I have a nearly five-year-old daughter, and she is of the inquisitive type. A day with her is a nonstop barrage of questions followed by her own personal extrapolations based on the answers to the questions. I wouldn't call her extrapolations wrong, but rather fanciful, and if not wholly accurate they are at the very least based on the facts available to her.
Others would say that she has a good imagination and I certainly wouldn't contradict them. She has a great imagination (okay, as her father I'm biased, but I'd still argue that she does) and a desire to learn about the world.
Enter Kidlandia.
Begun in 2008 by Brian Backus, Kidlandia is a website that allows kids (with parental oversight) to create worlds based on characters new and old. On the Kidlandia website one can make wall hangings, prints, door hangars, height charts, and gallery wrapped canvases (amongst other things), and personalize nearly all of it.
On the website you choose a character/theme (Kidlandia Kreechurs, Disney characters, Dora, VeggieTales, SpongeBob, and several others in the future) then get a huge number of options involving the plethora of products (the aforementioned canvases, hangings, and more) you can make using the characters. You can also work the other way, choosing the type of piece you want to create and then selecting the characters you want on it.
A basic example of this is the work we created on
the right (click for a larger view). It is a Kidlandia Kreechur themed piece done on their "Pirate Hideaway" map. We spent hours customizing it and the final result is better than anything we could have hoped for.
It is with this customization that the real fun—and the use of imagination—begins. Once you have your basic character and piece set, you can use the website's wizard to create names for rivers, oceans, mountains, islands, etc. You can also opt to individually change all the names manually. What you then end up with is a beautiful, almost completely personalized for—and by—your child, piece of art. But, the project can extend well beyond just names and objects on the map. You can actually click on the characters and create stories about them on the site.
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