When I was a kid, I was surrounded by homemade afghans in bright oranges and greens. (It was the eighties. ) I vividly remember drinking hot chocolate with marshmallow fluff on my grandma’s couch watching Saturday morning cartoons wrapped in one of the family’s homemade crocheted blankets. I loved them so much that when I was 18, I taught myself to crochet and tried to make my own large afghan. I probably only got through about a third of the blanket before I stashed my project in a closet and then threw it away several years later when I stumbled across it. By that point, I didn’t even like the colors I had chosen anymore.

My first project was too ambitious for a newbie. At least it was for me. It had a variety of stitches that required me to count. It was WAY too large and I was still very slow. Since then, over the years I have knitted or crocheted several simple baby blankets and lap blankets to give as gifts and keep in my home. All of them have had fairly small dimensions since I learned from my early mistake. Now that I have a teenager who will be graduating from high school in a couple years, I have a new goal. I want to make a blanket for each of my kids to take with them when they go off into their own adult lives. A piece of home to have and to keep where ever they may end up.

I’ve settled on a temperature blanket for three main reasons.

1) It is simple. You pretty much can’t use fancy stitches or it will get WAY to large. That means no counting, no forgetting what I’m doing mid row. It seems like the perfect blanket to mindlessly pass the time while I’m watching TV or in the car or chatting with a friend. I know it’s going to take awhile, but I really think I can do this.

2) It will be one-of-a kind. I am going to allow each of my kids to choose their own color scheme. Given the choice of colors and the seemingly randomness of the “temperature” model, I can pretty much guarantee that no one else will have the exact same blanket.

3) It will be personalized to them. The way a temperature blanket works is that you choose the colors of each row based on the temperature at a specific location on a specific date. I am going to use the dates corresponding to their first year of life and the location corresponding to our hometown. Not only will no one else have a blanket like theirs, but no one else COULD have a blanket exactly like theirs. It’s underlying meaning is specific to them.

Now that I have decided what I want to do, I have the task of deciding EXACTLY what I am going to do. I decided I’m going to document my process as a gift to my future self, since I have four kids and this way I won’t have to reinvent the wheel every couple of years. Also, I thought these instructions might be helpful to others who might want to attempt similar projects.

STEP 1: CHOOSING THE YARN

I suppose there are other places one can start when making a temperature blanket, but where I decided to start was on choosing a brand of yarn to use. First I tried going to Hobby Lobby, but since I knew that my oldest wanted to do a monochromatic color scale and that I was going to need many shades of blue, I wasn’t happy with the selection I found there. I needed there to be at least 5 shades of blue that he liked all in one brand of yarn.

On top of that, I needed the yarn to be fairly thin. This blanket is going to have 365 rows and I don’t want it to be comically long. The yarn weight that I decided on, and this may need to be updated later after I’ve actually made my first blanket, is DK weight (also called #3 or light weight).

In terms of material, the cheapest yarn options would be acrylic. There are advantages to this in that it’s fairly easy to care for, doesn’t get dirty easily, and is probably the most inexpensive of all the options. I’m pretty sure all the blankets I grew up with were made of Red Heart yarn and they seem to be holding up great, even after 50 years. However, since I want this blanket to be special since it is the ONE blanket I am making for each of my children, I decided I don’t mind paying extra. I chose to pick from natural fibers (wool, bamboo, linen).

After I put together all of my requirements (lots of colors, DK weight, natural fiber, durability, ease of care, cost, availability), I ended up deciding on Cascade 220 Superwash yarn which I purchased from Love Crafts. It turned out that of all my requirements, the most difficult to meet was the variety and availability of color options, and this brand fit the bill easily. The cost was a little higher than I would have liked, but since it is meant for a special gift, I’m willing to pay.

I’ll discuss below how I ended up deciding how much of each yarn to get, but I ended up purchasing 3 skeins of each of 5 colors on sale for $9.20 each. Here is a copy of my receipt.

This is what I received. I’m hoping it is enough, but I will update this post if it is either too much or too little!

The colors that I ended up getting based on my kid’s input were, from left to right are:

1. Color 813: Blue Velvet
2. Color 377: Lapis Heather
3. Color 252: Celestial
4. Color 904: Colonial Blue Heather
5. Color 1944: Westpoint Blue Heather

STEP 2: FINDING THE COLOR PATTERN

The idea behind a temperature blanket is that the color of each row is based on the temperature of a specific day at a certain location. Since my plan is to make one of these blankets for each of my kids, the temperature I am going to use is the daily high on each day of their first year of life in our hometown. (I figure the high will give me more of a swing than the average.) Now, you COULD just download the historical temperature data using a website such as Climate Data Online Search, make your own legend matching each of your colors to a certain temperature range, and then figure out the color each row should be. If you decide to go this route, you’ll want to select Daily Summaries for your Weather Observation Type/Dataset, choose your date range, and enter your zip code.

If you go this route, you will have to add your requested dataset to the cart and “purchase” it, but it’s free. You should receive an email within a few minutes containing the data you want.

I started on this path, then realized that there is a really handy website that will handle all the data and let you visualize your blanket at the same time! It’s called https://temperature-blanket.com/. To use this website, you simply add in your location and the starting date for your one-year time period. I did not use my kid’s actual birthday in the image below to respect his privacy.

