Winter Break Activity Round-Up!

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard "what can we do now?" this past week, I'd be able to retire tomorrow.

Okay, maybe that's a SLIGHT exaggeration. But winter break is hard, guys! Not being able to go outside makes finding things to do SO much harder than it would be in the summer. I've spent more time on Pinterest this week than any other website, just searching for ideas of games, activities, and art projects. My task is made harder by two phrases: "that's for babies" and "that's for girls." Yes, this English learning activity is designed for toddlers, but I've changed it up, and you need the language reinforcement at this level. No, Cat's Cradle is fun and good for fine motor skills. Yes, this word game app on my iPad is designed with light colours and big bubble letters, but I promise, it's just a word game. It's not for babies- anyone younger than 6 or 7 probably COULDN'T play it.

So here's what we HAVE been up to, at least for the first half of break. I decided this would be easier than trying to stretch out each individual craft or game into their own posts- maybe for some of the more complex ones I'll do better posts down the road. We'll see!

First, the "screen-time" activities:
- Minecraft. Minecraft, minecraft, minecraft. All day long, minecraft. However, I've started to be better about drawing the line- we can play minecraft for a short amount of time, IF we're going to use it to actually be creative. Let's do a "quick-build" challenge. Let's play Hunger Games. Let's go into a survival world for once so we actually have to gather our own resources. Lets build an airplane, or a boat. Let's NOT just run around lighting trees on fire and putting TNT everywhere.

-Playstation. This has actually gotten better with the purchase of a new Mickey Mouse game. FAR more appropriate for a 7 year old than GTA5. I had heard GTA was bad... I never imagined it was THAT bad. It got to the point that I wouldn't even stay in the room while he was playing it. I hated the nonchalant violence and dear lord, the LANGUAGE! No wonder there was such a huge movement against this game. But last week, he bought Epic Mickey: The Power of Two and we have been playing that quite a bit. It's hard to keep him focused on completing the set quests instead of running around beating up the townspeople- he IS used to GTA, after all- but if we keep it under 45 minutes or so of game time, the attention span stays on what it's supposed to.

-Youtube. And what do we do on Youtube? Watch minecraft play along videos, of course! We actually have a pretty good channel for that, though. Stampylonghead and iBallisticSquid are two friends from the UK who make videos both separately and together. They're really funny and entertaining, they stopped using any inappropriate language once they got a large following of young kids watching their channels, and what they build is relatively easy! We get a lot of inspiration for things to try to build in our own world from the two of them. Sometimes, they even make up stories with actual plot lines, like they were making a movie instead of just talking while playing minecraft. Right now, Stampy's pet cat was kidnapped by his arch enemy who wants to take over his world! Every once in a while, I find myself watching one of their videos on my own, before I even realize what I'm doing.

-Movies. Though the fight between watching in English and in Turkish is always a struggle. We've watched The Jungle Book, Toy Story 3, and part of The Emperor's New Groove so far this break. (sidenote- I've never seen Toy Story 3 before. RIGHT IN THE CHILDHOOD.) Toy Story was the only one in Turkish (we put on English subtitles for me) because there was someone else visiting and watching with us. The other two were in English, since we were watching on my computer (streaming sites are my favourite!) The Jungle Book was actually better-liked than I expected it to be, but he just wasn't into the Emperor's New Groove at ALL. Once I really started paying attention, though, I realized that they talk VERY quickly- so he was missing most of the jokes.

But even with the changes, those are still the activities I am trying to avoid as much as possible. So I try to dig back in my mind and come up with ANYTHING without a screen that will keep him occupied for another couple of minutes!

-Card Games. Speed, War, Slap Jack, Rat Slap (too complicated!), Go Fish, Old Maid, UNO. We are lacking a real deck of cards, so we're using UNO cards for everything. I just have to keep sorting them out so we have the right number of everything. The black cards serve pretty well as generic face cards for something like Slap Jack! I actually think the UNO cards make it easier sometimes- for a game like speed, you can just focus on the numbers 0-9 instead of worrying about what order J, Q, K, and A come in. I've also taught him Tiddlywinks, but I think Turkish coins are a lot heavier- it didn't work nearly as well as I remember.

-Movement Games. Mother May I and Red Light, Green Light were BIG hits! I also created a game based off something I found on Pinterest where I made 2 dice- one with an animal, and the other with an emotion. They had to try and dance like a "bored spider," or a "crazy giraffe," or a "sad crocodile," and then I just set the rest of the rules up like a freeze dance game. Really good for thinking about emotional expression! Twister is also a popular choice.

-I modified his Jenga game to make it a little more fun/interesting by writing on each block- silly things to do, like spelling your name backwards, doing 5 jumping jacks, or taking your next turn with your wrong hand. Pull a block, complete the task, then replace it!

-Obstacle Courses. Just about every day, we tear apart the downstairs and create a new obstacle course. We sacrificed a ball of my yarn to make cobwebs to climb through, we mark out hopscotch on the floor, we roll up carpets to make balance beams, jump across or over pillows and rugs, turn one side of a Rubik's cube, stack 3 small rocks in a pile, move stuffed animals from one spot to another... it all changes every time! It usually takes us about 3 minutes to complete an entire course. The cobwebs are so hard for me- I try to set them up so it's hard for a skinny 7 year old, which makes it near impossible for me to get through without touching anything!

-Colour matching/Bingo/Scavenger hunt game. I combined 3 or 4 ideas when I came up with this one. I guess it didn't have to be Bingo- I just had some blank bingo cards laying around from something I had planned on doing a while ago that we never got to. I outlined each square in a different colour marker, pen, or crayon, then hid all of those colours around the living room. The first person to find all the EXACT matching colours- no markers filling in where crayon was outlined!- won. It wasn't perfect- a bingo chart had way too many squares, and we had an issue with one kid playing being a lot more meticulous about matching the colours exactly where the other just filled in the closest one she could find, so it wasn't really an even race. But it was a good first try, and a definite foundation to create a better version from sometime in the future!

-We've actually spent a lot of time playing piano recently. Usually, the piano is avoided unless it's during his lesson, but recently I've been playing while we are brainstorming ideas of what to do, and after a few minutes I'm usually being pushed over to make room. Once, we manipulated his favourite exercise from his lesson, playing it in different octaves, faster, slower, crossing our hands over, switching the parts each hand was playing, playing it together or assigning different parts to play together- it's only a little 8 measure piece, but we did so many things with it! When his cousin was visiting, we spent even more time playing- she's a HUGE Adele fan, so I sight read Rolling in the Deep... if I had the piano skills I do now just from goofing around all the time a few years ago, I may have made it in the Music Therapy program! I'm getting so much better at creating accompaniments and just seeing chords and going for it!

-Crafts. I have a bag of random things that could possible be turned into craft supplies in my room, and I've been trying to put it to good use so it doesn't build up too badly like my craft supply collection at home! We made adorable little penguins out of toilet paper rolls the other day, and we made stand up cardboard t-rexes a while back. I sketched out a few minecraft-themed pictures for painting and colouring- and I made sure when I bought paints that I just did basic colours so we could practice mixing. Look at me, saving money AND encouraging artistic skills!

I'm sure there are a few more things that I'm missing, but this is getting pretty long so I'll stop here. Maybe at the end of next week I'll have a whole bunch of new things to write about- there is a whole week left of winter break, after all! Wish me luck!