Shelter In Without Flaming Out: 128 Fun & Educational Things to Do with Your Kids During COVID-19

More than 30 million children are out of school because of COVID-19. Many parents want to fill that gap but find the prospect of educating their children daunting. If you are one of them, I have some good news for you: there are many things you can do with your children that are just as educational as conventional schoolwork — and are lots of fun for both them and you. In this regard, I speak not just as the leader of a network of charter schools that serves 18,000 children, K-12, but also as the mother of three of my own. In both roles, I believe that joy and engagement is a critical component of learning.

Board Games

At Success Academy, board games are actually a regular part of our curriculum. They teach strategic, logical and mathematical skills that children are highly motivated to learn as they enjoy playing these games and like to win.

While many board games are educational, you should encourage your child to play games that are intellectually challenging for their age. Games like Monopoly, Clue and Settlers of Catan teach children more complex intellectual skills. Playing Clue well, for example, requires that players make complex logical inferences based on the guesses of other players. Simpler games such as Sorry are fine for younger children to learn basic counting skills but you’ll want to encourage your child to graduate quickly from such games so they can play more challenging ones. . 

Here is a list of my favorite board games: Eyegamer Memory Matching Game; Connect 4; Sorry; Mancala; Uno; Gobblet Gobblers; Blokus; Monopoly Junior; Rummikub; Gobblet; Qwirkle; Think Fun Laser Chess; Labyrinth; Sumoku; 24; Ticket to Ride; Apples to Apples; Boggle; Othello; Backgammon; Monopoly; Clue; Mastermind; Settlers of Catan; Prime Climb; Sequence; Set; Taboo; Chess; Scrabble; Bridge.

Note that this list, and most of the ones below, are arranged from easiest to hardest. 

Games that Children Can Play by Themselves 

In recent years, companies have created a plethora of ingenious educational games that children can play by themselves including Kanoodle, Genius Square, ThinkFun’s Gravity Maze, Marble Run, Rush Hour Traffic Jam, Shape By Shape, Balance Beans Math, Clue Master and Master Logic. 

Audiobooks

Many people seem to think that there is something magically educational about reading a book that doesn’t apply to listening to one. There isn’t. The only thing that listening doesn’t teach is the “decoding” skill of turning letters into words but that’s just a small part of reading. The more important benefits are developing one’s ability to understand complex sentences and ideas, and of course, learning the content of the book. All of these benefits can be obtained by listening. In fact, the delivery of a strong narrator enhances one’s enjoyment and understanding of a book. Moreover, listening is an important and under-rated skill.

Audiobooks are particularly helpful for children who haven’t yet become strong readers since it relieves them of the burden of “decoding.” This allows them to focus on the meaning of the text. Moreover, most classic children’s picture books can now be found in a spoken word format so your child can enjoy the pictures as he reads the text.

Audiobooks can be obtained online for free from Amazon’s Audible Stories and from public libraries that subscribe to Overdrive. In addition, there are paid options such as Amazon’s Audible service. These books are quite cheap when you consider that many young children will listen to books repeatedly and will benefit from doing so as they will get more from each reading. For $16, you can purchase a collection of eleven Dr. Seuss Short stories that your child can listen to for dozens of hours and that are read by wonderful actors such as Ted Danson, Jonathan Lithgow, and John Cleese.

Puzzles and Brain Teasers

Educators often talk about the value of “critical thinking,” while ignoring logic, which is the foundation of critical thinking. Problem-solving is also an undervalued skill. Fortunately, both of these skills can be developed by playing Puzzles and Brain Teasers, which is why they are part of our curriculum at Success.  

You’re probably familiar with such classics as the three hat problem or the man who has to row a wolf, cabbage and goat across a river. Many more can be found in these collections: 

• Of Course!: The Greatest Collection of Riddles & Brain Teasers For Expanding Your Mind (Zack Guido 2014).
• My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles (Martin Gardener 1994)
• Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers (Martin Gardener 1988).
• Math Puzzles Volume 1: Classic Riddles and Brain Teasers In Counting, Geometry, Probability, And Game Theory (Presh Talwalkar 2015).
• The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems (Martin Gardener 2005)
• The Moscow Puzzles: 359 Mathematical Recreations (Boris A. Kordemsky 1992)
• Mind your Decisions channel on Youtube (Presh Talkwalkar)