When you hit search, a graph of all the specific temperature data will appear. This exact information is not super important, but it might be interesting to note the highest temperature and lowest temperature reported in your window. Make sure it seems reasonable just as a sanity check! Next, hit the tab “Colors” at the bottom of the screen.

The first thing I did on the colors tab was reduce the number of colors from 10 to 5. I’m sure the blanket would look fantastic with 10 colors, but I like to keep things simple.

Next, you’ll want to click on “Find the Matching Yarn” for each of your colors and choose the exact yarn colors you want to use based on the yarn you purchased (or are thinking about purchasing). The first color will correspond to the “hottest” color.

My son and I had a minor disagreement in that I thought the darkest color should naturally be the hottest and he thought it should be the coldest. It’s his blanket, so we went with his preference! They have SO many yarns on this website, that it’s very likely you’ll find the exact yarn you want to purchase.

Since all of my yarn is Cascade 220 Superwash, I set it as my default yarn. I was able to find all 5 of the yarn colors that I purchased. I did need to use the yarn name and not the Color number listed on each skein. You can find the name of the color on either your receipt or on the Love Crafts website.

Unfortunately, one of my 5 colors (Color 904: Colonial Blue Heather) was way darker on the website than it actually is, so I chose a different blue that I felt better matched the actual yarn I received. Clearly their site is not perfect, but this is still an extremely valuable tool!

This is the final color scheme I ended up with. If you click the Download Gauges and Weather Data button, you will have exactly what you need to make your blanket.

I also recommend hitting the Preview button at the bottom to get a sense what your final blanket will look like. You can play around with different designs if you want. I briefly considered zig-zags, but ultimately decided I personally prefer the straight lines.

To make your blanket, you will want to print out your downloaded data and look at the color data for each row. I decided to go with the days high, but you can really choose any of the columns. Underneath the preview of the blanket are settings where you can switch to other options besides high. Personally, I chose to use the column with the hottest temperature, but it was a fairly arbitrary choice.

STEP 3: DECIDING ON THE STITCH

Once I decided on what yarn I was using and figured out what color each row should be, I just needed to finalize the details of the pattern, like what size crochet hook, what stitch to use, and how many stitches per row. I thought about doing a single crochet, but after some research, decided the moss stitch (also known as the linen or granite stitch) is probably better for this project. It will make the final blanket a little thicker and since you are crocheting into the previous row, I think it will minimize the risk that the blanket will get unreasonably long.

On the yarn itself, it says to use a size G or H crochet hook. I believe the G hook actually comes in two variation G/6 and G/7. Personally, I own a G/6 (4.25 mm) hook and a H/8 (5 mm) hook. I made a swatch of 15 single crochets using both hooks to help me decide which to use.

The G hook produced a roughly 2.5 inch square while the H hook produced a 2.75 inch square. I had thought initially I would want to use the smaller hook, but after doing my swatches, I liked the larger needle better. My estimate for blanket length with the larger 5 mm hook is 60” or 5 feet which seems like a good length. I actually would not mind it being even longer than that, so maybe next time I will try a bigger yarn weight.

Next, I tried two different methods of doing the moss stitch with the bigger H (5 mm) hook. This tutorial by Daisy Craft Farms provides a very simple, widely accepted explanation of a crochet moss stitch. It starts with an even number of stitches and the number of stitches per row is the number in your chain row minus two. You start the moss stitch right away. However, when I was watching tutorials, I stumbled across this one by Ginger Knots that uses a single crochet foundation row and does two single crochets at the end of each row. I decided to try both. The Daisy Farms tutorial is on the left below and the Ginger Knots one is on the right.

They ended up very similar, but I decided that personally, I liked the edges better in the Ginger Knots version on the right. In case these tutorials go away at some point in the future, what makes this tutorial different from traditional moss stitch is that the number of stitches per row is equal to the number of stitches in the chain row minus one. You single crochet in each stitch of the first row (skipping the first stitch, hence the minus one). At the end of each row, you chain one, turn, single crochet into the first stitch, chain one, and repeat the single crochet + chain until the very last stitch. Since you have an even number of stitches, the last stitch should be a chain, but instead you will single crochet into it, so you have two single crochets in a row. This gives the borders a little more structure.

The only problem with this is that I felt like the base single crochet row was a little too long. I decided to do an experiment where I used the G hook for my chain and foundation single crochet and then switched to H when I started the moss stitch on row 2. As a side note, I kind of like that the foundation row, which represents my child’s date of birth, is a little different in that it is all single crochets. I think I am going to actually do 366 rows and then single crochet the last row corresponding to my child’s first birthday. It’s the little things that no one will ever even care about but me, right? Anyway, this is how my experiment switching hooks turned out.

Since I was happy with it looking rectangular, this is the method I decided to use in my final blanket—G/6 (4.25 mm) hook for chain and single crochet foundation row, H/8 (5 mm) hook for moss stitch in remaining rows. I will likely switch back to the G hook for the final single crochet row. Based on the length of my swatches and my tendency to make my blankets a little too narrow, I ultimately decided on a row length of 268 stitches, which meant that I had to chain 269 since you lose one when you start single crocheting into the second stitch. This gave me a blanket that is just a tad under 51” wide. I feel like I might regret not making it just a bit narrower, because I may end up having to buy more yarn. 253 stitches would have made a blanket that is 48 inches wide (with my tension).

