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By Mom Unplugged, February 24, 2008 10:01 pm

This week’s Unplugged Project theme was Alphabet/Letters. All the usual ideas seemed, well, usual. Picking up on a hide-and-seek theme proposed by my 5 year-old, I invented an Alphabet Scavenger Hunt.

First we cut 6 and a half sheets of construction paper into fourths making 26 uniformly-sized pieces. Math project anyone?? Then my oldest wrote the alphabet on the remaining half sheet of construction paper. We counted out 13 letters and made a line between the two sections. Each of my two children (5 and 7) was assigned half the alphabet to write, one letter per rectangle.

The children then hid someplace else while I distributed the letters throughout the main living area of our house. I won’t say that I really “hid” them, although some of them were harder to find than others. I wanted this to be part memory game too. I explained to them that they would see a lot of letters while searching and would have to try and remember them so they would be able to find them easily later in the game.

Once everything was hidden, I called the kids back and gave them a letter to find. They searched until someone found it and brought it to me. That child got one point. I used the alphabet list previously written by my oldest to cross off the found letter. This game continued with much raucous laughter and high-speed running around while I cooked dinner in relative peace (all I had to do was assign a letter to find, cross it off, and record points).

The memory-game aspect seemed to work as planned since the children found the letters more and more quickly as we progressed through the game. They loved it!

We will definitely keep these letters and play this again. Give it a try with your kids. The game could be easily adapted for different ages by making the letters harder or easier to find.

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So what did you come up with for Alphabet/Letters? If you joined us this week, please put your link in Mr. Linky. Mr. Linky has been a tad unreliable lately, so please leave a comment too, that way we will know where to find you if I have to delete him. I look forward to seeing what else is possible with Alphabet/Letters!

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme is:

Music

You don’t have to compose a symphony. It doesn’t even have to be anything we can hear. Just try and think of something musically-related (however remotely) and go with it. Dance, sing, use some old piano books for a collage. Hey…the letters A through G are even musically-related! See how loose the Unplugged Project is? The key is to just have fun with your kids. Anything goes!

If you are at all interested, please feel free to jump in and join our project next week. As they say, the more the merrier!

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By Mom Unplugged, March 5, 2007 9:17 am

Today I saw the first spring robin on my way to school with the kids! That sight always fills me with some hope for a warmer future.

As of yesterday, it is a little easier to believe that spring is truly on the way. Yesterday was so warm that the kids had a friend over and played outside most of the afternoon. After being shut indoors for so long, it was refreshing to see them run around, have a “picnic,” and play on the swing set. They also enjoyed all the mud that the snow has left behind. I guess I’ll be doing some laundry today!

It occurs to me as I write this, that this is the type of information that I would have written in a letter in the days when people actually wrote letters. Since the theme of this blog is essentially “high-tech” vs. “low-tech,” it makes me realize that a blog actually seems to be a “high-tech” way of delivering “low-tech” (in most cases) information.

Perhaps we all miss the days of seeing a familiar envelope in our mailbox and knowing that it brought very ordinary news from dear friends or family. There was comfort in that connection, a sense of belonging. Do I experience that same thrill of pleasure and surprise when I open an email from a friend? No. Would I email my friends to tell them about the robin I saw this morning? No. Would I have described that experience in a letter? Yes.

Perhaps our desire to connect with others in this fashion is a yearning for a return to simpler times.