'Mom, my iPad is broken'
featuring a great list of creative & fun off-screen activities to try out with your family this summer
Welcome to the second edition of “On, Off, All the Time”!
Intro (for first-time readers, otherwise feel free to skip)
This newsletter is dedicated to fellow parents, grandparents, teachers and anyone else involved in caring for kids, who wake up stressing out about having to come up with a healthy balance of on and off-screen activities to keep children educated, entertained and safe.
For many of us, this responsibility (especially these days) exists literally all the time, at least until our kids are shipped off to boarding school, college or Hogwarts :)
Today’s edition is solely focused on off-screen activities, which sometimes involve a little more hands-on parental involvement, but often result in those priceless family moments that make all the hard work worth it.
Educational Resource List of the Day
We will have a chance to do a deeper dive into some of these ideas soon, but first wanted to introduce the insanely awesome thread that Rachel Young, mother of two & a Learning Designer at IDEO, wrote up all the way back on March 13th!
I caught up with Rachel recently, and not only has she since done nearly EVERYTHING on this list (!!), she is already compiling new ideas for a potentially long summer (and G-d forbid Fall 😨) with kids at home.
Come back here tomorrow to read a super interesting interview with Rachel, chock-full of great tips to designing your own great family-friendly activities!!
(or click the subscribe button below to have it hand-delivered to your inbox 😃)
Activity Idea #1 - Make a Family Tree 👪 🌳
Cost: free
Resource required: large piece of paper or notebook
Setup time to kid independence: initial (30-60mins), subsequent (varies highly depending how comfortable children are interviewing relatives)
Recommended Age Range: 5+ (Note: every family has its own sensitivities regarding family history, so some parents might prefer to wait until a child is a little older)
Time required: a simple family tree going back 2-3 generations could take around an hour to draw up (assuming information on hand), but this is the kind of task where it pays to go slow and delve as deep as possible
Related Sites: https://www.familytreemagazine.com/kids-genealogy/
Grandparents will love it because:
they get to spend time with their grandkids while telling over inspirational stories and subtle life lessons!
Parents will love it because:
outcome is a treasured memento that can be shared with the entire extended family
will definitely come in handy for a future class assignment!
Your kids will love it if:
they like mystery novels (every family has its quirks and secrets!)
they are old enough to be familiar with different historical periods and are curious with how grandpa or great-grandma lived during those times
Kid Review (9yo):
“Love Zooms with ‘Saba Raba’ (=great grandfather in Hebrew) where we fly around the world in Google Earth while he tells us stories about places that are important to our family!”
“Discovered that my great-great-grandmother’s sister personally received a Maths prize from Albert Einstein..how cool is that?!"
Parental Review:
With grandparents and great-grandparents literally 7,000miles away, and our family having a shared love of history and geography, this was an activity that ticked all the boxes
Was personally blown away when while re-reading my great-grandmothers memoir about her experiences during the Holocaust (she miraculously survived Siberia with 3 young kids), I discovered she was also a fan of Jules Verne! (just last year my wife had read to my son ‘Around the World in 80 days’)
Bottom Line: This is definitely one activity where parents learn as much as the kids!
Activity Idea #2 - Practice business & math skills by running a pretend store 🏪
Cost: free
Resources required: kitchen toys, pretend food, kid’s cash register (or spare computer keyboard?), Monopoly money, notebook
Setup time to independence: simple enough for many kids to organize on their own, but may need some parental guidance to for more advanced setups (eg if records must be kept for tax purposes ;)
Recommended Age Range: 3+
Time required: kids really enjoy the setup, so once store is ready, suggest you try to keep it up for a least a day or two to maximise the fun
Parents will love it because:
suitable for kids of all ages, with new skills (math, record-keeping, marketing) that can be introduced when relevant
Your kids will love it if:
they miss real-life shopping with their parents :(
they love creating and playing in new worlds, accompanied by siblings, parents or their favourite stuffed animals
Kid Review (4yo and 9yo):
“Love playing this with my brothers”!”
“I loved making up a menu”
Parental Review:
this is such a great activity and kept our kids entertained for hours on end… writing up menus, counting out change…
has endless variations..eg one day the store was converted into an Italian restaurant with kids taking into turns to be the chef, waiter, manager and customers.
Bottom Line: Great training for opening a real-life Lemonade stand later this summer (fully online, powered by Uber delivery robots of course!)
Watch this Space - Life School
One great newsetter+app focused on off-screen activities for kids and adults alike is ‘Life School’, teaching life lessons via 2-minute audio/video snippets!
Just a few months in and they have already published comprehensive courses on everything from making kale chips to the art of loading a dishwasher.
Whether you are like me and have always wanted to learn how to boil the perfect egg (but have been too embarrassed to ask!) or would like to up-skill your kids so they can help more around the house, there are tons of great life lessons here!
Photo thread of some happy readers 😜:
This parent seems to be an avid subscriber to this newsletter..look how happy Mom + baby are after discovering the best educational activities!
Conclusion
Hope you enjoyed today’s issue!
As always, please feel free to comment below or DM me if you have any feedback or ideas to share!
Have a great weekend,
Yaakov