When I started the blanket, I estimated that it would end up about 60 inches in length and 51 inches in width. Currently, based on about the foot that I have crocheted so far, the final blanket is on track to be about 58 inches in length and 48 inches in width. This means I’m crocheting a little tighter than I thought based on my swatches, but overall pretty close. It’s likely I can also stretch it to the original planned dimensions if I want when I’m done.

My goal is to have it finished early 2027. I will update this post once it’s complete! For now, I am enjoying having a project to pull out while watching movies with my kids and to keep my hands busy on trips.

Related Links:

Best Gifts for Kids
Best Books for Kids
Best Travel Toys

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Now, you COULD include the Wizard of Oz in this marathon as the first movie. The 1939 classic is 1 hour and 42 minutes. Honestly, my kids and I had thought both Wickeds were 3 hours each, which was why we turned it into a whole day event with intermissions, but the movies were not actually that long. The first one is 2 hours and 40 minutes. The second is only 2 hours and 18 minutes. If you just do the two Wickeds, teh total time spent starting at a screen is only 5 hours (which was WAY better than our Harry Potter day). If you add Wizard of Oz, that brings you to around 6.5 hours, which is still very doable. We ended up inviting some extended family members, so we watched the classic Wizard of Oz the night before. That held up way better than I thought it would! I think all my kids had already seen it, but my youngest kids were very young the last time we watched it.

On the actual day of the event, we planned for family to arrive around 10:30 am. We had some appetizers and started the movie a little before 11 am and finished around 2 pm including bathroom breaks. Then we had lunch and started the next movie around 2:30 pm and were done by 5 pm. Overall, it worked out to a very relaxing, unhurried schedule and still left time in our evening for other activities.

The Decorations

I think planning the decorations and the food is the most fun for my daughter and me. The planning itself becomes a bonding event. When I planned Harry Potter, I wanted everything to be a surprise, so I did most of it myself and then decorated and prepped overnight while the kids slept. This time, my daughter helped plan decorations and then everyone helped blow up balloons and set things up. This tactic was definitely a lot easier on me and also I think make the experience more memorable for them, so we will definitely have a lot more family involvement in this stage for future events.

Our budget for this party, especially decorations, was quite low. We decided on a pink and green theme and just went to the dollar store. We found a REALLY cheap balloon arch that was only about 18 inches in diameter. It broke almost immediately when I tried to put the circle together and bend it, but we were able to repair it to a sufficient degree. The circle is just not a perfect circle. I think it was $1.25, so I’ve been meaning to go back and get another one so we’ll have spare pieces when we do this again.

At the dollar store, we also bought like 3 different packs of balloons that contained pink and green options as well as a few different fake flowers that were a dollar each. In addition to adding them to the balloon arch, we placed the balloons in flowers in a few places around our home, such as around the fireplace, and hung balloons from the ceiling, which apparently I didn’t take a picture of.

I also updated our chalkboard art sign and made my kids a sign using a quote from the movie. This one actually still said I solemnly swear I am up to no good from 2 years ago! I don’t think I will leave this one up as long, but it’s a nice reminder of a little memory.

This one got erased the next day, but I also made my kids another themed sign on our whiteboard that we use for school. All together, I spent between $10 and $15 on decorations.

This would have been more expensive to buy for the party, but we already owned it. At the library last summer, they were giving away prizes as part of their summer reading program. I really wanted to win the movie themed one which had included in it a light box and popcorn cups (Amazon affiliate links). I didn’t win, so at the end, I just bought myself those two items from the basket so our family movie nights could feel more special.

Wicked Food

The food is where the real money went, but honestly, I don’t feel bad about spending money on food since it all gets eaten eventually anyway. (I wouldn’t normally buy so much junk food, so my kids were really happy at the next week’s worth of snacks.) I accidentally made so much pink rice that we were having “Wicked burritos” with leftover green tortillas, beans, cheese, salsa, and pink rice for the whole week.

To start our party planning process, the week before our party, we were specifically on the lookout of pink and green foods.

We did not end up using all our ideas, but here are some of the pink foods we brainstormed.

• watermelon
• strawberries
• raspberries
• red potatoes
• salsa
• salami
• summer sausage
• strawberry muffins
• pink cookies
• pink candies
• pink yogurt covered pretzels
• using beet juice as dye

Here were some of our green ideas:

• green grapes
• kiwi
• honeydew melon
• guacamole
• green apples
• celery
• snap peas
• cucumbers
• zucchini
• pistachios
• pickles
• edamame
• spinach tortillas
• wasabe peas
• green candy
• green pesto

I feel like this charcuterie board was the highlight of our planning. It was very improvied, but we made and “emerald city” out of celery (which was toothpicked together, but that’s okay, because with so many sugary treats, no one tried to eat it), and a “yellow brick road” out of cheese. My daughter and I had a lot of fun assembling this.

We are definitely not professional charcuterie board assemblers by any means, but it seems pretty straight forward. Get some board, put some containers around it and fill until it’s full! I used a metal book end and two boards of different heights to hold up our “palace.”

We mainly put our pure treats on the front cutting board, like the candies and crackers that we don’t normally have. On the back, we put our healthier snacks like the fruits and vegetables.

