Today is Fun is dedicated to helping adults entertain the kids in their lives. The ideas here will keep kids happy and occupied for hours on end, without you having to spend money or buy more stuff. The tips are always entertaining, often educational and developmentally appropriate. We are here to help parents, home schoolers, teachers, and more. Please subscribe now to receive an idea each day. Today is Fun!

Serif vs. Sans-Serif

A fun and educational way to look at letters!

Posted on March 3, 2011 by steve

kids letters

 

Yes, your kids know their alphabets.  Many can probably write in block letters and even cursive.  Now it's time for them to learn yet another aspect of letters : serif and sans-serif.


kids lettersSerifs are those little lines on the ends of letters.  Look for them on the tops and bottoms of capital H's.

If letters are printed without those little lines, they are called "sans-serif" (meaning "without serifs.")  The letters you're reading now, here at Today is Fun, are sans-serif.

Once you've explained serifs to your little ones, it's time to start playing with them:

First, take your kids and explore the world, both at home and at large.  Can you spot some serifs on the drive to school today?  Do you have any sans-serif letters around your house?  Where?

Make your next trip to the supermarket a serif vs. sans-serif extravaganza.  If your kids want to, let them keep a tally of the number of things they see with serif letters vs. sans-serif ones.

At home, your child should grab some markers or crayons and write a fully-serifed alphabet.  Which letters get a lot of serifs?  Which get no serifs?  Can numbers be serifed up?

Finally, which style of letter do you like better?  Does your child have a preference?

I would have liked to close this post with a reference to a serif ceremony, or perhaps a serif sheriff.    Instead, I'll just say:  enjoy your serifs today, everybody!

[more]

–S

 

(Many thanks to Russ Neumeier for the assorted letters photo.)

Posted in Educational, Good Any Time | Leave a comment

Many Book Madness

I'm not kidding. It's madness!

Posted on March 2, 2011 by steve

kids reading activity

 

Length:  Thirty minutes, more or less.

Parental Involvement:  Explain the activity.  Participate if you want!  (But kids can do it without you, too.)  

Kids Should Be Able to:  Basic reading is great, but not necessary.  Kids should be able to look at pictures and create simple stories.

 

If you've been visiting our blog even occasionally, you probably know some of our favorite things:

 

(1)  Books and reading
(2)  Creativity and imagination
(3)  Fun


and finally:

 

(4)  Madness!

 

(By madness, I mean joyful, energetic craziness.  And in case I'm not doing a good job expressing myself, it's supposed to be a good thing.)

Today's activity is meant to get kids reading.  It's also supposed to rev up their imaginations and their creative instincts!  (Oh, and it's quite simple, too.)

Have your child go to the bookshelf and choose five random books — or seven, or nine.  (For some reason, I think an odd number of books works better for this activity.)

Your kid should spread the books out on a bed, table, or the floor.  Then have your little one open each book to any random page.  Next, you guys should read each opened random page out loud.

Do the pages make any sense whatsoever when you guys read them back to back?  Probably not a lot of sense, but maybe a little.

You don't have to work too hard to make sense of the random pages.  Either you'll see a connection or you won't.  Even better, maybe the budding bright minds will spot a connection or story that you missed!  (Parents have enough work during the day as it is.  Let the kids figure out the story!)

Here is an example many-book story session for you.  We randomly flipped to these pages…

 

I sat there with Sally.
We sat there, we two.
And I said, "How I wish
We had something to do!"
(from The Cat in the Hat)

Three little bears.
(from The Spooky Old Tree)

Blue hat, green hat, red hat, oops.
(from Blue Hat, Green Hat)

Swerving, curving–
Screech!  Boom!  Bam!
They're snarled up in
A traffic jam.
(from Racer Dogs)


From these pages, my kids decided the story was this:  Some kids were bored.  They looked out their front window and saw some bears walking down the street.  The bears were wearing hats: a  blue one, a green one, and a red one.  (And oops, one of the bears tripped and fell.)  Then, the bears got into cars and swerved, curved and[more] had a huge race car accident.  The kids watched all this from their window and were not bored any more!

Now, is that an amazingly wonderful story?  Will Steven Spielberg want to make a movie out of it?  Well, probably not.  But it was "something new" that my kids created.  And it was fun!

When you guys have figured out the story and discussed it to everyone's satisfaction, have your kid put the books back and get another five.  (The cleaning up is very important, obviously.  Parents have enough work during the day as it is!  Have the kids keep tabs on the mess, please!)

Have fun with the reading madness!  If you guys create anything super spectacular and entertaining, please let us know.  (We'd make up our own stories, but we have enough work during the day during it is!)

kids reading activity

Posted in Reading Activity | Leave a comment

Monkey Movin’

(And mosquito movin'. And moose. And manatee.)

