Yikes! Holidays

Our last day of this round of Holiday Progrmme at Yikes some of the boys finished Part 2 of their movie. Last hols they completed Part 1. Both videos will be posted on Youtube by end of January. Everyone got picked up early today and headed off to our different Christmas celebrations. Merry Christmas everyone. We'll leave you with our Computer Tips and Shortcuts from some of the crew at Yikes: Ctrl + Alt + Del gets you out of a screen freeze everytime. F5 will refresh your page, this is really helpful if your page is loading slowly. You can use your arrow keys and Enter to scroll and select When selecting files you click on the first file then hold SHIFT and click on last file and it will select the group of files needed. You can select all your icons on your desktop by dragging across the page and then click on one to move them all. Instead of typing in a whole address in the address bar, just google main wording of website you want and click to get on site from there...

How did these IT savvy kids cope without power??? There were lots of moans and groans without internet access BUT we managed till 12 when power returned. The older kids wrote clues for the younger ones to do a treasure hunt, some boys did the camera work for their movie, others started taking photos for their youtube "how to " videos and thankfully Deb came in early to do some art! Some of the clues                                    Siggi's Instructional Video on Youtube                       

MACRO MODE: These stunning images were done in macro mode by our 5-9year olds (Holly took the bee and flower ones). Tara's done it again - shown us a whole new level of art/craft out of old wrapping paper! We made our own gift bags.

Rain, singing, snowglobes, pop-up books kept our attention today at YikesNelson Holidays. There's nothing like the beautiful harmonies of children to melt the heart and lift the spirits, a much needed antedote to the intensity of the morning rain which meant everyone had been indoors for hours. Not only that all morning we had been very focused on our creative juices flowing, so by afternoon everyone felt a bit stir crazy. Wonderful Brenda came and gave us a great outlet for our energy. Brenda took the whole group in a singing session, she gave a list of christmas songs and so the children got to choose. After about half n hour she took a smaller group who were interested in more input and finally she spent time one on one with any interested children. Have a listen: All morning we focused on online pop up books and snowglobes. A very delightful online tool. The globes are a great christmas greeting to send to friends and relatives. Check out this boy's, he wanted to be...

We created cartoons to go on our e-cards & finished off our video greetings. WELCOME BACK TO OUR VERY ARTISTIC TARA! She tutored us in making quite ritzy decorations using paper. I love her clever creativeness. Our computer tip for the day was in Word. Very handy tips. To select all the text you can just press CTRL + A To copy just press CTRL + C To paste just press CTRL + V And if you need to find a word that is similar to the one in your text but you want one that's more descriptive you can just press SHIFT + F7 and Word will open up a Thesaurus for you. Pretty clever aye. The older kids were the ones who gave these tips a go and voted on it. Polls on right.

Personalising christmas greetings was our focus today. We chose the option of sending a message from Santa at Portable North Pole (Click on Image to see an example message to you) Or the other option was designing our own webpage as an e-card to be sent to family and friends. Instead of filling out an e-card online we decorated the pages ourselves and are beginning to video our personalised greeting. Personalised greetings are so much nicer to receive Every day at Yikes we'll be sharing a computer tip and voting on it. Today's tip was a Youtube tip: You can use the number keys on your computer (the ones at the top not on the side) to go along a youtube video in increments eg: if you press 1 it will forward 10% into video if you press 5 it will forward 50% of video. Check out the poll on the sidebar to see what everyone thought. WELCOME back to Holly. Holly is studying at Otago University. She's going to bring some of her skills to us next week in her field of e...

It's Christmas time at Yikes! We love Christmas and so the next holiday programme dates will reflect Christmas. O yes and notice the new times. We will make our own MOVIE TRAILERS summarising Santa in an edgy way, we'll send E-CARDS to relatives home and abroad, we'll do fun things like the VIDEO BELOW , except we'll use our faces, our friends and familys faces and send them as a fun card for Christmas, we'll make Christmas cards in our ART FOCUS and we have a PERFORMING ARTS (soon to be graduate) joining the team & much much more.... CHRISTMAS DATES: * NEW TIMES *: 8.45am – 5.30pm Friday 17 December 2010 – Friday 24 December 2010 AND Monday 24 January 2011 – Friday 04 February 2011 Cost: $25 half day/ $40 full day, $180 full week/full day booking Or $120 if every day till 3pm. Recently John Key and Hillary Clinton tried to express our warming relations, this Christmas video really reflects their message don't you think? :-) We're going to ...