Reading

For all children, but particularly those who are unenthusiastic readers, consider high-quality comic books and graphic novels. Some great series for children are Asterix, Bone, Amulet, Black Sands, American Born Chinese, and Persepolis. In the category of humor, Peanuts, the Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes are brilliant and far more sophisticated than you may realize if you only know them from pictures on coffee mugs and t-shirts. For example, if you read enough of Peanuts, you’ll begin to see individual episodes in the context of the characters’ personalities and prior interactions. Take Lucy’s decision to open up a booth offering psychiatric sessions at five cents a pop. What makes this funny isn’t just the idea of a child running a psychiatry booth rather than a lemonade stand, but the fact that Lucy is particularly ill-suited for this avocation given her rough demeanor, which leads her to end her sessions with declarations such as “Snap out of it! Five cents please.”

Non-readers and early readers can enjoy wordless books such as Creepy Castle, Journey, and Flotsam. A wordless book may sound like an oxymoron but it isn’t. Reading a book is fundamentally about taking information and formulating a story from it that makes sense. For example, if a story says that a boy stomps out of a room after he is told that he can’t go to a baseball game, you are expected to infer that the boy wanted to go to the amusement park, is angry that he can’t, and is stomping to express his anger. You may not be conscious of it but you are constantly engaging in this type of thinking when you read a book. Wordless books require this skill just as much as conventional books do, perhaps more so, thus they are a great skill-building activity for pre-readers.

Don’t think for a moment that the quality of the books your child reads doesn’t matter or matters less than for adult books. There is a reason that the classics are classics and it’s not just that kids like them (although they do). Books such as the Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Wrinkle in Time, and James and the Giant Peach are thought-provoking and have subtleties that children can uncover in multiple readings. This is true even of early reader picture books such as those of Dr. Seuss. For example, as soon as the Cat in the Hat shows up, he declares:

A lot of good tricks./ I will show them to you.

Your mother/ Will not mind at all if I do.

Since the children in this book haven’t raised any concerns about their mother, the Cat’s spontaneous reassurance that they needn’t worry is a sure sign that they should! Some have suggested that the Cat represents the children’s id and that the fish who objects to the Cat’s games represents their superego. While five-year-olds don’t understand psychoanalytic theory, they absolutely understand the conflict between their desires and their own growing understanding of how they ought to behave.

In choosing books, the site Goodreads is quite useful, and, helpfully, they have a list of children's classics. 

I would also recommend that you encourage your children to read non-fiction books such as Unbroken: An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive, Through My Eyes, Hidden Figures, and Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Among scientific books, the lavishly illustrated DK books as well as these wonderful books are great choices for young kids:

• Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up
• Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks and Other Sea Monsters
• Bugs: A Stunning Pop-up Look at Insects, Spiders, and Other Creepy-Crawlies
• The Way Things Work Now
• Why?: Over 1,111 Answers to Everything 
• What if?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
• A Little History of Science

Comedy

Not only is humor enjoyable, it’s an important intellectual skill that is of great utility in the real world. Presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama used humor to enormous effect. Children can develop their sense of humor by listening to these wonderful recordings: 

• “Free to be You and Me” (Marlo Thomas)
• Abbot and Costello: “Who’s On First,” “Stolen Oranges,” “The Car,” “Lending Abbott Money”
• Allan Sherman: “Number One Hits,” “Peter and The Commissar” (with Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops)
• Bob Newhart: “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back,” “Behind The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart”
• Victor Borge: “Comedy in Music; Live!”
• Mike Nichols and Elaine May: “Improvisations to Music,” “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May”
• Tom Lehrer: “That Was the Week That Was,” “The Tom Lehrer Collection 1953-60”
• Jackie Mason: “The World According to Me”

All of the above recordings are G-rated, although the last four require more intellectual sophistication. Most can be found on streaming services such as Spotify. Many can also be found on Youtube.

Here are some humorous books for children: 

• Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes (Rob Elliott)
• Sideways Stories from Wayside School (Louis Sachar)
• MAD's Greatest Artists: Dave Berg: Five Decades of “The Lighter Side Of…”
• MAD's Greatest Artists: Don Martin: Three Decades of His Greatest Works
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
• The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain
• Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
• The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (William Goldman)
• The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker

Science Activities

Science instruction should involve many experiments but it’s often taught as a collection of facts. You can remedy that by helping your child carry out experiments at home. 