I actually forgot we had found these watermelon plates and napkins that fit our theme perfectly! We also made a couple pastas. One of them we has just pasta with pesto sauce to make it green and for the other, we died the pasta pink using beat juice, but I think we got a little carried away. We probably could have used less! That one was just pasta with chopped up zucchini and celery with some italian dressing.

Everyone can get involved in helping prepare the food even if it’s as simple as washing grapes and taking them off the stems.

My daughter made the ranch dip pink by adding a little beat juice to it.

My 12 year old helped to make a watermelon and honeydew salad using a melon baller.

My oldest made strawberry muffins with cornflakes on top.

My daughter also made green chips by cooking cut spinach tortillas for a few minutes in the air fryer. You have to really watch those so they don’t get too toasty! We served them with salsa and guacamole.

We were pretty excited to also find some sparkling juices at Trader Joe’s that were pink and green. They were delicious! We definitey splurged on a few things that we would not normally get.

For the actual lunch that we served between the first and the second movie, we decided to make avocado rolls, which my kids LOVE, but I usually only make sushi for someone’s birthday since they require a bit more work and planning than I’m habit of exerting. We decided to die the rice pink with beet juice by adding beet juice to the rice vinegar before we added it to the cooked rice. I definitely went overboard. I feel like I barely used any beet juice, but I should have used much less, because it turned the rice bright pink. To make it feel less harsh, I had the brilliant idea of making a second batch of rice and mixing them together thinking that would diffuse the color, but instead, we just had speckled sushi.

It ended up looking really neat. The only problem was that I made so much sushi rice that we were eating sushi rice for days.

I forgot to take pictures since they were in the freezer, but we also had strawberry (pink) and macha (green) flavored mochi ice cream balls from Trader Joe’s for desert. Overall, the day was a success! My kids even liked the movies, LOL. Not as much as the original Wizard of Oz, but given their latent distaste for musicals it could have been a huge failure. I think possibly if we hadn’t turned it into such a big event, it might have been, but given all the work that we put into it, it turned into a memorable pleasant day.

Whether or not you use any of these ideas to create your own Wicked-themed party, I hope our experience inspires you to make some memories with your kids while they are still young! We are thinking that we want to do a National Treasure movie day next. I really have no ideas on food yet, but I thought it would be fun to build some puzzle solving into the day. My kids are really loving the Enola Holmes movies on Netflix so I told them in a like 10 year when they are all adults, we are going to make a plan for them to all come back so we can have an Enola Holmes movie marathon. Stay tuned!

Related Links

Homemade Fun for Kids
Best Gifts for Kids
Tabletop Games for Kids

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The Green Ember Details

Title: The Green Ember
Author: S.D. Smith
Publication Year: 2014
Website: https://store.storywarren.com/
Age Group: Late Elementary, Middle School
Amazon Product Page (Affiliate Link)

Honestly, I cannot believe that I never wrote a review for The Green Ember before given how much our family has enjoyed it. I did included it on the Best Book Series for Fifth Grade and I stand by that recommendation. These days, a lot of what my kids want to read has a very modern feel to it, which is not necessarily bad, but it does include a certain amount of potty humor or a bit of gratuitous sensationality. The Green Ember is nothing like that. It feels almost Narnia-esque in it’s wholesomeness. It is an adventure story, pure and simple, with surprisingly complex characters for a children’s book.

The characters are rabbits. That should be stated up front. However, it doesn’t feel baby-ish. My kids have a real sensitivity to anything that they think is too sentimental or unrealistically idealized. For example, personally, I loved The Vanderbeekers of 141st street, but I’ve never reviewed it on this site, because my older children found the way the kids related to each other to be unbelievable in the kindness and sensitivity that they showed to each other. (Of course, it’s always possible that those fictional children just had better parenting than my real-life kids.) Even though The Green Ember has a similar feeling of innocence and goodness to me, my kids did not react to it in the same negative way. They enjoyed this story and the characters.

I think the biggest strength of The Green Ember is the character development. The best example is that one of the main characters, Pickett, starts the series a bit surly. Granted, he’s just lost his family and is still too young to have much agency, but he deals with his issues the way a sullen, sulky teenager would. He automatically dislikes a perfectly likable character simply because he feels less competent and in control. This makes him a very relatable character to an audience of growing kids who feel like they are constantly being told what to do and just want more independence and to be taken seriously.

We are about to start Book 3 soon, and I am loving re-reading this series with my youngest two kids who don’t remember the first time I read it aloud. If have kids between the ages of about 7 and 12, this could be a lovely bonding experience for you. I’ve found that with all the action and sword-fighting, this series appeals particularly to boys, but there are strong female characters in here as well.

Included on Lists:

1. Personal Family Favorites: Mid Elementary
2. Personal Family Favorites: Late Elementary

Related Links:

Best Books for Kids
Learning Activities for Kids

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The very first thing I did was jump onto Canva and create a printable sheet that we could use to log our progress. I scrolled WAY BACK through my instagram posts until I found the bingo card that Cait posted back in the day. I used most of her ideas and then my kids and I brainstormed a few substitutions.

Our family chose to complete this challenge by starting at the first square and progressing to the right and down like you read a book, but you could also choose boxes randomly. We did miss probably 3 or four days and made them up on days that we were less busy. At this stage of life, we have to be flexible and take wins where we can get them.

You can see below what we came up with and download it for free to use with your own family at the bottom of this post. We used the version on top that has a light blue background, but since that might be more ink than some families want to use, I also made an alternate with a white background that is a little more printer friendly.