We've really attacked the MAC's this week and it's been FANTASTIC! Today we're going to revisit the Inspector, he's so helpful, and tidy up our loose ends, like publishing our pages onto our blogs etc. Yesterday was a big day videoing and so there was no time to post to this blog. But later today there'll be a couple of videos to watch and a write up. The best thing I've liked about MAC ATTACK week is how the interactiveness of the software has created friends amongst the group . It has come to our attention that we need to branch off into two areas with the programme: 5-7 year olds and 8-14 year olds. The younger children need more specialised care and a slightly modified programme to cater to their age group. We will not be splitting up the programme geographically, it is great to have all the age groups sharing and interacting together. Pop in regularly to this site to see the updates on this. Also we will begin to profile all our staff on here...

We'll let the footage speak for itself. Below are three examples of using iMovie. A great tool. Simple to use. The bottom footage is of a video some of the 5-7 year old group did. Also, on our "Day 4" tab is another movie a group of the boys made. Enjoy!

Pages on a Mac is the equivalent to Word on Windows. The kids will find that the skills they have already learnt on previous Mac stuff is easily transferred here. Again we will see the "Inspector" and dragging and dropping files is easy as 1-2-3. Oh and I think they're going to love the templates MAC has on offer. Because it's MAC Attack week I used a Pages template to create the poster here on the left. The 5-7 year olds will get to create a poster too as well as their other acitivities. Watch this site for developments with the programme with regard to the 5-7 year olds. We're going to expand it and get more specialised programming for them. Exciting. The photos below were some of the ones we used on our posters. We used a really fun site called Dumpr to add fun effects to our photos then we inserted them into our poster page. This boy added his photo to a rubik cube One girl added a picture of her goldfish to a museum display. She also go...

Keynote has so many great features it really does enable the user to create top class presentations. Today the children will learn about these features and give it a go. I'm not biased toward Mac computers or general PC's but I must say, Keynote sways me in a Mac direction! This quick clip was made with Keynote: THIS WAS AN EXAMPLE CREATED BY ONE OF THE CHILDREN: Decorating our own doorhangers enabled us to have a bit of downtime from computers. Not that anyone really wanted downtime from the computers!!!

Today we worked on the tool.....well we played with the tool "Photobooth". A surprising outcome to the use of this tool was how it quickly broke down the shyness between the newcomers to the holiday programme and knit everyone together! With all it's funny effects everyone ended up in fits of laughter and grabbing each other to show the latest funny pose. As a Co Ordinator of this holiday programme I think Photobooth is going to be a great tool to use consistently to help break the ice. One of the boys made a video with photobooth using the "twin" option, so it looked like him and his clone were making the video. Very clever. We also got used to navigating with the MAC computers by dragging the photos into iPhoto, eiminating any blemishes and fancying up what we wanted. We took one normal shot too on photobooth and uploaded it to a great image editing site called Picturetrail. On Picturetrail we chose the bling option to "bling" up our photo. ...

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$120/week $35.00/day $20 half a day. CYFS & OSCAR certified. WINZ subsidies available. Monday 04 October - Friday 08 October 9am - 3pm. CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE SCHEDULE

WE FINISHED OFF WEEK 1 FOCUSING ON ANIMATION! Scroll over the images below and press play: Take off and Landing by yikesnelson , made at DoInk.com  Animation is so much fun. Animation is also quite a detailed process, so the online software we used really helps beginners get a taste for the process and it is also possible to start out as a stick figure artist and progress to hollywood type ventures! Girl skipping by YikesNelson1 , made at DoInk.com Arts Section Today we did some profiles of the childrens faces and we showed the children how to proportion where their eyes, nose and mouth goes. And how to start showing some shading, the light, the dark, and the shadows throughout the face. And we learnt how to use the rubber to show the light on the face as well.

We deviated off the schedule and ten of us headed to the movies since our numbers weren't too big today. We watched Karate Kid , grabbed some sound bytes straight after. Before we headed to the cinema we looked at an online review site to see what reviewing a movie online was all about EG: Click Here We took note that the sites often used pictures or video clips of the movie. They put the title, director and actors and a bit about the plot. And most sites used stars for the rating. Some sites even had a poll, which we're going to do too. But instead of stars as our ratings , we are going to use a karate kick icon taken from the movie promo's. KARATE KID 2010 Directed by: Harald Zwart Written by: Christopher Murphey (Screenplay) and Robert Mark Kamen (story) YIKESsoundbytes following the movie: ADD YOUR RATING TO OUR POLL ON THE LEFT!

