Keeping the Kiddos Busy

(Image credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/US_Navy_060521-N-9076B-059_Lt._Janel_Rossetto%2C_Chief_Musician_Donald_Chilton_and_Musician_2nd_Class_Ian_Charlton_appear_as_guests_on_the_Philippines%27_largest_radio_station_DZRH.jpg) Before the days of Netflix and television, people listened to the radio for entertainment. To this day, radio drama and other programs are still staple forms of entertainment in many places. Producing and recording your own radio program can be a fun project for your kids - or even for the whole family. First, you write the script. It does not have to be long. You can tell an existing story or make up your own. Or, if drama is not your thing, you can do a documentary, an advertisement, a public service announcement on the importance of washing your hands - anything. What matters is that your script uses a lot of sound, narration, and dialogue since your listeners will rely entirelt on what they hear to understand what your pro

(Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/BLACK_NAPED_ORIOLE_%288553658674%29.jpg) Just because you and your kids are cooped up inside the house does not mean you cannot enjoy nature. You can do backyard birdwatching. What do you do when you do backyard birdwatching? You literally just watch the birds that you can see from your window, balcony, or porch. Birds are fascinating creatures, and watching them provides hours of entertainment. No need to tune in to National Geographic or Discovery Channel when you can watch a live nature show outside the window. To make it more interesting, you and your kids can learn to identify the birds you see. When you see or hear a bird, make notes and sketches about them. The sketches do not have to be masterpieces - just enough details for you to be able to look up the bird in a book, website, or bird identification app. If you cannot see the bird but can hear it, you can record its call and submit  the recording

Your kids can become historians during this Covid-19 lockdown! They can record your family's history. For this activity, they will need something to take down notes with: a pen and notebook, a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop, or any other tools they may prefer. And plenty of free time. The first step is to make a family chart with the names of their parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other relatives, as far back as they can. If they can fill in birth and death dates, or at least the years in which these events took place, that would be better. The next step is for your kids to interview you and any other relatives they can interview (of course, while maintaining physical distancing) and take down notes. They can ask the following: Where and when were their parents (or grandparents) born How did their parents (or grandparents) meet each other What were their parents' (or grandparents') jobs What things did their parents (or grandpa

UPDATE: Philstar  already revised its article about this initiative. Dr. Nicole Perreras, a doctor in RITM, is requesting kids to make hand-made get well cards for Covid-19 patients. The cards can be scanned and emailed to covidletters@gmail.com . Someone will print them out, and the patients will each get a card as part of their breakfast trays. Some ideas for making cards can be found here . But any hand-made card, no matter how simple and made with whatever materials you have at home, will brighten the day of someone who needs it most. Who knows? Perhaps the smile that your kid's card brings to the patient who receives it may just be that push the patient's body needs to fight and defeat that virus.

In my first-ever post in this blog , I wrote about haiku writing. Another poetic form that children can have fun experimenting with is the cinquain. A cinquain has five lines. The first line has 2 syllables. The second line has 4 syllables. The third line has 6 syllables. The fourth line has 8 syllables. The fifth line has two syllables. A cinquain can be about anything. It does not have to rhyme, but it can have rhymes in it. Here is an example of a cinquain composed by Ken Nesbitt: Ice Cream Ice cream. Cold and yummy. I love its sweet richness as it finds its way into my tummy. (By the way, he has a wonderful website called poetry4kids.com , which has a page of tips on how to write cinquains.) Here is another example which I composed just now: Virus Virus - How I hate it. It makes the people sick And it keeps me from going out To play. Now, you and your kids try it.

With so many museums and art galleries putting up virtual tours these days , and with the extra free time your children (and possibly you) have, it is a perfect time to learn art appreciation. Looking at paintings together with your children is a rewarding way to spend time with them. ( Note: it is the same with paintings as with movies: some subjects may require additional parental guidance for children. ) Learning art appreciation is not about the boring memorization of the various art movements through history, although it would be cool too if your kids could learn them. Rather, it is learning how to look at paintings and what to see in them. In her article entitled "How to Look at Art with Your Children" , Cindy Ingram suggests asking kids three questions when looking at art with them: She suggests having fun with the paintings: posing like the characters, for example. ( The Qeddeng Family posing as the Spoliarium .) Another way to look at paintings

(Image credit:  NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) Those who know me well know how passionate I am about astronomy and how I love to promote the hobby.  However, I have been controlling the itch to feature it in this blog because I did not want to encourage your kids to violate curfew rules and the other safety measures being imposed these days. But then, I realized, there is no reason kids cannot do what we amateur astronomers do whenever the weather is not conducive to stargazing: take advantage of the downtime to read up about outer space.  There is also no reason you cannot join your kids in learning about outer space. One resource is the kids' section of the NASA website, which has stories, games, pictures, videos, and other activities. ( WARNING: please supervise your kids in doing the activities. Also, use your sound parental judgment in deciding whether to allow the activities that involve going outdoors.) The website of Astronomy  magazine has

