Keeping Your Kids' Minds Sharp Over Winter Break

By Megan Nellen, Lower School Principal at The Walker School

1. Community Service - Use the break to plan community service ideas for the coming year.

• Kids can write flyers and notes asking neighbors to save and donate any holiday décor they plan on tossing out to be used next year for a family without a tree or decorations.
• Any age child can help make and deliver sandwiches for a homeless mission or shelter or make cards and pictures for a local nursing home.

2. Reuse, Recycle, Entertain - Collect leftover boxes, ribbons and paper and have your kids use them to build a robot or make a game. Each year at The Walker School second graders use cardboard to make arcade games. Visit Caine’s Arcade online for inspiration and let their imaginations go!

3. Family Book Club - We all know the benefits of reading, but too often, our kids may not see us actually reading anything other than our emails.

• Research some age-appropriate books, let the entire group make the decision on what to read and set a deadline for your book club meeting.
• If the ages of your children vary, consider pairing up similar ages with near-by cousins or friends, or select a book that the older ones can read on their own and the younger ones with a bit of help.
• Be sure to follow through and discuss the book allowing for everyone’s opinions and feedback.

4. Learn to Code - For the tech savvy -- and those that prefer computers to books -- channel that screen time toward learning to code.

• For younger kids, check out the Santa tracker on Google (https://santatracker.google.com/#village).
• For children 13 to 17 who are already or want to become knowledgeable in open source software development, consider entering the Google Code-In coding contest (http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014). Participants have until Jan. 19, 2015 to complete their selected coding tasks.

5. Picture-A-Day Blog. This is ideal for families who will be traveling this holiday season, but can be just as effective for those staying local.

• Work with your children to start a blog. Any number of free sites such as Blogger (www.blogger.com) or WordPress (www.WordPress.com) make this very easy.
• Post a daily photo and summary, including what happened, why the photo was selected and a quick reflection.

6. Spend time outside. Giving kids unstructured playtime in the outdoors is invaluable, but it can be tough to find the time while school is in session.

• Allow your kids to make up their own games, find animals or tracks, do a scavenger hunt (list common items such as finding a stick shaped like a Y, something red, a beautiful leaf, or a white rock).
• Take a family hike.
• Check out this list from AtlantaTrails.com for ten top trails around Atlanta – several in Cobb County.

7. Challenging Games - Board games and game tournaments are a great way to entertain varying ages and generations as well as large groups of people. Consider using competitive brackets for both winners and losers for competitive two-person games like chess and Chinese checkers. Two other recommendations:

• ShapeTigo – A spatial awareness game (http://www.mindware.com/shapetigo-a2-66082.fltr)
• Qwirkle, a simple game of matching colors and shapes, but requiring tactical maneuvers and well-planned strategy (http://www.mindware.com/qwirkle-a2-32016.fltr)