Tools for Parents

For Kids K-2 <-----> For Kids Gr3-5

Have you ever thought about how many hours you spend each year waiting?  At the doctor’s office?  Restaurants?  Airports?  And, of course, waiting in lines?   If you added up all of these hours, you’d be amazed to see that literally days of your life were spent waiting.

Your kids are frequently waiting with you.  And they get bored, restless and sometimes cranky if they have to wait too long.  To an eight year old, thirty minutes in a waiting room seems like a week.  So why not help them pass the time with something that would engage them?  Why not recycle this “waiting” time and use it to challenge your kids with activities that will help make them smarter and more creative?

Consider this scenario:

You’ve had a long day and now you’re sitting in the dentist’s office with your two kids, both who have check-ups.  You’ve only been waiting five minutes and though you’re tired, you’re relaxed.  Both of your kids are quiet.  Each with a clipboard, paper and pencil, they’re engrossed in thought as they work on their design for the perfect waiting room chair.  You sit back and enjoy this peaceful moment.

            This chapter contains lists of qwerky questions and activities to engage your kids when they’re waiting in a restaurant, a doctor’s office or a terminal.  It also includes a list of activities you can use to ease the boredom for your kids when shopping with you and standing in long lines at the grocery store.

QWERKY QUESTIONS To Discuss

Read through the list of questions and familiarize yourself with them.  When asking open-ended questions, challenge your kids to come up with as many possible answers as they can and always encourage them to be creative. Become familiar with the four types of skills necessary for creative thinking discussed in Chapter Four. 

If you’re questioning two or more kids, tell them to take turns giving the answers.  Or to encourage cooperation, ask the kids to work together to see how many answers they can think of as a team. 

Whenever you ask kids questions requiring a verbal response, allow them “wait time.”  After you ask the question, tell them they will have one minute to think.  After the minute is up, ask for answers.  Wait time is an important step in the thinking process.  It helps kids get into the habit of pondering a question rather than blurting out the first thing that pops into their mind without giving it any thought. 

BRIEF CASE ACTIVITIES To Draw, Write, Figure Out

As with the qwerky questions, read and become familiar with the brief case activities.  Ask your children to help you gather the supplies they’ll need to complete all of them.  Put these in an old briefcase, cardboard box or backpack.  Whenever your children are waiting and bored, ask them to complete one of the activities.  Direct them to pull out the supplies they’ll need and get busy thinking.

Brief Case Supplies  

Clipboard,

Graph paper, line paper, blank paper,

Colored construction paper

                                    Pencils, portable pencil sharpener, pens

                                    Crayons, markers, scissors, glue stick

                                    Small Dictionary

                                    Book about Secret Codes

Calculator

Stop Watch

                                    Mini Tape Recorder

IN THE WAITING ROOM

AT THE DOCTOR/DENTIST’S OFFICE 

QUERKY QUESTIONS For Kids in Grades 3 – 5

How many things can you find in this room that are…

·        Things You Have At Home?

·        Things You Would Never Have At Home?

·        Things Only A Doctor/Dentist Would Have?

How might you group the objects in this room?

What colors are not in this room?

What is the heaviest thing in this room?  The lightest?  The most expensive?  The cheapest?  The oldest?  The newest?  Explain why you think what you do.  What evidence do you have to support your answer?

Pick an object in this room.  In what other places might you find one like it?  Name as many places as you can.

What objects in this room would not have been in a waiting room 100 years ago?

What might a waiting room have looked like 100 years ago?

What objects might be in a waiting room in the future? 

How might a waiting room be different from this one in the future?

Pick any object in this room.  How many ways might you use this object?

I’m thinking of an object in this room.  What is it?  Can you discover what it is by asking me only 10 questions?  Try it.

Name all the things the doctor might add to this room to make it a better waiting room.

What if the doctor decided to rearrange the furniture in this room?  How might he rearrange it?

What if the doctor decided to take something out of this room?  What might he choose to take out?  Why?

What should the doctor add to this room to make it more interesting?  To make it more comfortable? 

Look carefully at the room to your left, to your right or behind you for 10 seconds.  Then, turn away and name as many things as you can remember seeing in that part of the room.

What if you were locked in this room?  What are all the ways you might get out?

If I were locked in this room overnight, how might I use the furniture to make myself comfortable?  How many different things might I do to entertain myself?

What if this room was upside down?  How would it be if the ceiling was the floor and vice versa? 

Pick an object in this room.  How is this object like a patient? 

Pick an object in this room.  How might it feel to be this object?  What are some things this object might say if it could talk?  What might make this object happy?  Sad?  Frightened?  Angry?

Pick two objects in the room.  What might one object say to the other?

Pick any object in this room.  What are all the things that you think of when you look at that object?