A group of friends have started a gratitude letter drive where you can write personal messages for the heroes fighting the battle against Co-VID-2019! The letters will be transcribed in a PUBMAT, posted online, and then shared until they reach our heroes working in different fields. You and your kids may write to health workers, uniformed personnel manning the borders, security guards, bankers, supermarket sales persons...You may write letters to the afflicted also. One group of frontliners who are often not mentioned are the priests. They administer the sacraments, and these days they are most likely swamped with requests for prayers and spiritual consolation. Giving these can be tiring too. We often ask for prayers and advice from priests without realizing that they also need our support. Perhaps some of you might want to write them letters too. Whatever you and your kids do, what matters is to send words of gratitude and encouragement to those who need and deserve them. And

Got scrap pieces of paper (literally any kind, including leftover cartolina from previous projects, old magazines, left-over gift wrappers, etc.)? Bond paper? Paste or glue? A pair of scissors? Good. Cutting and pasting paper has always been an art activity for children in schools. There is no reason they cannot do it at home. More than that, there is no reason adults cannot enjoy it too. Cut-and-paste art has, in fact, been considered serious art. The cut-outs by the twentieth-century artist Henri Matisse are considered masterpieces. With techniques as simple as cutying and pasting, you and your kids can make masterpieces of your own. ( IMPORTANT: Please supervise very young children in using the pair of scissors. ) (Two cut-and-paste art works by Matisse)

It is never too early (or too late) to learn music appreciation.  Music appreciation is one of the things you might want to learn as well as teach your kids during these times of community quarantine. There are countless resources online. For starters, there is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra , which familiarizes listeners with the different instruments of the orchestra: Then there are two works that demonstrate the capacity of music to tell a story, paint a picture, and stir up imagination and feeling. One is Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.  There are many recordings of it on Youtube. I am deliberately posting one with no accompanying animated  visuals to highlight how effective the music alone is in telling the story.   (Warning, though: some younger children might be frightened at the menacing theme representing the wolf.) Another is Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals , often combined with a reading of humorous verses by Odgen Nash. Younger

Anyone who has grown up watching detective TV shows during the 1980s would have seen the heroes (and the villains) using codes and ciphers to send secret messages to each other. You and your children can have so much fun making up codes, sending secret messages to each other, and decoding them. The simplest secret code substitutes each letter of the alphabet with a number, letter, or symbol. For example, A becomes 1, B becomes 2, and so on. So "My name is John" gets written as "13 25 14 1 13 5 9 19 10 15 8 14". Another is to use the alphabet backwards as a code. A becomes Z, B becomes Y, and so on. You can make your own code, substituting symbols for letters, for example.  You can read about some other codes here.   If you have materials at home, this video shows you how to make and use a secret decoder wheel. Another activity you can do is learn the Morse code, which is comprised of dots and dashes (or "dits" and "dahs"). Morse c

When I was 10 years old, an aunt gave me a book on origami. I really loved it. That book gave me countless of fun hours folding animals, flowers, fancy boxes, and other objects. Origami is an engaging and cheap activity for children and even adults. All you need are square-shaped sheets of paper (which you can make using scratch paper), scissors for some projects, and instructions. There are many websites of origami projects. For the butterfly and the cherry blossom pictured in this post, I got the instructions from   origami-instructions.com, where there are countless other projects. It even allows you to upload and share pictures of your completed projects. The key to making good origami projects is to make the folds neat, crisp, and accurate. Origami is a fun way for kids to learn eye-hand coordination and geometry. A warning, though: origami is addicting. Your house will be soon cluttered with origami figures that you will hesitate to throw away!

Words are free, easily available, and can do a lot of things.  It is no wonder that my friends and I turn to writing as a way to beat boredom during these days of community quarantine. Introducing kids to poetry writing is a fun way to help use their time productively during these days. One short but expressive poetry form they (and you as well) can learn is the haiku. A haiku is a verse with three lines. The first has 5 syllables, the second has 7, while the third has 5. Modern haiku writers usually do not strictly follow this syllable scheme, however, and usually the syllable scheme gets lost in English translations of haiku in Japanese. Haiku are usually about nature. Writing a haiku is like taking a photo of something interesting using your camera phone, except that you are using words instead of your phone. Want to try it? Here are some tips: 1. Start by observing your surroundings. Take note of the sights, sounds, feelings, scents, and tastes you find