I hope one of these activities has inspired you to get outside and enjoy some fun today!
I love to encourage parents to get their children moving and playing outdoors….I really do believe there are so many emotional, social, physical and cognitive benefits which is why I was so excited to hear about a new company using the power of the internet to reach out to parents and their children and get them moving outdoors again. I really believe in the premise of Freaky Rivet and having seen some of their fantastic activities i can certainly recommend joining them for outside inspiration and ideas.
I've invited the founder of Freaky Rivet – Iyas, to tell you a little more about this great initiative and share some of their ideas!
Weekly Activities to get your kids out and about
We've just seen that there are some psychiatrists in the UK who for a mere £15,000 (or about $24,000 AUD) will treat your 4 year old for iPad addiction! Call me a “bad parent” for sometimes using a smartphone to keep my kids amused while I did something else, but letting a child spend HOURS on end unchecked with a tablet, smartphone or laptop? That's a recipe for a misspent youth AND abnormally over-developed fingers!
We're no luddites. We know kids absolutely need to use and understand technology – especially in this fast-paced world. But they also need to run around aimlessly. Bump into stuff. Bump into each other. Make some stuff. Break some stuff. Discover nature. Explore. Create. Laugh. And all in balance.
And that was why we founded Freaky Rivet. Our mission? To get kids engaged with life by moving, creating and exploring.
Today, we're doing that by emailing our members weekly activities that may be physical, creative or technical, or contain aspects of all three and more. Soon, we're going to release a safe and monitored interactive site where kids can encourage each other to do stuff, and we'll use their love of bragging rights to motivate them better than we can do just as parents!
What kinds of activities? Here’s a couple of examples. Remember playing Capture as a kid? We'd get a list of stuff to go find in the yard or a park. The first team to bring back everything on their list would win. Move forward a generation, and you have Digital Capture. Mom creates the list of 10 items, and sends them by text to the teams. They then have to go wild and photograph those 10 things. No restrictions on size like the old days. If you want them to find a eucalyptus, tell them to find a eucalyptus. Sadly, they may need to look up what one looks like, but more kudos to you if they don't! Simple, but one of the best games our kids played. We even asked them to bring back a smile. Couldn't have put that in your pocket back in the 70s!
Or we have our Special Ops series. A set of activities that we're creating for budding spies and sleuths. Rarely was there a better mix for physical world skills, cunning and technical know how. Add into the mix kids' own ability for creativity and imagination, and there's a whole set of fun activities. They can navigate laser beams in the corridors in your house with a $1 roll of party tape from your local store. For tech measure, they can set up a video or webcam at the end of the course. We have Special Ops physical fitness training for them to get fitter and faster. We'll be adding some language activities in there – what good is a spy who can't speak Mandarin at the drop of a hat?
There is less and less of a line between our kids physical, online and imaginary worlds. And that distinction is going to get increasingly blurry as more of the things we use in the physical world get their own Internet brains and connections.
Which is why we’re using the power of the Internet to get kids off it! It's about time they learned the meaning of the word irony!
If you would like to learn more about Freaky Rivet and perhaps join up to receive their weekly activities via email just click on the box in my sidebar to the right!
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Warm Wishes
Agreed! It doesn’t really matter what they’re doing as long as they are getting some time in outside! It’s hard here in the Texas summers but that’s why we do swim team. We get outside time THAT way and the kids go out a lot in the evening too! Cute ideas.
We have pretty hot Summers too and since we have been landscaping we have lost alot of our shade unfortunately so i can see we will need to do something before our Summer hits again! Great idea re the swim team…water always tires them out too!
Great post & loads of fab ideas in the one place, thanks so much for adding this the outdoor play party too – it’s perfect.