At-Home Activity: Boredom Buster - Activities Box
When is the best time to plan for future success? Right now!
Thinking ahead about how you want to reach your goals is something that kids can do anytime as a fun exercise and as a way to stretch their self-awareness skills.
You don’t have to wait for the new school year or report card time to help your child start deciding which goals to work on.
Building an Activities Box focuses your child’s attention on their current and future goals.
Bonus--it’s a great boredom-buster because it gives your child options to stay active during breaks or downtime.
Have your child read and complete the following steps, helping them if they need it, along the way. It’s encouraged to put aside 30 minutes of time and to have the following materials handy to complete the activity:
Paper
A pen(cil)
Pair of scissors
A box or container
Other art materials (optional)
Think about what you are good at and what you’re not so good at. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses--it’s okay to be honest about both! If you can’t think of anything, ask people you trust to give you advice or try to remember times when people have told you what you’re good at and what you can improve.
Take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. One side is for what you’re good at. The other side is what you’re not good at. Write down everything you can think of for both sides. Try to get at least 10 things on each side.
Look at everything you’ve written down. Decide which of these things you want to get better at (and can get better at ... considering the circumstances) and draw a box around them once your decision is made. Maybe your friends have told you that you’re not that great at telling jokes, but you don’t care about that. Or, your mom says that you’re really good at math and you want to keep getting better. Be honest!
Then, cut each one out and crumple them so you can’t see what you wrote down.
Find a box or container lying around your house. Once you do, put all your crumpled slips of paper in it.
Design the outside of your activities box with some markers and any other art materials you’d like. This is your Activities Box, so make it your own!
Over this next month, pick a slip out of your activities box each day and practice it. At the end of the month, notice how much you’ve improved from the first day! Remember to ask for help if you need advice on how to improve on something.
As your child achieves these goals over time, talk about their improvement and what you’ve noticed about their progress.
Reflect any observations you have about their own self-awareness back to them to strengthen their skills. Use the following questions to help you in this conversation.
Did they continue practicing their skills all month?
Did they realize they wanted to work on other skills and add to their box? Or did they realize they didn’t really want to work on something and take it out?
Did you notice any of their strengths when completing certain activities?