Screen Free Week!

Join us in celebrating Screen-Free Week and Children’s Book Week, May 3rd-9th. After a year of having screen time out of necessity, we’re excited to find possibilities in unplugging! These two organizations have joined together to create a great book list for children.

Screen Free Week is a wonderful opportunity to do activities as a family and step away from the screens. Screen Free also has a handy guide to help families organize themselves!

What can you do instead of turning on the screens? Screen-free connections don’t have to take a lot of time; they can easily happen every day. No app or program is as interactive as a teacher, parent, or playmate. These opportunities for shared time establish an easy dialogue between you and your children and lay the foundation for the changing and at times, challenging, conversations that will come as they grow.

·    Chat or sing songs en route to and from school, the store, wherever you’re going

·    Cook meals together. Children love measuring, mixing, cutting and pouring

·    Fill the dishwasher together

·    Lie on a blanket in the park and watch the clouds go by

·    Splash through puddles

·    Take a walk in the woods, along a river or creek, or just down the sidewalk

·    Start a nature collection. 2 to 6-year-olds love to amass collections of rocks, sticks, leaves, shells, anything they are interested in

·    Share songs and stories during bath time

·    Choose books without added noises and moving pictures – let your children use their imaginations to make their own impressions of the characters and descriptions in books.

·    Make sorting laundry a game: sort towels by color, make piles of each family member’s clothes, carry them to the right dresser, match socks

To learn more about this project, go to https://www.screenfree.org/.