Looney Labs Educators Mailing list Archive

["Carol Townsend" <carol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Happy "It's Soon To Be Winter Break!" time to our Teachers!

I know I looked forward to Winter Break when I was teaching full time - I'm sure the same is still true for a lot of teachers!

Anyway, I wanted to toss a thought out to this list - new Animelds are being posted on the  
Wunderland.com site.  They're a cool word-play-mixed-with-art thing that Alison has been doing for a few years now.

http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Alison/B3Bits/animelds/index.html

Basically, take an animal, change one letter in the name to make it different, then draw that. Alison's official rules are:
- Change one letter in an animal name so that it has the name of an object within it. 
- This can be a substitution (the most pure form) ( no marking) 
- or the dropping of one letter, or the adding of one letter. These are marked with an asterisk (*).
- A two-letter change (of any type) is allowed (but not quite as cool). These are marked with a number sign (#).
- These should be animals melded with objects (not adjectives or concepts).

Examples: 
Basset hound --> Basket hound.
Parakeet --> Parafeet
Butterfly --> Butlerfly
3-toed Sloth --> 3-toed Cloth.

Anyway... I was thinking that this might work well in some classrooms, either English or Art or whatever.  

If you or your class come up with cool new Animelds, Alison would love to see them -- with the following caveat that she posts to most replies to her Animelds:

"I get a lot of suggestions for Animelds, -- more than I can possibly use. I don't do them in the order they were suggested; I just look at the list of hopefuls and see which jump out at me as the better ones.  This means that sometimes it's something that came in just in the past week, and sometimes it's something that's been in the queue for years. I don't have a system to notify people specifically when I use their Animeld, but if you're interested, you can sign up for the Weekly News
Notification List. http://www.wunderland.com/lists.html  Once a week we send out a message to this list to say that the main site has been updated.  This includes a brief description of what's new,
including the name of the Animeld for that week. "

So, have fun - and let us know if you used this in your classroom!

Carol