101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces: At the Doctor's Office, on Car, Train, and Plane Trips, Home Sick in Bed . . .
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About this ebook
You can never have enough space. And if you can't, just think of your kids--all the time they have to spend in tight spaces--like cars, planes, trains, the doctor's office, the grocery store, being sick or housebound, waiting in line. Kids need room to move around, but there are many times when they just plain can't have it.
While raising two exuberant boys, teaching preschool, leading Cub Scouts, and running a birthday party business, Carol Stock Kranowitz came up with savvy, creative ways to keep kids content in tight spaces. In 101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces, her activity ideas combine old standbys with new ones born of desperation and cramped quarters. They follow a philosophy that helps kids develop their different skills and abilities while entertaining themselves and interacting.
You'll find great projects for every imaginable small space parents and children encounter:
Fun Food for Tiny Kitchens: Ants on a Log, Footprints in the Snow, and Aiken Drum Faces
In the Urban Community: Windowsill Garden, Bug Jar, and Corn-on-the-Sponge
When the Walls Seem to Be Closing In: Pillow Crashing, People Sandwich, and Teeter-Totter
When what you've got is a small space and a restless child, what you need are 101 ingenious solutions--right away. Here they are--easy to implement, creative fun for the three to seven-year-old--activities that can turn tough moments into teachable, terrific ones.
Carol Stock Kranowitz
Carol Stock Kranowitz, M.A., is a music and movement teacher in Washington, D.C. Carol is the author of 101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband; they have two sons.
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101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces - Carol Stock Kranowitz
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
A TIGHT SPACE PHILOSOPHY
WHY THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT
AGE RANGE
THE SETUP OF THE ACTIVITIES
1
THERE’S NOTHING TO DO
(HOUSEBOUND AFTERNOONS)
ART AND CARPENTRY ACTIVITIES
Punched Paper Activities:
Chomp the Monster
Faces and Laces
Paper Plate Tambourine
Collage
Wood Scrap Sculpture
Paper Towel Tie-Dye
Neat Place Cards
Fingerpainting with Shaving Cream
Lunch Bag Puppet
Mobile
Newspaper Hat
Soap Sculpture
Wooden Paddle Boat
Nail Board
If I Had a Hammer
NATURE AND SCIENCE ACTIVITIES
Bug Jar
Pinecone Bird Feeders
Waterdrop Doggies
Windowsill Garden:
Avocado Plant
Vegetable Greens
Potato Plants
Corn-on-the-Sponge
Mystery Plant
Terrarium
MUSIC AND SOUND EXPERIMENTS
Drawing to Music
Rubber-Band Harp
Chicken Squawker
Jingle-on-a-Stick
Keyboard Stories
Waterglass Xylophone
FUN FOOD ACTIVITIES
Ants on a Log
Footprints in the Snow
Aiken Drum Faces
Construction Snacks
Muffin Pizzas
Baked Surprise
Kranberry Shapes
HANDS-ON ACTIVITIES
House of Cards
Domino Lineup
Sorting Jobs
Special Collections
Memory Box
Kite String Spiderweb
Marbleship Battle
Marble Chute
DRAMATIC PLAY
Nursery Rhyme Playlets:
Little Miss Muffet
Jack Be Nimble
Little Bo-Peep
Little Jack Horner
Fairy Tale Playlets:
The Three Little Pigs
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
Real Life Playlets:
Shoe Store
Barbershop
Classroom
Secret Hideaway
2
I’M ALL REVVED UP
or I’M TOO POOPED TO PLAY
MOVEMENT ACTIVITIES
Pillow Crashing
The Feet-Beat Game
Back-to-Back Stand-Up Game
People Sandwich
Teeter-Totter
Ripping and Rolling Newspaper
COOKING AND GOOKING
ACTIVITIES
Smash Hit Cookies
Oobleck
Stretchy Gook
Homemade Playdough
MUSIC AND SOUND ACTIVITIES
Spoon Bell
Kazoo
Homemade Drums:
Oatmeal Box Drum
Tin Can Bongo
Flowerpot Timpani
Chopstick Mallet
Film Canister Shaker
Talking String
3
I FEEL YUCKY ALL OVER
(SICK IN BED)
Cutting Magazines and Catalogs
Favorite Things Scrapbook
Stringing Projects:
Stringing Buttons
Stringing with Pipe Cleaners
Stringing Macaroni
Musical Metal Wind Chimes
Flour Sifting
Coloring Flowers
Felt Board Fun
4
WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET THERE?
(CAR, TRAIN, AND PLANE TRIPS)
Busy Box
Trip Tapes
Ojos de Dios
Pipe Cleaner Garland
Fifty States License Plates Game
Road Sign Alphabet
Highway Scavenger Hunt
Grandmother’s Trunk
Memory Booster
Apples Are Red
Joint Squeeze
5
I WANT TO GO HOME!
(DOCTOR’S OFFICE, GROCERY STORE, WAITING IN LINE)
What If?
People Watching
Add-a-Line Stories
Fill-in-the-Rhyme
Grocery Search
Unfolded Monster Drawings
Flip Book
Whirling Button
COPYRIGHT
TO JEREMY AND DAVID
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY PRIMARY thanks go to my father, Herman Stock, and to my late mother, Doris Stock; to my children, Jeremy and David; and to my sister, Ellen Stern, for their playful participation in most of these activities. I also thank my nieces, nephews, and students for joining in the fun.
