What’s All This About Circles?

If you’ve been following the blog, you should know that my younger son, The Little One, sees the world differently than the rest of the family. We try to reach out to him in all different kinds of ways, music, art, games, and of course, books. One of my favorites to read with him is The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds (Candlewick, 2003). I love this book because it stresses trying. You don’t get anywhere if you don’t make that first mark. The Little One likes to see where that mark takes Vashti. Then we talk about his marks. It’s a fantastic book.

Luckily for us, there is more. What, you ask? Well, there’s Dot Day (A whole day about being creative), Celebridots(I totally got to make one of these), and The Dot Club (join it).

What’s the deal with Dot Day? I’ll let the good folks at International Dot Day explain that for me:

When is it?

International Dot Day was launched by teacher Terry Shay (@tjshay) when he introduced his classroom to Peter H. Reynolds’ (Website, twitter) book The Dot on September 15, 2009. (Fun Fact: Terry chose September 15 because the original publishing date of The Dot is September 15, 2003!)

What do you do?

An International Dot Day celebration can be whatever you want it to be – from a 30-minute moment to week-long series of activities or even a year-long theme for your classroom, school, or District.

Here’s a gallery of some of the past projects that folks have done. And, here’s a link to some great classroom resources

OK. So, what is the deal with these celebridots?

The Celebridots blog is filled with dots created by authors, illustrators, and celebrities who share in the dream of a more creative world. The first Dot is by Sharon Creech, author of some awesome books, including Love That Dog, a Lehrhaupt family favorite. You can find an alphabetical listing of all the Celebridot makers here. I recently had the great pleasure of creating one of them myself. Below is a bit about my creative process. You can see my dot here.

Creating a Dot. An excursion into creativity. By Me.

You would think that making a circle would be easy to do. I mean, we aren’t talking about a perfect round orb. We’re talking about a Dot. A blot. A mark. So, of course, I over thought it from the start.

How do I show me as a Dot? Should I put a monkey in it? What colors do I use? How do I add that layer of ‘difficult’ that I need to put into everything?

I started with an idea to do something based on the moon, but that’s already been done. A few times actually. I needed something different. Something unique.

I made a dot. Then I made another. I kept making dots until I had a whole sheet of dots. When I looked at it, I knew what my idea would be. I would make a dot…of dots.

I looked up circles made up of circles to see what types of things others had done. There are some pretty cool examples out there. Give it a look.

That’s where I found examples of color-blindness tests. These fascinate me. The concept of hidden messages is a pretty cool one. Even if the message is just a number or a shape.

I created a whole bunch of sample dots to make sure I got mine right. I hid smiles.

I hid monkeys.

I hid all kinds of things. I even tried some that didn’t have anything hidden in them.

Until I struck upon the one I picked as final. Which you can see here. It was a lot of fun. I hope you like it.