“The rules for parents are but three…love, limit and let them be.”

Elaine M. Ward

We are all doing our part to help contain the spread of the coronavirus by keeping our children at home, which means finding creative ways to keep everyone happy, healthy, and involved in engaging productive work and play.

Although I am a huge advocate for offline experiences, I do feel screen-time can be a positive thing at times, and I have compiled a list of some of the best digital and non-digital opportunities for our kids.

Let’s start with digital.

Watch a show or movie together and discuss the following questions together as a family:

• How do the characters feel? How can you tell what they are feeling?

• What were some of the choices that the characters made?

• What characters were friends? How did they show friendship to each other?

• Did any of the characters get really upset? What did they do to take care of or cope with their feelings?

• Did the characters change at all during it? How do you know? Why do you think the change happened?

• What would you do differently if you were one of the characters?

Go on a photo walk, as described here (when I asked twitter friends for their favorite digital-based activities) and try some creative video storytelling by turning the photos into clips, using Adobe Spark or WeVideo, and adding music to make a full story. Find some great examples from Multimedia Educator & Author Don Goble’s college students here and here.

Tik Tok is a favorite of Jeni Long, who is an ITS in Texas, because she loves seeing the talent and creativity of her kids come to life while they make videos. This article has recommendations for the best easy and fun Tik-Tok dances for families to try.

Read ebooks together, as Taylor Armstrong, an amazing educator and dad, claimed as his favorite. You might want to check out apps like Vooks and Epic for large collections of ebooks, and this is a great article which shares an eight year old’s perspective on reading with a kindle.

Flipgrid was mentioned over and over as a powerful digital experience, especially by Donna McCance. She used it in her second grade classroom to allow her students to see each other, share, and help them gain confidence in public speaking. She also used it to teach math, demonstrating a lesson and then asking kids to teach it back, so all the kids got to see each other’s explanations and learn from each other. She has pictures and everything on this tweet. Flipgrid can be used at home and this is a great article for families wishing to try it. I also love this article, with fifty discussion prompts, for teachers who want to use it for distance learning. I will be using Flipgrid to welcome students when the new school year begins, as Donna suggested here, encouraging everyone to introduce themselves.

At Art for Kids Hub you’ll find all kinds of art lessons for kids, including lots of really fun how to draw tutorials, painting techniques and origami. They also have an awesome YouTube channel, which gets updated weekly.

Virtual Field Trips, as suggested by Christelle, an amazing trauma-informed mental health advocate and mom, are perfect for right now, whether you are enjoying them In your living room with your family, or with your class during a zoom session as part of distance learning. This link will give you access to more than 30 exciting virtual field trips.

The Cosmic Kids YouTube Channel is my personal favorite because kids can practice yoga, mindfulness and relaxation by following along with the most brilliant and fun videos. Both parents and teachers have reported significant improvements in self-regulation, focus and empathy after trying many of them. Read the teacher survey results here and find out how the Cosmic Kids adventures meet physical activity guidelines here. One of my favorites from Cosmic Kids is Peace Out Guided Relaxation for Kids: Climbing Up, but there really are so many to choose from. My second graders loved Frozen: A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure! and Minecraft: A Cosmic Kids Yoga Adventure!

Now let’s talk about screen-free activities. These are some of my favorites for right now.

Boxes, Tubes, & Random Recyclables are always an awesome way for kids to imagine, plan, and create. The sky is the limit when they are allowed to use what they have to make what they want. I wrote about my classroom’s experiences with open-ended ‘Not Just a Box’ creative fun on this post.

Cooking! Adding Flavor is the title of Chapter 5 of Educate the Heart. To be exact, the title is Adding Flavor: Easy Classroom Recipes that Build Community and Teach Essential Skills and each recipe has suggested literature extensions and opportunities for mathematical discourse. As Guy Fieri once said, “Cooking with kids is not just about ingredients, recipes, and cooking. It’s about harnessing imagination, empowerment, and creativity.” This is one of the many examples from my book that doesn’t require any baking or fancy equipment and allows kids to be creative:

Let’s Pretend It’s Our Birthday Cones

Ingredients:

• 6 flat-bottomed ice-cream cones

• 1 4-oz box instant pudding mix, any flavor

• 2 cups cold milk

• Prepared whipped cream 

• Candy sprinkles

Steps:

• Pour 2 cups cold milk in a bowl.

• Add the instant pudding mix and beat with a wire whisk.

• Wait 10 minutes. Spoon pudding into the ice-cream cones.

• Freeze for at least 3 hours.

• Add whipped cream and candy and pretend it is everyone’s birthday!

I love this article from the Food Network Kitchen which includes awesome recipe ideas kids will love to make, such as oatmeal cookie smoothies and crunchy breakfast tacos.

Get Out and Enjoy Nature and also keep the kids engaged by bug hunting, creating rock art, designing a summer memento wreath, making pressed flower placemats, or having a nature scavenger hunt. Find all the details on these projects here.

Legos! Need I say more? I love to see children create freely with all different kinds of building bricks and often ask students to create a scene and then write a whole story based on their design. We also use them for STEM challenges such as this one from Educate the Heart:

Building Brick School Supply Caddy Challenge

Challenge: Construct a school supply caddy out of only building bricks that will hold 5 pencils, 5 highlighters, and 5 boxes of 8 crayons (adapt this to fit supply needs of students).

Materials:

• Building bricks

• School supplies that will need to fit in the caddy

• Paper and writing supplies or STEM journal for recording their building plan  

Steps: Students need to be placed in groups of 3-5 and work together to brainstorm ideas about how they can most effectively construct a school supply caddy out of building bricks that will hold all the necessary supplies. They will choose the best idea, draw a picture, and devise a step by step plan. Once they create, test, improve, and reflect upon their construction, the group should then share their strategies, group successes, and plans for future improvements.

Although this could be a family project for home, and siblings could work together to design different types of caddies for books or collectible toys, because of our current restrictions with social distancing this would have to be an individual activity at school or could be assigned as a distance learning project.

This recent article from Scholastic has a huge variety of activities to enhance learning and development across a number of areas.

‘Old Fashioned’ Game Creation is fun and also gives kids a practical way to apply new knowledge that they have been excited about learning. Kids can choose a topic and create a new game based on important facts or concepts about the topic. It could be a board game, athletic game, card game, or any other type of game they can think of. For example, younger students might create an alphabet card game, and older students might make a board game in which students answer questions about the United States. My son created a ‘Save the Earth’ board game this past spring. Read all about it here on this post.

Encourage children to celebrate a favorite book or author by creating a play, puppet show, or a movie advertisement based on what they have been reading. It could be simple improvisation of an actual story or an imaginative version of it. Puppets are so easy to make with socks or popsicle sticks and a stage could easily be formed with a blanket over a table. Another option could be to pretend the book is being turned into a film and they can create an enticing movie poster for it as an advertisement. If you assign this to students, I would tell them that posters should include each of the main characters from the book with real actors and actresses listed. Ask them to make sure the advertisement highlights the theme of the book or novel and states specific reasons to persuade people to see the movie.

Thank you so much for visiting the blog today. I hope you found this post worthwhile. I truly appreciate your time and attention.

What do you think? What digital-based or screen-free activities are your kids loving right now?

If you would like to connect further, please feel free to leave me a comment, message, or email and I will get back to you in a timely fashion.

Yours truly,

Jennifer

“Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?”

Samuel Johnson