I am grateful to many generous friends, all of whom are extraordinary teachers: Lynn Balzer-Martin, Julia Berry, Jane Healy, Peg Hoenack, Mike Kligerman, Mary Marcoux, Greg Myhr, George Petrides, Karen Strimple, Liz Wilson, and my colleagues at St. Columba’s Nursery School in Washington, D.C.
In addition, I thank my husband, Alan, for his patience while I confined myself to the tight space in front of the word processor, as well as Lynn Sonberg and Meg Schneider of Skylight Press and Tina Y. Lee of St. Martin’s Press for their editorial assistance.
INTRODUCTION
DEAR PARENT,
You were a kid once.
Do you remember how it felt to wait in the dentist’s office for your name to be called? Do you remember long car trips over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house, or, worse, long airplane rides? Do you remember rainy afternoons with nothing to do … and being confined to bed with the chicken pox … and having lots of energy to expend in a home that never had enough space?
Kids haven’t changed. They will always want to burst out of tight spaces. They will always crave experiences like making mud pies, climbing apple trees, and riding bikes until dark. For our modern, urban, supervised children, however, such spontaneous activities are often out of the question.
When something of value is taken away, something of equal value must take its place. The trick is to find substitutes for old-fashioned activities that will fit kids’ needs and fit into a tight space.
Helping Kids Get the Experiences They Crave (But Can’t Have)
What can you do to help kids get the experiences they crave?
1. First, understand that kids are born with an inner drive to learn. They learn through active participation in the world around them. An example of active participation is playing Ring Around the Rosy. The child who is in the play learns more and has more fun than the passive child who merely watches from the sidelines.
Active participation depends on children’s ability to use all their senses—not only the familiar senses of vision and hearing, but also the senses that are less familiar because they are hidden inside our bodies. These hidden
senses are:
• the tactile sense (through the skin), providing information about people and objects that we touch or that touch us;
• the vestibular sense (through the inner ear), telling us about our movement through space, our balance, and our resistance to the force of gravity; and
• the proprioceptive sense (through muscles and joints), informing us about our body position and what our bodies are doing.
Think of the child who plays Ring Around the Rosy. She is seeing, listening, holding other children’s hands, moving in a circle, keeping her balance, purposely falling down, and scrambling up again. Touching and being touched, moving and being moved, she is using many senses simultaneously and effectively.
The efficient employment of all our senses is called sensory integration.
Sensory integration is the unconscious process of taking in sensory messages, analyzing them in the central nervous system, and organizing them for use, in order to function smoothly in daily life. To function smoothly—to become competent human beings—kids require a variety of active, multisensory experiences.
2. Second, unplug the TV and hide the videos. Television and videos provide passive entertainment and rob kids of the chance to learn through doing.
3. Third, use this book. 101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces suggests activities that will satisfy kids’ need to touch, move, play, and think. Some ideas are old standbys. Others I devised—sometimes in desperation and always in cramped quarters—while raising two exuberant boys, teaching hundreds of preschoolers, leading a den of Cub Scouts, organizing elementary school festivities, and running a birthday party business.
Helping Kids Choose an Activity
Kids who can read will be able to leaf through this book and make their own selections. Younger children, or those who are not self-starters, may need your suggestions, and for them it is often a good idea to offer two or three ideas.
You may be surprised by choices that children make. A child’s interest in an activity may be affected by his or her internal personality traits, such as temperament, mood, learning style, perceptions, activity level, and attention span.
In addition, external factors, such as materials, place, weather, time of day, and company of an adult or friend will affect a kid’s interest. It all depends.
Occasionally, your kid will choose an activity that just won’t work at that particular moment—like Smash Hit Cookies when you are out of oatmeal. He may be unhappy or resentful, saying something like, I never get to do anything I want to do!
Turn this potentially tense moment into a teachable moment. First, respond sympathetically: I know it seems unfair.
Then, explain briefly why he can’t do the desired activity: We have no oatmeal.
Then, ask for suggestions to fix the problem: What should we do so this won’t happen again?
Finally, find out what his goal is. If he wants to make something good to eat, suggest Construction Snacks as an alternative. If he just wants to pound his fists, then Oobleck may satisfy his need.
When kids have calmed down and have regained self-control, usually they will be agreeable to trying something different.
Helping Kids Get Unstuck
Some kids, though, will avoid new activities and will stick to one or two favorites. Up to a point, repetitions are fine, because children learn something new each time they practice a familiar action. However, a child who insists on doing the same thing in the same way may need help to get unstuck.
A possible solution to this situation is to show your own interest in a novel activity, and your child may cheerfully join in.
Once you get your kid started, back off and go about your own business. After all, the fun activities are meant to result in your child’s very own work. Some attention, in the form of guidance, can spark a child’s creativity: too much attention, in the form of control, can put a damper on it.
Talking Positively about Kids’ Creations
Indeed, providing just the right kind of attention can be challenging. The trick is to speak positively. Talking positively is not always easy, but it is always important, whether you are commenting about your kid’s art project or any other creative effort.
Here are some guidelines:
• Say, Tell me about your work.
This simple comment invites the child to express herself verbally as well as artistically. The child may say, It’s red,
or I used up all the toothpicks,
or Here’s the whale, here’s the fish, and here’s the boat.
Respond to what the child has said, with observations such as, Yes, I see that you used only red food coloring for your Paper Towel Tie-Dye,
or You made a big pile of toothpicks!
or I can see that the whale is spouting.
• If the child can think of nothing to say, you might encourage her with open-ended comments or questions that do not have a yes
or no
answer. For instance: "I see that this corner of the paper