For the most part, we used board games for this challenge as our family owns quite a large number of games. (It’s almost embarrassing.) However, we did not ONLY use board games. We played charades for the parlour game and 20 questions for the car game. For the movement game, we played something my kids call werewolf, which is basically a reverse tag game where all the players search for the tagger then yell “werewolf!” and run back to safe when they find them. I wish I’d written down all games we played, but it’s taken me a couple months to get this post up, so it’s a bit of a blur.

Did the games always end happily? Absolutely not. We have 6 people in our family so feelings quite often get hurt. However, this happens far less often than when my kids were young. Another advantage to doing this game challenge with older kids is that this is the first time we’ve ever done this where everyone in our family is solid at reading. That really opens up what we are able to play. I plan to fill this out more in the future, but feel free to check out my Amazon storefront if you are looking for game recommendations!

Our favorites do change somewhat frequently, but here are some of our favorites that have stood the test of time, in no particular order:

One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Dixit
Not Parent Approved
Skyjo
Forbidden Island

Recommended Age Range: All ages
Time Required: ~10-30 minutes per day (or longer, totally up to you!)
Difficulty: Medium (it does take some planning)
Cost: Free printable

*** Download your free printable here: Family Game Challenge ***

I hope your family enjoys this challenge and that it brings you all a little closer together!

Related Links

Homemade Fum for Kids
Tabletop Gaming for Kids
Learning Activities for Kids

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When my kids were young, we held themed parties with friends more regularly. (For example, see this Gold Rush party or this Soap Sculpture activity that was part of a Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler book club. (In a bizarre coincidence, my family came home from skiing/snowboarding just this morning to find our dog had eaten half a bar of Ivory soap, which happens to the be last remaining bar from the set purchased for this activity all those years ago. I don’t even know where she found it.) What with pandemics and busy lives and growing kids, the number of themed parties we’ve thrown has diminished considerably over the years. Then, suddenly, a few weeks ago, I realized that these Winter Olympics would be the last of my oldest’s childhood. He’s currently 16. The next summer ones will be his senior year of high school. I couldn’t let an opportunity like this pass us by. My kids and I got to work.

Winter Olympics Menu

The easiest place to start was with a menu. My teenage daughter knows how to use Pinterest and we all have a pretty good imaginations. This is what we came up with.

We got the idea to use ice cream cones as Olympic torches off of Pinterest, though the ones my daughter found were filled with fruit. I’m sure orange sherbert combined with Cheetoes has been done by someone somewhere as it seemed the obvious filling choice to my ice cream and chip obsessed crew. I think it really was what made our party the most memorable as half of our guests were fully on board and the other half were completely disgusted.

The next big centerpiece was the fruit, which was a lovely and appreciated contribution from a friend.

My daughter found on Pinterest others who called their bottled water melted snow and we loved it.

My 13 year old daughter made these Olympic cupcakes and my 9 year old sun helped with the sorting of mini M&Ms into colored bowls to make it easier for her.

I really wanted the kids to have some actual nutrition and not fill up on dessert, so I made some peanut butter balls that I regularly make and covered them in powder sugar. The recipe is 2 cups oats, 1 cup peanut butter, 1/2 cup chocolate chips and a generous drizzle of maple syrup (maybe 1/4 cup, but I don’t measure).

I had initially thought I would make snowball cookies, but I think these peanut butter snowballs turned out better. They definitely all disappeared.

My daughter, who loves caprese salad, found some mozzarella snowmen on Pinterest and we improvised. These did not seem as popular with the kids, but were a nice adult-ish touch.

At the grocery store, my kids had the idea of calling yellow oreos, gold medal oreos, and we knew we wanted pretzels, so we got straight ones and called them ski pole pretzels.

Since we were messing with semantics to eat what we wanted, we also got popcorn and called them snowflakes.

Winter Olympics Decorations

Our primary decorations were banners that we made using folded over pieces of paper that have flags on one side and the country name on the other.

If you’d like to use these, you can download this Flags of the World printable file I created here. I may add more countries to it the next time when we do the Summer Olympics, but this time, we used 24 countries and strung them across our kitchen and in our living room window. Here is a pictures of our soap-eating dog waiting for guests to arrive.

The only other decoration we made was a banner to welcome our guests. I tried to get my kids to help me on this, but all they really did was offer suggestions for what to put. It turns out as they get older, they get more self conscious about their artistic creations.

Winter Olympics Activities

The primary activity was that we had the Opening Ceremonies playing during the entire party and watched a few key moments, namely the first 15 minutes, the beginning of the Parade of Nations, when the United States entered, and the passing of the torch and lighting of the cauldron near the end. The fact that opening ceremonies occured during a time when kids normally come over to my house anyway for a weekly chess club was a big factor spurring this party. However, I don’t think watching opening ceremonies is crucial. In the future, if the opening ceremonies are not at a convenient date and time, highlights could be watched or skipped entirely.

The part of an Olympics party that I don’t think you can do without is a little competition. At our party, we had the following “Olympic games.”

