So this week we have been participating in screen week with our local homeschool support group. It basically having your children not watch TV for a week. Now we didn't watch much TV anyway but its been a good experience so far turning off the tube.
During an average week my children would get an hour of TV during the weekdays and on the weekend they could get up to 2hrs on Saturday and Sunday. So compared to our nations average of children watching 4+ hours a day I say we were doing pretty darn good. But you know just 4 days into our screen free week I can see we could have been doing better. In that hour I was letting my children have it was usually while I was trying to fix dinner. So now instead this week the children and I have been more creative with that time. I have invited my kids into the kitchen more and they have come up with some things to do themselves.
If you decided to go Screen Free for a week here is a list of ideas to keep your family entertained:
- Go for afternoon walk around the neighborhood or local park
- Start and garden
- Listen to Audio books of the Classics
- Do an arts and craft project
- Start silent reading hour
- Create a production of your children's favorite story
- Draw while listening to Classical music
- Play in the yard
- Pull out the board games
- Train children in doing a new chore
Here are some pics I took of this weeks Screen Free Week.
Starting Seeds
Reading in front of turned off TV!
Hi Erin,
ReplyDeleteI just noticed you joined my blog as a follower. Glad to see you there. I will be frequenting your blog as I found so many useful ideas here. I love to see what other homeschoolers are doing and learn from them. Kudos to you and your homeschooling group for Turning the screen off challenge. In our home we don't get any channels. Our TV is more for watching documentaries or movies mostly related to the topics we are working on, plus playing the Wii on weekends. So like yourself our average is way low to the North American Average. I do feel the electronic media has hindered our creativity in making up games and activities to pass time effectively! hoping to share and learn more with you. :)
I totally agree with you Umm Umamah. When I was little my brother and I had a broken telephone that we used to play school, office, and store with. We would be busy for hours in our own imaginations.
ReplyDeleteI noticed you as a new follower to my blog Crafty Homeschool, Welcome. I have really enjoyed looking through your blog, adding a vote to your Circle of Moms top 25, and a new follower. It's so funny you would post about TV because in my house TV is refereed to as "brain rotting garbage". I really like the week free of TV (actually I would love to just get rid of it), I'm not sure my kids or hubby would like it. I just did some research and found out that the average TV time for kids is about 28 hr/wk. My jaw hit the floor, my kids get 1 hr each day (TV, computer, and game systems are all in that hr), and I thought that was too much.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the vote Len. Its amazing how much screen time the average child is getting per day in this nation. We really need to unplug. I think the TV time is directly related to the obesity crisis. When I was coming up we always had a chubby kid or two but even that child was very active outdoors. We craved the outdoors when I was little and TV was reserved for Saturday mornings. Which straight after it was over with which was usually noon we wanted outside again. Its amazing how within a generation we made such a drastic shift.
ReplyDeleteGreat inspiration!
ReplyDeleteI think this is one area we could use a little work on at times. When it's nice outside we seem to do better, but when it's raining it makes things harder.
~A lovely blog you have.
Amanda
That's wonderful! People can really accomplish a lot more in their lives when they watch less TV.
ReplyDeleteWe helped my Father run his cattle ranch in the mountains of Arizona for 1 year. There was no TV reception. It brought the family much closer, and the girl's behavior was surprisingly better. Although, TV can be used for educational purposes as well.
ReplyDeleteI was homeschooled, and I recall not watching much TV either. Unless my mom had some DVD or video she wanted me to watch that related to my school work, I probably watched only about an hour of TV on school days. Then we got to the point where we had so many TV shows and movies on DVD, that we pretty much watched only one channel (the Weather Channel). So we decided that if we were going to pay about $100 dollars a month for cabel and watch only one channel, we just may as well not have it at all, so we got rid of our cabel and have absolutely no channels on our TV, except for the video channel.
ReplyDelete