Rhyming Prompt: December 5
I had so much fun sharing food yesterday
But now I’ve been thinking of where people stay.
There are so many out there with nowhere to sleep
And sometimes I feel like I could just weep.
The best way to help those less lucky than we
Is to give them a place to live well and be free.
Let’s practice this kindness while having a snack;
With cookies & icing we can make a sweet shack.
A marshmallow snowman with nowhere to go
Will like to take shelter when winds start to blow.
Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word document.
An image of the December 5 prompt printed on cream cardstock with a green border. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree. There is a yellow wax seal in the corner, with the imprint of a frog highlighted in silver.
Other Materials:
Meringue Powder
Powdered sugar
Graham crackers (I like honey maid for this because they don’t contain palm oil)
Candy for decorating, if you’d like
Marshmallows
Toothpicks or skewers
A serrated knife
Suggested Pose:
We have a pen and ink drawing of a house, and Frantz has gotten a taste for climbing.
Frantz the Frog is perched on top of a pen-and-ink drawing of a Victorian house in an elaborate gilt frame. The day’s prompt is sitting lower, in the bottom of the frame.
Activity:
Today we’re helping our kids be tiny activist architects by building homes for unhoused marshmallow snow people! This activity is a bit more hands on than most of the others.
Make the royal icing. The meringue powder should have a recipe on the side, or you might prefer this one. You also might prefer classic royal icing with raw egg whites (or you could used pasteurized egg whites in a carton). This all depends on your preferences/comfort level with raw egg whites.
Make your house! You’ll need to cut your graham crackers into squares and triangles with your serrated knife, and you’ll want six squares and two triangles for each house. This blog has great step-by-step instructions and pictures.
While that dries, make your snowman! You can get very creative with this using whatever you have on hand, but it might be helpful to have this basic tutorial up for guidance.
Rationale:
My kids have a lot of questions about homelessness, which are not always easy to answer. In Eugene, where my children are growing up, we have the highest number of people experiencing homelessness per capita in the U.S., so you would have to work hard to ignore the problem. While the citizens of Eugene are widely divided about how to improve the situation, policy insiders aren’t; it’s more effective and economical to give people experiencing homelessness housing and ongoing support services than it is to criminalize homelessness. If you’ve got the time, the You’re Wrong About podcast has an excellent and accessible deep dive into what we can learn from the cities that have set out to “end homelessness,” why these programs “failed,” and how we should re-evaluate our societal perspective on the issue entirely.
I might talk to my kids about homelessness during this activity, but I also might just let the seed germinate. The snowman is a fun character for my kids, and they should get joy out of building that character a house. Playing with your kids without an agenda might feel like nothing, but it’s extremely important and sometimes hard to accomplish when you yourself are feeling depleted. As Lawrence J. Cohen writes in Playful Parenting, “play serves our incredible—almost bottomless—need for attachment and affection and closeness.” By just playing and creating with our kids, we’re reinforcing our bond with them. That kind of bonding is foundational for empathy; studies have shown, over and over again, that “attachment-security priming led to greater compassion and willingness to help a person in distress; these effects occurred repeatedly, reliably, and in two different societies” (Mikulincer et al., 2005, p. 835). Give yourself permission to keep this exercise light and playful. The next time you’re out with your kids and they ask you about homelessness, you’ll have both your attachment to draw on and the memory of how fun it was to offer shelter to a snowman in need.
Book Recommendation:
Last Stop on Market Street, by Matt de la Peña & Christian Robinson, which you can watch a read-aloud of here. I love the bold geometric illustrations of this picture book and its focus on forming community with the people around you, even if they don’t live the way you do.
The cover of Last Stop on Market Street, by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson.
References
Cohen, L. J. (2002). Playful parenting. Ballantine Books.
Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R., Gillath, O., & Nitzberg, R. A. (2005). Attachment, caregiving, and altruism: Boosting attachment security increases compassion and helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(5), 817-839. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.5.817