1. Trivia (I’ll provide some suggested questions below)
2. Foot race (out in the street, maybe 50 meters)
3. Standing broad jump (be sure you have some sidewalk chalk)
4. Cornhole (everyone got 3 beanbag throws. A different parent ran it, but I know they got 1 point for every beanbag that stayed on the board. I think 3 points were for touching the hole and 5 were for making it through, but I could have this off a bit. I don’t think it matters as long as the scoring is clearly laid out ahead of time.)
5. Jump rope (just the maximum number of jumps before messing up)
6. Rock Paper Scissors (my 16 year old organized a full single elimination bracket with each individual competition being best 2 out of 3).

I believe those were all the competitions that actually happened, though we had a few other ideas that we would have done if time allowed. The one that I was most hoping would happen was a talent show where a set of judges would get to write a score on one of the 5 mini white boards that I own. The kids were excited to do this, but it just felt overly ambitious to try to squeeze in near the end of the party and by that time, a giant, spontaneous game of tag had broken out.

The whole party lasted 3 hours, but the first 30 minutes were eating snacks and watching opening ceremonies and the last 30 minutes were mostly just tag and hanging out. The 2 hours in the middle that it took to do the competitions with short breaks in between felt more than sufficient. We had about 20 kids total between the ages of 3 and 16.

To honor the winners, I actually used my Cricut to print and cut circle stickers for the gold, silver, and bronze medals. I also used my Cricut to partially cut cardboard circles out of an Amazon box, but my daughter helped with a lot of that final cutting since the Cricut couldn’t go all the way through. She also affixed the stickers to the cardboard circles. To give credit where credit is due, my boys played a big part in cutting and attaching the ribbon to the medals.

In the end, I made 15 each of gold, silver, and bronze medals and then an extra 9 gold medals so that anyone who didn’t win could have a gold to take home as a souvenir. Some competitions, like the running, jumping, cornhole, and jump roping, had 3 age divisions so we needed 9 medals total for each of those competitions. The trivia and the rock-paper-scissors tournament had everyone competing in the same group, so there were only 3 each for each of those. All in all, we made 45 medals and used 42, plus we had the extra golds which came in handy, particularly for the youngest participants who sometimes had mishaps, like shoes falling off in the middle of races.

Here is the Canva Olympic Medal for Party file I created, in case you would like to modify it for your own purposes. I don’t normally share Canva files, so if you try this and have any issues, just reach out! You will obviously have to change the word on top since you probably don’t live in my city and will likely need to change the year as well since I’m so delinquent in getting this post out.

Olympics Trivia

In case it is helpful, here are the questions I asked for my Olympics Trivia competition. I’ll put the answers, though not all of these will be accurate next time.

1. In what country did the Ancient Olympics originate? (Greece)
2. In what country are the Olympics currently being held? (Italy)
3. How often are the Winter Olympics held? (every 4 years)
4. What did the first Olympians wear during the Ancient Olympic games? (nothing, they were nude)
5. What color is associated with third place? (bronze)
6. What do the 5 Olympic rings represent? (regions of the world – Europe, Asia, Africa, Americas, Australia)
7. Where will the Summer Olympics be held in 2028? (Los Angeles. A good number knew this since we live near LA are are excited.)

I passed out small pieces of papers and pencils. We did the quiz as a group, then we collected pencils and went over the answers as a group.

Since we had a tie for who knew the most, as I suspected we would, I came up with a few tie breaker questions.

1. In what city in Greece was the first modern Olympics held in 1896? (Athens)
2. What continent has particpated in, but never hosted the Olympic games? (Africa)
3. In Ancient Greece, winners did not get gold, silver, and bronze medals? What did they get instead? (laurel wreaths)
4. What country has hosted the Olympics the most times? (United States)
5. The motto of the Olympics is, in latin, “citius, altius, fortius.” What does this mean in English? (faster, higher, stronger)

We did not need to use them all, but it was helpful to have a few options just in case.

After Party

Don’t forget to actually WATCH some of the Olympics after your party. The best way to do this I’ve found is to download the Olympics app on your phone. I was able to tell it which athletes and sports we were most interested in and I would get notifications on my phone that helped us watch a few medaling events live.

One other thing we decided to do was have a movie night, just as a family, to celebrate our Olympics-themed day. Personally, we chose to watch Cool Runnings, but The Cutting Edge and Miracle might also be good choices depending on what your family enjoys and has already seen.

And that’s a pretty thorough overview of our successful Winter Olympics party! If you decide to use some or all of these ideas, I hope you have a blast!

Related Links

History Activities for Kids
Social Science Activities for Kids
Robotics Activities for Kids

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Animal Adventures: RPG Starter Set Details

Product: Animal Adventures
Company: Steamforged Games
Website: https://steamforged.com/collections/animal-adventures
Recommended Age Range: Box says 14 and up. This seems a little ridiculous to me. I think that any child that can read has a decent shot of being able to solve some of these puzzles with adult help. We’ve done several of the puzzles, and I don’t believe there is any “adult” content that would prevent a child from participating. All of my kids, including my 9 year old, had a lot of fun with this.
Price Range: ~$30
Amazon Product Page (Affiliate Link)

Review

Overall, I am really glad that we purchased this box set, as the instruction manual is of a reasonable length, the story line is fairly simple, the character sheets are cute and easy to understand, and my family had a lot of fun. I also really enjoyed that it came with a map and actual miniature figures that we could move around. I will say that my family did eventually give up on moving so many spaces per turn as is outlined in the instructions. I have enough experience attempting to be a game master for D&D that I now have confidence to just throw out the parts that are holding you up and move forward with what’s fun.

