Activities with kids

Holiday Activities to Encourage your Children to Read and Write
23 March 2012


With the holidays approaching, here are some ideas for ways to share your love of stories and story-making with the children in your lives.  These activities are geared for children aged 4-8, but can be adjusted to accommodate older or younger children.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears
A Jo&D.Kydz Production

1.  DIY fairy tale.  Enact a favourite story at home through a series of photographs.  You can print off the photographs, glue them into a book, and add text at the bottom, or make a slide show on Picasa with photographs and caption.  Click here for a Goldilocks slide show that I created with my son and our down-the-lane neighbour during the 2010 snowstorms, inspired by Lauren Child's wonderful version, illustrated with Polly Borland's ingenious photographs.  The photography is unapologetically amateurish, but we had a blast.

2.  Co-author a book.  Team up with your kid(s) to write and illustrate a story, a book about a relative, family friend, or a pet, or a non-fiction book on a topic that sparks their interest.   This is a license for unbridled silliness, but you may also choose to tackle sensitive or complex issues of special relevance to your child.  A friend  and her daughter recently co-authored an impressively candid short book on bullying, and the project helped both of them to overcome challenges that they were facing at the time.

Sir Alistair the Brave, by Ally & Jo

3.  Fill in the blanks.  Write a silly story, leaving blank spaces for your child to fill in words or sentences.  For a younger child, leave big boxes for them to fill with pictures.  You may wish to write a sentence at a time, allowing your child to fill in the blanks, so that the story builds on his or her ideas.  I test-drove this with my son, a.k.a. our family's writer in resistance, and amazingly, he asked for a follow up instalment -- in preference to the Wii!  If a writing-based activity passes the Alistair test, it's a winner. 

4.  Alphabet hunt.  Take your kid(s) into town, and photograph letters on interesting-looking billboards, shop fronts, license plates, road markings, etc.  Your kids may either take the photos themselves, or help find letters for you to photograph,  depending on their ages, and confidence with a camera.  Make an alphabet collage by printing the photos and gluing them to a large piece of card or cardboard, or by using Picasa or Photoshop software to assemble the photographs as a poster.  If it takes you several trips to complete the alphabet, save the photos to an 'Alphabet' folder on your desktop.  It's amazing how many details you suddenly notice about a familiar environment when hunting for a 'J' or a 'Q'. 

So much to do, so little time...

5.  Your child's day.   This is a project to help children aged 4-6 understand the meaning of time.  Choose a day that you plan to spend  together as a family, and take photographs, every hour, from the time your child wakes up until bedtime. You may date/time-stamp the photographs, and/or take a photo of your watch before taking the picture, so that you can recall the times later.   Insert the photos into a MS Word document, or print them off to paste into a notebook or home-made book, chronicling your child's day -- or make a Picasa slide show (see Activity 1).  Depending on the age of the child, you may ask him/her to write a sentence for each hour, or to fill in the blanks, i.e., "At 7 o'clock, I _________." "At 8 o'clock, I ____________________________".  I discovered that this activity has a positive (albeit Big Brother-ish) effect on one's parenting -- it was tempting to get a long list of chores done during my toddler's nap, but I didn't want to record for posterity that we'd allowed Alistair to play the Wii for three hours straight on the first springlike Sunday of the year, so we dug out the green bean seeds, and left the laundry undone.

6.  And of course . . . visit the library!!!

The Making Books website  has instructions for making lovely homemade books, and the 'Stick and Elastic' book should work well for most of these projects.  Alternatively, you can simply assemble pages of A4 or A5, use heavy card for the front and back cover, punch holes down the side, and assemble with paper fasteners.   I have been using Picasa through my Gmail account for years, and just found out that you can download a much better version to your computer for free through this link.

What creative holiday activities do you enjoy as a family? Please share! Click here to post your ideas on the Mums Write! Facebook page, or send them to me at joanna.norland@gmail.com