How many questions are in this room?  (Ex.  How old is it?  What was it before it was a waiting room?  Why did the doctor decide to work here?)

How many uses can you think of for…(pick one from this list or pick an object in the room)?

How might you improve…(pick one from this list or choose an object in the room)?

Pick an object in this room.  What if it started talking to you?  What might it say?  What might you say?

Pick an object in this room.  Tell me a story about you and this object.  How did you use it to solve a problem?

Add your doctor or dentist to a story you’re reading in school.  How would this addition change your story? 

Choose a character from a story you have read recently and put the character in this waiting room, sitting right beside you.  What would the two of you talk about?  Why might the character be seeing the doctor/dentist?

What If ….?  What might be the consequences?  Name as many as you can.

·        What if there were no doctors?  What if people never got sick? 

·        What if people lived 200 years?  What if our life span was only five years?

·        What if people didn’t need to sleep?

·        What if people had twice as many teeth?  Or had 8 fingers on each hand?

·        What if people had only one eye?  Or had two mouths?

·        What if everyone’s teeth were exactly alike?

·        What if everyone had the same exact face?

·        What if doctors had X-ray vision?

·        What if doctors could see odors?

·        What if dentists could hear cavities?

·        What if dentists had hands the size of their feet?

·        What if dentists had pills they could take to make them shrink?

CLIPBOARD ACTIVITIES To Draw, Write, Figure Out…

Draw a mural the doctor could use to brighten up this room.

Make up a word problem using any of the objects in this room.  (Ex..  If each chair was occupied by five different people today, how many people would have been in this waiting room?  And, if each person paid the doctor $40.00, how much would the doctor make today?)

Make up a word problem about the doctor and his patients.  Use these three numbers in your problem: _____  _____  _____ (Ex.  5, 25, 8)

Pick any object in this room.  What might you add to it to make it better?  What might you eliminate?  Draw a picture of how the object would look after you made those changes.

Design a super-duper waiting room chair.  Draw a picture of it.  Include details.  Label your drawing.

Design a chair that an alien might use in a waiting room on a far away planet.

Design a series of road signs that could be used in this office.  Ex.  Exit.  Sign In.

Draw a picture of how you might look sitting in this room 60 years from now.

Create a symbol for this waiting room.  For this doctor/dentist.  Draw a symbol that illustrates how you feel while waiting.

What if you were the doctor and he/she was your patient?  Write a list of questions you would ask before you examined him/her?

How many words can you make out of this word (choose one)?  Doctor, Patient, Insurance, Medicine, Health, Disease, Illness, Prescription, Healing, Stomach, Heart, Liver, Brain, Esophagus, Tongue, Throat, Teeth, Braces.

What might you make out of this line?  (Draw a curvy or non-straight line.  The line should be approximately an inch in diameter.  Tell your child she can add anything she wants to in order to turn the shape into something interesting.  Encourage her to add details to her drawing.)

How might the doctor rearrange the furniture in this room to make it more comfortable?  Draw a plan to illustrate this new arrangement.

Explore Magazine Pictures:  Select a magazine in the waiting room.  (Women’s magazines such as “Coastal Living or “Ladies Home Journal” work well for this). 

What can you remember?  (Find a full-page picture.  Ask your child to study the picture for 10 – 30 seconds.  Then, take the picture away and ask him to list the items he remembers seeing in the picture.)

You are an eye-witness.  Find a picture in a magazine and show it to your child for 10 seconds then take it away.  Ask questions about the picture.  (Ex. How many people are in the picture?  What color shirt was the woman wearing?  What objects were on the coffee table?)  Ask five questions.  Do the same activity with the child asking the questions about a picture you studied.)

Can you find my picture?  Select a picture in the magazine.  Give your child 3 –5 clues about the picture.  (Ex.  The picture has two people in it.  They are outside on a sunny day.)  Ask your child to look through the magazine and find the picture that you selected, using your clues. 

Can you find my object?  Select a picture and pick one object that you notice.  Tell your child to look at the picture and ask questions in order to figure out what object you picked.  Challenge him to ask good questions.  Point out that the better the questions, the fewer he needs to ask.

Why is she smiling?  Select a picture that has at least one person in it.  Ask your child why one of these people is smiling or laughing, frowning, running.  Whatever they are doing.  Challenge your child to list as many reasons as they can. 

What happened before this?  Select a picture that has people in it.  Ask your child what the people might have been doing before the picture was taken.  What might they have done after it was taken.

What if you walked into a picture?  Ask your child to look through the magazine and find a picture.  What might he see if he were in the picture that is not visible to you looking at it in the magazine?

Who lives here?  Select a picture of a room in a house or in a garden.  Find one without people in it.  Ask your child who might live in this place.  What might their names be?  Brainstorm ideas about how they live.  What they do for a living.  what they do for fun. 