You’d be amazed at how many scientific principles can be demonstrated with things you already have at home. These collections contain hundreds of them:

• 201 Awesome, Magical, Bizarre, & Incredible Experiments (Janice VanCleave).
• Chemistry for Every Kid: 101 Easy Experiments that Really Work (Janice VanCleave)
• Science Experiments for Kids: 100+ Fun STEM / STEAM Projects and Why They Work (Crystal Chatterton).
• The Everything Kids' Science Experiments Book: Boil Ice, Float Water, Measure Gravity-Challenge the World Around You! (Tom Robinson).

Poetry

Much like setting lyrics to music, arranging words to create rhymes and rhythms makes them more enjoyable. When a poet can do this while simultaneously making a profound point or a good joke, it’s like watching somebody juggle while riding a bicycle.

Not surprisingly, children particularly like humorous poetry, and, fortunately, there’s lots of it. The reigning king of children’s poetry, Shel Silverstein, begins his wonderful poem “Sick” as follows:

“I cannot go to school today,”/ Said little Peggy Ann McKay.

“I have the measles and the mumps,/ A gash, a rash and purple bumps.

My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,/ I’m going blind in my right eye.”

An unending list of increasingly unlikely maladies follows!

Another great children’s poet is Jack Prelutsky, whose poem “Be Glad Your Nose is on Your Face,” begins as follows:

Be glad your nose is on your face,/ not pasted on some other place,

for if it were where it is not,/ you might dislike your nose a lot.

 Imagine if your precious nose/ were sandwiched in between your toes,

that clearly would not be a treat,/ for you'd be forced to smell your feet.

And of course, there are also wonderful poems that are more serious such as the classics “Casey at the Bat,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and “Dream Deferred.” Here are some collections of poetry to get you started:

• Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (Jack Prelutsky, Marc Brown)
• Poetry Speaks to Children (Elise Paschen)
• Locomotion, Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)
• Crossover (Kwame Alexander)
• Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein)
• Revolting Rhymes (Roald Dahl)
• Hip Hop Speaks to Children (Nikki Giovanni)
• The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (Jack Prelutsky)
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (Langston Hughes)

Movies and Documentaries

While you want to be careful about your child’s screen time, high-quality movies and television can be quite educational, and watching them together will enrich your dinner discussions with your child. In addition to virtually anything by David Attenborough, here are some particularly good nature and science documentaries:

• Walking with Dinosaurs 
• Walking with Beasts 
• Walking with Cavemen
• The Great Human Odyssey
• Wonders of the Universe
• Wonders of Life
• Wonders of Our Solar System
• In Search of Giants

Here a several movies that accurately recount real historic events:

• Apollo 13 (1995)
• The Crossing (2000)
• John Adams (2008)
• Selma (2014)
• Mandela (2013)
• Thirteen Days (2000)
• Glory (1990)
• The Right Stuff (1983)
• All the President’s Men (1976)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
• Gandhi (1982)

Finally, while there are innumerable great films, here are some that are particularly appropriate for elementary and middle school children:

The Sound of Music (1965)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948):

Ben Hur (1960)

Spartacus (1960)

The African Queen (1951)

Singing in the Rain (1952)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

To Be Or Not to Be (1942)

Amadeus (1984)

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Twelve Angry Men (1957)

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Casablanca (1939)

West Side Story (1961)

Romeo and Juliet (1968)

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

Sense and Sensibility (1995)

I hope you find these suggestions helpful. It’s true that learning isn’t always fun and that, as children become older, they need to develop the discipline of studying even those subjects they have less natural affection for. But adults sometimes conclude that if education is sometimes boring, this means that the more distasteful something is, the more educational it must be. This is especially true of novice teachers who think that if their students laugh, something must be going wrong. Experienced educators know better. In general, the more interested and amused students are, the more they learn. That’s why activities such as playing board games, solving puzzles, and listening to comedy are some of the most educational experiences in which your child can engage. So do your child and yourself a favor by finding the joy in learning and parenting!