Category: Summer

Well, our first month has come and gone. We experienced most items on the board and a few we’ll have to come back to later. One recent highlight was making Strawberry Shortcakes from America’s Test Kitchen Kids. This recipe was listed as “advanced” and most young kids would find it difficult to do on their own. So we did it together and he learned some introductory baking lessons. My sweetest moment was when he asked me who taught me to bake and I told him “my Mom, just like I’m teaching you”. For him the sweetest moment was eating the fruits of his labor.

We had a few other fun discoveries in the past weeks… Crash Course Kids is a great way to break up tablet usage. After a couple toy unboxing and/or lego speed-building videos, it’s time to learn some science! We also have been successfully using the bubble challenge and freeze dance self-regulation games to exercise body control. And I personally like The Past and the Curious at bedtime. While he seems to nod off fairly quickly into the episodes and might miss some of the content, I’m not sure that’s an actual problem if it helps him get to sleep 😉

In addition, my kid was super excited to create the Giving, Saving, Spending banks and really wanted to decorate them as “monsters”. We found fun construction paper designs on “Teachers Pay Teachers” and attempted our own versions without the templates, though if I were doing this with a large group of kids, the downloads would be handy.

Lastly, I want to share our experience with Storynory. As mentioned in the original write-up, we enjoy listening to their Herodotus series. I like how it very transparently brings together historical texts, ancient mythology and concepts from modern cultures and religions. “Bertie”, the narrator, provides various viewpoints on a topic and then asks the kid listeners to draw their own conclusions. Like could Arion really have been saved by dolphins? Be aware that some episodes discuss battles and tragedies, so it may not be for every kid (especially younger ones), but for us it spawned a bunch of interesting conversations.

I really, really, really wanted to love the other stories. Unfortunately, we found the fiction less compelling, despite wonderful narrations from actors that seem to be Shakespearean trained. My child was especially fond of Richard’s voice – check out How Love and Peace Came to the Woods, a cheeky take on an Aesop’s fable. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I didn’t enjoy Storynory’s other content as much. Part of it was that some stories seemed geared to older kids and some stories felt a little dated. We’ll definitely come back for future installments of Herodotus, if they are produced, but since my kid didn’t find a story series that spoke to him in the same way, we plan to check out other story podcasts for a bit.

In the last week and a half we explored a bunch more activities, and while none were a complete bust, some garnered more excitement. We we really enjoyed creating the Bee Bath, especially after being inspired by the one my friend Sara did with her kids. Both came out so pretty and it was fun to collect and reuse natural objects. Still haven’t seen a bee actually bathe, but we are making sure to continually keep it full and at the ready.

We watched 3 empathy stories read aloud: Enemy Pie, Hey Little Ant and The Monster Who Lost His Mean and had a great conversation about friendship and respect. This also lead to the discovery of Fixed Fairy Tails on YouTube from HISHE Kids. I wouldn’t say they kindled deep discussions, but the pragmatic Fairy Tale “solutions” are pretty cleaver and amusing. Check out the quick fixes to Goldilocks, The Gingerbread Man and Little Miss Muffet for a chuckle.

A few other quick notes…

• National Geographic Kids is a good source for basic research on animals. We looked up some fun facts on few of his “stuffies”. Lots of info on hippos, coati, dogs and tigers, but surprisingly not much on cows, except their contribution to climate change.
• I’ve love how Spare the Rock Spoil the Child is so eclectic and listenable, even if my kid barely notices it’s on. The occasional song catches his attention, like Esta es Tu Tierra from Sonia de la Santos on the July 5 playlist. I also heard him singing Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem’s Green Grass Grows All Around from the July 12 playlist, so I figure he must be subconsciously absorbing the music 🙂
• We started our summer scavenger hunt while on a neighborhood walk the other day. 9 items down, 26 to go.
• My kid tried Water Cycle from Blazer Fresh a few times and I realized that following choreography is slightly intimidating to him. I’m not going to push it. If he’d rather “breakdance” by spinning in a circle and rolling on the ground right now, more power to him.
• He did a few math problems with chalk before moving on to shading the porch with color. It’s cool how chalk brings out the grain.

Lastly, we have started the Miles Traveled Log and it hits home how hard it is in Covid-times to get my kid the kind of physical outlet he had with school/camp <sigh>. I’ll keep working on it.

It’s been about a week and we are still enthusiastic about bingo 🙂

With sweet animations and soothing music, “Stop, Breathe and Think Kids” seems like it will be a great tool for my kid. He really liked Bulldog’s “missions” to find quiet, weather emotion storms and send kind thoughts to others. The “Square Breathing” fish also helped him learn a calming technique he’s used to get ready for bedtime and settle his body. There are ~15 free missions and another 25 with an upgrade to premium for $60 a year.

We also started exploring the “Ordinary People Change the World” books by watching “I am Martin Luther King” read aloud on YouTube (there are many videos available, note that in the author’s live reading he doesn’t start the story until about 7 minutes in.)

As a family, we’ve been talking a lot about why and how we are protesting in support of #BLM. This book, as well as the “I am Gandhi” book, helped our kid better understand the power of peaceful protest and I was reminded that both leaders really promoted kindness and love as key tenants of their messages. The stories also demonstrated that there is no quick fix to these deep problems. So our family discusses how Dr. King and Gandhi were continually active in the fight for equity, and since things still aren’t fair for everyone, we need to act too. While I know my husband and I aren’t having these conversations about race and justice perfectly, we are having them… choosing to share uncomfortable truths about the past and present over silence.

This has been a colder than usual summer in the Pacific Northwest, so on the one warm afternoon this week, we decided to get outside and play in the dirt. When I was doing research on mud pie making, I found many beautiful, Instagram worthy photos out there (Sparkle Stories and Rhythms of Play had the prettiest). We tried our hand, but it quickly devolved into barefoot mud stomping and spraying each other with the hose. Which was just fine. We got dirty, we got wet, we had fun.

My kid was super excited to kick off the board on July 1st and he selected Kitchen Science as the first square.

I didn’t have as much vegetable oil as we would have needed to do the side by side lava comparison of salt and baking soda, so we just tried the baking soda option. It bubbled a bit and I view this more as practice run. We’ll plan for the lava showdown another time. We still were able to talk about about the different weights of the liquids (oil is lighter than water/vinegar) and also introduced some solids (rocks sink and corks float). The colored water and oil was so pretty, we repurposed the materials into a very simple “ocean in a bottle”.

While we were at it, we also tried the Magic Milk experiment on the Curious and Geek blog, which was super easy and fun. We’ll do that one again too. (note… we used whole mile and it worked really well, a friend of ours tried it with non-fat and got mixed results). All the Kitchen Science activities combined, took about 40 minutes.

On day 2, we explored Origami. Of course my child selected a complicated option first, and Dad “helped” him with the Panda after they taped white and black construction paper together. Probably not the most ideal starting point in terms of difficulty level or materials. We moved one to some more simple choices. Easiest of all, which my kid did on his own, was the dog. This crane was also pretty straight forward for us to complete as a team. In addition, it taught us a cool highlighter trick that makes folding and manipulating the paper easier.