Find a picture of a room in a house.  Ask your child what three things they like most about this picture.  What don’t they like?  Explain their thinking.

Find a recipe in the book.  Read the ingredients.  How much of each one would you need if you doubled the recipe?  Tripled it?  Made only half of the dish?

Find an ad that contains numbers. 

·        What is the sum of all of the numbers used in this ad?

·        What is the smallest number?  The largest number?  The difference between the two?

·        Make up a worksheet of addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems using the numbers in this ad.

·        Ask your kids to make up a word problem using the numbers in this ad.

·        Pick one number on the page.  How many different ways can you make this number?  (Ex.  12:  3 x 4 = 12; 6 + 6 = 12; 20 – 8 = 12;  460 – 448 = 12;  7,322 – 7,310 = 12)

Find a picture of an animal in the magazine.  Ask your child to pretend that the animal is his pet.  Name his pet.  Write a story about the pet and a problem that it caused.  Tell your child to write in his story how he solved the problem.

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IN THE WAITING ROOM

AT THE DOCTOR/DENTIST’S OFFICE 

QUERKY QUESTIONS For Kids In Grades K – 2

How many things can you find in this room that are…

·        Round?  Square?  Rectangular?  Any other shape?

·        Red?  Orange?  Blue?  Any other color?

·        Things That Begin With A?  B?  C?  Any other letter?

·        Things You Have At Home?

·        Things You Would Never Have At Home?

·        Things Only A Doctor/Dentist Would Have?

How many different colors can you find in this room?  Which color is used most often? 

Listen carefully.  What are all the sounds you hear in this room?

What words would you use to describe this room?  This chair.  A magazine.  Name as many as you can.

What is your favorite thing about this room?  What is something you don’t like about it?

Pick two objects in this room.  Which one had you rather be?  Why?  Pick two more.  Which of these had you rather be?

Pick an object in this room.  What if this object was magic?  What might it do?  Would you want to use it?  What might happen if you did?

Pick an object in this room.  What if this object came to life?  What might it do?  What would you do?  What might the doctor do?

Pick any object in this room.  What words come to your mind when you think about that object?

What is the biggest thing in this room?  The smallest?  The largest?  The tallest?  The shortest?  The widest?  The skinniest?

What are three objects that are close to you?  Three objects that are far away from you? 

Which objects would fit into this category…?  Objects with legs?  Those with arms?  Objects that are tall?  That are flat?  That have moving pieces? Those with switches?  Those you can easily pick up?  That would fit in a coat pocket?

What objects in this room would roll?  What objects would sink in water?  What objects would probably break if you dropped them?     

Pick two objects in this room.  How are these two objects alike?  How are they different?

Pick an object in this room.  What other objects in the room are similar to this one?  How are they similar?

How is this waiting room like your living room?  Your bedroom?  Your classroom?  How are they different?

If every chair was occupied, how many people would be sitting in this room?

Can you find any patterns in this room?

CLIP BOARD ACTIVITIES To Draw, Write, Figure Out…

What if this waiting room were on another planet?  Draw a picture of how an alien patient might look.  Draw a picture of the alien doctor.

Draw a map of this room.  Make a key for your map.

What might you make out of this shape?  (Draw a shape like a circle, square, any closed shape in the very center of a sheet of paper.  The shape should be approximately an inch in diameter.  Tell your child he can add anything he wants in order to turn the shape into something interesting.  Encourage him to add details to his drawing.)

Design a get-well card you might give to a patient.

Draw a picture that would look good on a wall in this waiting room.

Draw a design with a pattern that would make great wallpaper for this room.

Make a pattern of shapes that you see in this room.

Draw a picture of a grumpy patient.  A happy patient.  A scared patient.  Put details in your picture.

What if a patient came in with a swollen thumb or foot or ear or nose?  Draw a picture of how the patient might look.

Pick an object that you can see.   What if it started to grow bigger and bigger?  Draw a picture of how it would look in this room.  Put yourself in the drawing.

MAGAZINE PICTURES To Explore…

Select a magazine in the waiting room.  (Women’s magazines such as “Coastal Living or “Ladies Home Journal” work well for this). 

Find a full-page ad in the magazine.  Ask your child to do a “Letter Search.”  Find all the “A’s” on the page.  The C’s.  And any other letter your child might be learning or have already learned. 

Find a full-page ad and ask your child to do a “Word Search.”  Find all the words on the page that begin with “B.”  Or “D” or any other letter.

Find a full page picture.  Ask your child to find all of the things in the picture that are alive.  Or, that make noise.  Or that roll.  That are small enough to carry.  Any other categories.

Find a picture with people in it.  What if you were to step into this picture.

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