Posted on February 24, 2011 by steve

kids activities

Kids and animals, they just go together.  Children love animals.  Have you ever happened to notice that kids' books and movies occasionally feature an animal or two?

Well, today we are going to encourage your kids to turn themselves into animals.  A lot of animals.

Today, we're going to teach the kids some verbs — many that they probably haven't encountered before.  All these verbs describe actions that animals do. 

Say each animal-verb to your kids, and have them perform that action.  Have your kids demonstrate slithering like a snake.  Then let's see wriggling like a worm.  How about waddling like a duck?

Here are some other animal-moving verbs for your kids to demonstrate:

creep
gallop
buck (like a donkey)
rear (like a horse)
leap
soar
swim
climb
peck (get those noses moving forward!)
stomp
hover
scamper
roll (like a pig in mud)
dig (like a dog)
jump (like a dolphin)
flap
shake (like a wet dog)


Now, below is a list of animal verbs that all relate to noises.  These words can involve a bit of exercise, too.  Just watch your kid's body after you've told him or her to roar like a lion, or growl like a wolf.  Kids put their whole bodies into making these sounds:

buzz
meow
caterwaul (a good vocabulary word for kids!)
grunt
bark
growl
roar
hiss
chirp
cluck
quack
squeak
chatter (like monkeys)
hum


When you're done with this activity, your kids will have a better handle on some solid verbs.  And hopefully, they'll have got any beastly behavior out of their systems!

(Many thanks to e3000 for the dramatic animal photo.)

Posted in Good at Home | 1 Comment

Cute and Not-So-Cute

Ask the cute ones in your house to divide up the world

Posted on February 22, 2011 by steve

kids fun

 

This is a simple and quick game to pass the time while you're waiting with the kids.  Break the world into two categories:  cute and not-so-cute.

To get started, ask your kids if they think puppies are cute.  Do they?

Then ask if they think babies are cute.  And how about Dory from Finding Nemo? 

How about a barking dog?  How about a crying baby?

Now, how about an old rusty car?  Or an alligator?  Or a mushed up banana?  Cute?  Or not-so-cute?

Keep asking them about things until you get to words that really might be neither cute nor not-so-cute.  For instance, is a hamburger cute?  What does your child think?

For maximum fun and best results, the idea is to get your kids talking about their ideas about kids foodthe world and the things in it.  If they start bringing their own adjectives into the discussion, you've really won.  For instance, if your child answers, "I wouldn't say a hamburger is cute or not-so-cute, but I would say it is delicious," your session has been a success.

The point here is that you can view the world in a million different ways.  Choose an adjective (cute) and its opposite (not-so-cute), and examine the world with it.  This will work, of course, with any adjective:  large, lonely, fun, yellow, and so on.

With a fun activity and some ever-so-cute kids, you can't lose!

Posted in Good Any Time | Leave a comment

Flag Drawing

A fun way to look at the world at large!

Posted on February 18, 2011 by steve

kids flags

 

We love the flags of the world.  Here’s why:

1.  They’re interesting to look at and interesting to compare.  Which flags have red stripes in them?  Which have blue stripes?  Why do some flags have horizontal red, yellow, and blue (Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia)?  Why do so many flags have the flag of the United Kingdom in the upper left-hand corner?  Why do some countries have similar crosses (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Faroe Islands)?

2.  Flags are a great starting place for learning about other countries.  Seeing an interesting flag often leads us to the atlas, where we look up the country’s location and some information about it.

3.  Flags are two-dimensional, and therefore somewhat easy to draw.  Flags are also always rectangles, and it’s interesting to see all the variations that people have created in those rectangles.

To check out all the flags of the world, please click here.

That site shows all the flags of the world on one long page.

Here’s an activity with that site:  Grab some crayons and some blank paper.  Tell your kid to choose a flag – but don’t tell you which one — and to draw it on the piece of paper.  Once the depiction is done, you come, study the flag that’s been drawn, and try to figure out which it is.  (You, too, of course, can look at that website – we don’t expect you to memorize all 248!)

You can draw a flag, too, and have your child guess which it is.

While you’re doing this, you can talk about where the country is (Asia?  Africa?  Oceania?) and maybe even what the country is like (Switzerland is cold! Peru has a lot of llamas.  The pyramids are in Egypt.  And so forth.)
kids flags
For some more information about flags (and some answers to the questions we asked above), look at the first comment in the section below.

What do you and your kids think about flags?  Let us know, please, in the comment section below.

Finally, we highly recommend that you give extra credit (thirty points, perhaps) to any child who can draw the flag of St. Pierre and Miquelon.[more]

Posted in art supplies needed, Good at Home | Leave a comment