One issue I had when I first opened the box is that it comes with 7 character minatures and character sheets, but of those 4 were girls and 3 were boys. Since I have 2 younger boys who I didn’t think would want to play girl characters, the very first thing I did when I opened the box was laminate the character sheets, then use a sharpie to cover up the name and gender. I told each person in my family to pick a character and then give their character a name and gender. It might have been unnecessary, but this worked well for us.

My only other complaint with this game is that it that it can only be played once. Once you have worked your way through the campaign, it probably wouldn’t be very fun to do the same storyline again, at least with the same people. I feel like I’ve already missed the window with my teenagers, but I’m hoping that my younger two kids (9 and 11 years) will use what we did as inspiration to write their own campaigns. That has always been my goal…to plant the seeds in their heads to get them writing for fun.

I didn’t realize this until just now, but the company that makes this starter set has actually written other adventures. I just ordered this Gullet Cove sourcebook which sounds like it has “3 additional adventures.” It does also say it introduces new animal characters and monsters/villains, and I see that the company website sells additional minifigs, but I’m cheap, so I’ll see what I can make work using the ideas in the book without buying anything additional. I assume the book will not have a convenient map the way the starter set does.

Anyway, despite that diversion into other products produced by the same company, I can say with confidence that this Animal Adventures: RPG Starter Set comes with everything you will need for your first adventure. If you are already a fan of D&D and familiar with campaigns and the rules of D&D, this will probably not be extremely interesting to you, but if you are D&D curious and want to encourage imaginative play in your kids, this is a great place to start!

Click here for more Board Games Reviews for kids of all ages.

Related Links:

Best Gifts for Kids

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Sneaky Sabotage Details

Product: Sneaky Sabotage
Company: Finders Seekers
Website: https://sneakysabotage.com
Recommended Age Range: Box says 14 and up. What is it with these games? My 9 year old LOVED this.
Price Range: ~$30
Amazon Product Page (Affiliate Link)

Review

My family LOVES Finders Seekers. (You can read my full review here.) I think it is such a great way to get kids exercising their brains and having fun at the the same time. When I started receiving promotional emails about their new game, Sneaky Sabotage, I ordered it right away even though 3 of my kids were not even in the recommended age range. I didn’t know exactly what we were getting, but I figured if it was too old, we would just save it until they were old enough. It turns out, it’s a lot of fun now.

This game is sort of a cross between the puzzles within the Finders Seekers boxes and the game One Night Ultimate Werewolf (which is another one of our family’s favorites — my review is here). In this game, the round starts with each player secretly choosing a character card. Most players will simply be “agents” who are trying to solve the puzzle and determine the secret code word. However, one person will be a “saboteur,” who is surreptitiously working AGAINST the team, trying to thwart their attempts at uncovering the secret word. An “insider” has some extra information that will help the team solve the puzzle, but they don’t want to give away their identity.

Just like in One Night Ultimate Werewolf, this game comes with audio that you need to play on a device. Unlike One Night Ultimate Werewolf, the game doesn’t have an app, simply a webpage that has different videos for you to select depending on the length of the puzzle. You can check those videos out here. At the beginning of each round, everone closes their eyes. The saboteur and the insider each open their eyes, one at a time, and read the clue on the back of the puzzle. Then, everyone opens their eyes and tries to solve the puzzle for the duration of the time. Could you play without the device? Yes, but it would be good to play with the videos first, so that the person leading the game knows what to say.

The puzzles themselves are of a decent difficulty level. They range from fairly easy to very difficult, but most of them are in a happy spot in the middle that require just enough out-of-the-box thinking to feel satisfying. The hints we’ve found to mostly be comically unhelpful, like “there is a hidden word,” but then some of the other ones are also maybe a little too helpful. It does not detract from the amount of fun we get from playing, but it does make it really hard to identify the insider, since the information they have is often either not very helpful or obvious.

We’ve had a lot of fun playing this game. My kids really enjoy the role playing aspect and are always hoping to be a sabateur. I really enjoy the puzzle solving and am always hoping to be an agent. The one time I was the saboteur, I saw the answer fairly quickly and then just had to subtly waste time for a few minutes. My daughter is the most obvious of sabateur’s asking us to look at skin irritations and using other obvious distraction techniques. While you might not expect it, somehow this game involves a lot of laughing, which is really my main goal when playing with my kids.

The only downside to this game is that there are a limited number of puzzles (only 24 that come in the box), so our specific family will only be able to work through each of those puzzles once, then we may pass it on to someone else. Each game has 4 rounds and so uses 4 puzzles by default, meaning we can play this game 6 times before we use up all the puzzles. Personally, I am hoping that the company comes out with inexpensive “expansion packs,” but even if not, I still feel like this game is well worth the value.

As someone who regularly buys Finder Seekers and other one-time boxed games like Hunt a Killer, I am no stranger to paying for an experience. It’s cheaper than taking my family of 6 to the movies! Just know that the replayability is limited. However, unlike the Finders Seekers boxes, the items within this game are not “used up” or damaged in any way, so you should have no problem passing it on to a new family when you are done.

Click here for more Board Games Reviews for kids of all ages.

