Stopmotion animation project ideas for kids

When I say "story" I obviously mean something ultra-simple. No narrative arcs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVFoCVbQc9o I did in about 10 minutes. That would work if it were somehow funnier.

Toy Story meets http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-39.html: Scene one: Your daughter starts colouring in a colouring-in picture, then yawns, and goes to bed. Scene two: (stop motion) Her pens and pencils sneakily escape from her pencil case and start colouring in the rest of the colouring-in picture. Scene three: Your daughter wakes up, stretches, gets out of bed, goes to finish her colouring-in and - gasp of surprise! She finds it complete! Fin!

That clip is really cute! You could have the nuts run into something that scares them and do the nut equivalent of running away screaming and waving their arms, whatever that is. She's 4, so slapstick in general could be a hit. There's Tom and Jerry-type routines: a nut and a nutcracker are looking for each other, maybe chasing each other around the bowl, switching directions and eventually colliding with unexpected results; a cross-door hallway chase; one character follows another, and every time the one being followed senses it and turns around to check, the follower stays behind its back; etc. It might be interesting to animate household objects. Maybe your lamp is secretly a Pixar lamp at heart? Pin some eyes/nose/mouth/eyebrow features on a couch and have it react to things? Cute might be as good as funny: one character gives another a holiday gift, to their delight; a Lego structure enthusiastically builds itself; a house grows legs and walks somewhere else, or wiggles around to shake off snow; the blackboard or magnetic board can be an empty room that someone peeks into, walks into cautiously, and starts to dance in or whatever; birds or butterflies can fly around on the walls... This is a really nice project!

I think you need to get a packet of googly eyes.

When I first tried stop-motion (with a Super-8 camera, waaaay before digital), I made Play-Doh sculptures of Easter Island heads, then had a bug walk around them. One of the heads' mouths opened up, a big tongue came out, and the head ate the bug. The kids I knew thought it was hilarious.

My kids and I did one years ago which went like this: [scene 1] Dad hollers off-screen that "it's time for school!" kid 1 runs into scene and drops a fire-engine, kid 2 runs into scene and drops a bendy Pinocchio doll. [scenes 2-x] Pinocchio doll jumps on fire-engine, rides over to toy basket, lifts the ladder and proceeds to encourage all the other toys to "escape" from the toy basket. One by one they climb out. [scene x+1] toy parade, led by Pinocchio on the fire-engine. about 40 sceonds of video that took almost 2 hours to make. But boy did we have fun doing it!

These answers are all great. Thanks so much everyone! @xingcat: that sounds like a winner :)

snarfois, if you film it, please upload and let us know. I'd love to see how it compares to my "masterpiece" of 1988.

My buddy Dave and his daughter made this video together. Some stop motion, some live action, some computer animation. Tons going on, very trippy and dreamlike: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aqqhkpYRU8