Maggiesville

Graham and I have been working on this video together to help Maggie learn colors. It's painful for me to watch because I have to listen to the sound of my own voice (ack!) but I do like the idea of the voice being familiar to her and Graham refused to do it.

We have no idea if what we've created is an effective way to learn, but the repetition of colors and the challenge of identifying them within objects seemed logical to us. To make, we downloaded the images from a stock photo website called Shutterstock. My office has a subscription to the site for unlimited downloads and I sought their permission to use it for this project. After gathering the images we liked (5 for each color) we arranged them in Photoshop and cropped them to the correct format. We also made the solid color slides and exported everything as JPGs. Those individual JPGs were then brought into a program called iMovie. (This comes standard on Macs.) It didn't take long to import the images and then record my narration into the sequence.

We played the movie back for Maggie and I'm happy to report that she was pretty mesmerized by it. Color is something that I'm sure we will teach through books and everyday exploration but I really think having these large, backlit images projected on the television will be a fun way to learn. We're already brainstorming for the next videos (shapes, letters, and numbers) and what we think might be the most effective way to display those.

We've never seen any of the Baby Einstein type videos, so it's likely that the movies we are creating already exist. Oh well. We're having fun making them on our own.