Related Links:

Best Gifts for Kids

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Mysterium Details

Product: Mysterium
Company: Asmodee
Website: https://store.asmodee.com/products/mysterium
Recommended Age Range: Box says 10 and up. I think younger kids can play too since there isn’t any reading in the gameplay, but the directions are a bit complicated.
Price Range: ~$45
Amazon Product Page (Affiliate Link)

Review

I’m going to start by saying that if you are easily overwhelmed by game directions and you haven’t played Dixit, play Dixit first. This game reminds us of Dixit which is one of our favorites, but Dixit is MUCH easier to learn how to play. If I hadn’t tried this game once before and given up, I probably wouldn’t have put in the 30 minutes or so it took to learn how to play this game. I was determined though. I watched a couple YouTube videos (I found this one them most helpful) and then it still took me like 15 to 20 minutes to set up the game the first time by looking at the directions.

The main premise is that there is a murder and one player is the ghost of the murder victim. The ghost has to send “visions” to the other players to help them figure out who the murderer is. The vision cards are a lot like the Dixit cards in that they are beautiful and totally random. The “ghost” has to make a connection between a random card and what they are trying to get you to notice and you have to just guess when connection they are making. For example, when I was the ghost, I was trying to direct my fifteen year old to a man who had half white hair and half black hair, so I was giving him vision after vision of black and white cards. He however, kept noticing different things about the subject of the cards and picked every character before the person I was directing him to.

Not only is this game really fun, but I feel like it is so good for kid’s creativity and flexible thinking skills. In a world where most video games and activities that kids participate in are very structured and cut and dry, it is so refreshing to be able to have fun in a way that encourages your brain to think divergently and make random associations. Now that we know how to play, I can definitely see this as one we will be playing for many years to come.

Click here for more Board Games Reviews for kids of all ages.

Related Links:

Best Gifts for Kids
Learning Activities for Kid

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Ungifted Details

Title: Ungifted
Author: Gordon Korman
Publication Year: 2012
Website: https://gordonkorman.com/the-books/novels/ungifted
Age Group: Late Elementary, Middle School
Amazon Product Page (Affiliate Link)

Everyone loves a main character who is not too perfect and Donovan Curtis is a lovable character who probably couldn’t be farther from perfect if he tried. The story begins with humorous hijinks that result in the destruction of the school gym and progresses to him hiding out in the least likely of all places, a school for gifted kids. The books is fast paced and keeps kids engaged with short chapters and multiple perspectives. We listened to the audiobook and while usually my kids don’t love when there are multiple narrators for a single book, they didn’t mind at all with this one.

While we just listened to it as a family, I think this would make a great book for a kids’ book discussion or book club as there are a lot of thought-provoking questions that arise from this book about moral dilemmas, what it means to be “gifted,” and the disadvantages of labels. It really is a very heartwarming book even that somehow manages to not be sentimental. My teens are incredibly averse to anything that comes across as sappy or unrealisitic by their standards, but they enjoyed this book just as much as my elementary kiddos.

Honestly, when I chose this book, I thought it was a standalone book, but I’m happy to discover there’s currently a sequel and a third one in the works. We’re all attached to these characters, so I’m excited to get to learn a little more of their stories.

Included on Lists:

1. Personal Family Favorites: Late Elementary
2. Personal Family Favorites: Middle School

Related Links:

Best Books for Kids
Learning Activities for Kids
Homemade Fun for Kids

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Rack-O Details

Product: Rack-O
Company: Winning Moves Games (originally Milton Bradley)
Website: https://winning-moves.com/product/Rack-O.asp
Recommended Age Range: Box says 7 and up, but younger kids can play as well. They just might need someone to help them score at the end.
Price Range: ~$12
Amazon Product Page (Affiliate Link)

Review

My biggest complaint about this game is that since I have four kids, I can’t play too. I really prefer games that allow up to 6 players, since that’s the size of my family, but we can’t always get what we want. Actually, if I really wanted to, I could buy a second box and then just double up and I think that would work great. The game is cheap enough, that it wouldn’t even be that expensive. I don’t think I will, mainly just because my game closet is already overflowing, but it’s nice to know that would work in case my kids ever developed a Rack-O obsession.

The premise is simple. You start with 10 cards in your rack in a random order. The cards have numbers between 1 and 60. Players take turns drawing cards and replacing cards in their rack until ALL of the cards are in order from smallest to largest. Then they yell Rack-O and are declared the winner. It literally takes about 2 minutes to learn and only about 15 minutes to play. Sometimes even just a few minutes if someone gets really lucky!

I think this is a great math game for kids who are learning to understand double digit numbers. Even if they were just working on their teens, you could remove all the numbers higher than 19 and tell the child you are only going to play with the first 5 slots instead of using all 10. This will allow children to understand concepts of greater than and less than in a fun, low pressure, motivating way. As they get better at this skill, you could gradually increase the number of cards and slots used until they can play the full game.

I also love that this game encourages critical thinking skills. There is an end goal of having your numbers in order from lowest to highest. The strategy for making this more likely to be possible probably won’t be obvious to all kids. As a tip, you can tell kids to try to make the card numbers closely match the numbers on the rack itself, because this will leave the cards fairly evenly spaced and prevent them from backing themselves into a corner. However, as they play more and get better, their intuition for good decisions will improve.

Click here for more Board Games Reviews for kids of all ages.

Related Links:

Best Gifts for Kids
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Best Books for Kids

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