf Steiner and his indications.  They provide numerous poems as suitable examples.  The point is that the text should have some kind of action in it that can be represented with a moving figure.  Since Willow is working on a poem a month and putting them into a poetry book, some of hers will include movable pictures.

 

The book gives clear instructions for creating the backgrounds and layering them to create different fields for the figures. It also tells how to make the figures and assemble the pages.  I'm sorry my photos are a little dark--it was getting dark outside!  I helped the children to decide how to put their pages together and left them to do the coloring and so on.  We used old watercolor pages for the stiff sticks to move the figures, which made it easier to choose the right length.  We used regular liquid glue, but I think a glue stick would work better on the lighter paper.

I'll continue to post our progress on our pictures here, since it cheers us so to make them.  I think it's also good, all-around practice in being thoughtful, instead of rushing through work.  There are so many opportunities for simple, subtle self-improvement through the arts.