Making movies is fun! For the sake of time we have approached Moviemaker in two ways: 1] By greenscreening a video introduction to our blogs. Mr A (we will call him) has an action blog and is inviting people on to his blog to take up his challenge to be a warrior. 2] We uploaded photos brought along on a pendrive, added voiceovers from a voice recorder and added our own titles, effects and transitions . To actually make an epic movie would require us to spend days on Storyboarding, and the process. Instead, by keeping our projects simple we were able to gain confidence with the software and thereby enabling the children to competently build on the base level of skills gained. Arts Section Tara helped the children transform star shaped pieces of wood into handy little mirrors. To the undiscerning eye, you could think there was a bit of paint and stuff, but there were art intricacies explored, like, mixing colours, texturising, stamps and more. Very handy for the handbag or in the ca...

Maddison's "Toon" The day flew by and I was tempted to call it twitterer Tuesday because it seemed like no-one stayed on the same project for long, everything was short and punchy like the tweets on twitter! No-one seemed in the mood for extended concentration. We redid some videoing using the greenscreen. Some of the girls are confident on playing keyboards and strummed some tunes and began their blog intro's. One girl did a rendition of Baa Baa black sheep and intends putting some sheep in her background. Some of the children uploaded photos and started decorating them and adding effects using photobucket. Moviemaker was tampered with and Maddison decided to create a cartoon using online tools. ARTS SECTION Optimus Prime image soon to be transformed into cardboard marionette And it is here we come to the reason why it today is called "Transformer Tuesday". Tara our tutor, was teaching ( Wow for the alliteration ), on making our very own marione...

Watching the creativity of individual children is a bonus of being part of YikesNelson. No two blogs were the same and each expressed the individual's taste, style and expressions of interest. We utilised Bloggers new Designer Templates and explored "Adding Pages"  and "Gadgets". We start the Holiday Programme creating the blogs so the children can profile the rest of the week's work on this platform, then families can view their talents and interests too. Tuesday we will build on this by exploring moviemaker and creating videos for our blog. Movement is an important part of keeping a blog or webpage "alive". ARTS SECTION I never had never heard of needle felting before but our Art & Design tutor introduced the kids to needle felting.EG: Some of the children made fish, others made flowers. They use wool type material and special needles and "stab" away at the wool till it takes shape. Fun!

Welcome back to YikesNelson Holiday Programme. It is exciting to venture out on another ICT journey these holidays (July 5 2010 - July 16 2010). If you look around the site you will see bits and pieces of what we did last holidays and the schedule will detail this round's topics. The emphasis is on fun, with computer skills built along the way! Each day is interspersed with art, outdoor activities, adventure playground, art, craft, movies and nintendo. We run Monday to Friday 9am - 3pm. CYFs is visiting us at the end of June, so we are hoping to be able to offer WINZ subsidies by these holidays, will keep you posted. Please email us for anymore information.

Yes it's a wrap. It has been a great week seeing the creativity of the kids evolve using technology. Scroll down to see what we covered each day and on the tabs at the top you will see some examples of work done. Looking forward to July. Ka Kite Tania

Today we are going to have fun with images.  Fun with text, fonts, styles  Fun with slideshows  Look at this Doll in a Blue Dress Now look at her Take 5 Images:

Today we are going to publish our own works: comic strips, magazines , art, photography, all using online tools! (Any image below can be clicked on for fullscreen view, just click esc when finished) Here's one made this morning: By yikesnelson | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon We can even make a flipbook comic book if we want like this one: The 7 Habits by Seannoel | Make your own at www.toondoo.com We can also create our own magazine using photos, images and text, here is an example just using our parent information sheet, but you can be even more creative:

Today's focus is on tools for voice, tools for expression. Some kids are shy and find it hard to express themselves. Remember when you were a kid and had to give a 5 minute speech in front of the class?! Imagine if you could deliver your speech through your own avatar! Just because some kids are shy doesn't mean they haven't got much to offer......... There are three types of voice expressions below, click the play button to hear:

Hi Guys, Holly and I are looking forward to seeing everyone Tuesday. The focus for the day will be moviemaker. Using this tool for making a movie or  making a quick presentation for your blog/website. Thought this clip would help with our planning phase. Don't be daunted by the age of this guy, or the content. Any age from 4yrs old and up can use this tool and create video masterpieces (in the eyes of their Mums and Dads anyway). And as for the content, Holly and I are here to help. If you are booked in for half a day, we probably will focus on a quicker presentation to get it done in time.