December 24: Penguin Habitat

Rhyming Prompt: December 24

I’ve loved staying here in your nice cozy home

But something I’ve noticed, whenever I roam,

Is that some creatures aren’t quite as lucky as this

And their habitats sometimes have gone quite amiss.

Let’s work together to fix up this scene

I know I’ll feel better when everything’s clean.

Download the prompts for December 21-24 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document. You may have already printed these—I’m just reposting for convenience. I also wanted to post the next set of prompts extra early, just in case you’d like to plan ahead. Here they are for December 25-28 as a PDF and here as a Microsoft Word Document.

A closeup image of the prompt for December 24, nestled in a lit Christmas tree. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a gold wax seal of a frog.

Other Materials:

• Today I’ll be giving my kids this Toob of Penguins, but you could use any figures of animals that can get greasy.

• Vegetable oil

• Dish soap

• Blue food coloring (optional)

• Spoons

• Cotton balls and/or white pompoms, q-tips, pipe cleaners, whatever you have on hand

• A tray/bowl/tub that can get messy

Suggested Pose:

I’ve set Frantz out with all the materials for the day. The visual display will help them buy into the activity before it begins.

Frantz is sitting in our play tray. He’s surrounded by all our supplies—q-tips, cotton rounds, pompoms, pipe cleaners, vegetable oil and pitchers, detergent, a spoon, blue food coloring, and an array of small penguins. The prompt for the day is on his lap.

Activity:

This is an extremely streamlined version of much more elaborate STEM activities for older grades, which here becomes part sensory bin, part STEM lesson, and part messy play.

• Fill your pan with enough water to cover the bottom. You might want to add blue food coloring, because it will make it easier to distinguish between the water and the oil.

• Add your penguins or other marine creatures, and let them frolic and play for a bit.

• Have your kids add in about 1/4 of vegetable oil, and see how it spreads everywhere.

• Task your kids with cleaning up the oil spill, so your creatures can have their nice clean habitat again. Let them use cotton balls, pompoms, spoons to dip the oil out, and whatever else they can think of.

• Set up a washing station where they can use detergent and sponges or rags to wash their penguins clean.

• Bonus: Have them clean up the mess of this activity when they’re done.

Rationale:

Let me start by saying that if you are thinking “No way will I do anything this messy on Christmas Eve,” let me take a moment to assure you that I am not a masochist. The reason I saved this activity for today is that it has previously bought me a solid three hours of productive, nearly uninterrupted work time. In my house that’s basically a reason to call the Vatican. My kids get so lost in that activity that I might actually be able to wrap some of their presents while they’re awake. If you can use some extra time today, this might be your ticket.

This will mostly just be chaotically fun messy play in this version, but it sets us up well for thinking about environmental empathy again. Even in this simplistic of a version, the kids can see how challenging it is to set things right once they’ve been adversely impacted, and that should help them ascertain the importance of preserving what we have. Your kids should feel great when they eventually restore the penguins’ habitat, especially once they see how challenging it is. If you’d like to make this activity more challenging for older kids, National Geographic has a wealth of resources.

Book Recommendation:

The obvious choice for today is Oil Spill! by Melvyn Berger and Paul Mirocha. It’s about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but it goes through the science of what leads up to an oil spill and what happens during cleanup. However, while this book is great, I find it to be a bit of a downer for this activity—I want to talk about cleanup today, and not about marine mammal deaths. If you are made of stronger stuff than me, you can watch a read aloud here. Instead, I’ll be taking the coward’s way out and reading a family favorite, Tacky the Penguin by Helen Lester and Lynn Munsinger. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of Tacky the Penguin, by Helen Lester and Lynn Munsinger.

December 23: Cup of Kindness

Rhyming Prompt: December 23

The cocoa is sweeter when filled with marshmallows

Let’s add some and fill the cups of our fellows.

On each of these mugs write the name of someone

In your life who you love, it’ll be fun!

Then on each little marshmallow write something kind

I don’t need to tell you it’ll make them feel fine!

Download the prompts for December 21-24 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document. You may have already printed these—I’m just reposting for convenience. I also wanted to post the next set of prompts extra early, just in case you’d like to plan ahead. Here they are for December 25-28 as a PDF and here as a Microsoft Word Document.

A closeup image of the prompt for December 23, nestled in a lit Christmas tree. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a gold wax seal of a frog.

Other Materials:

You might be creative, but if you are less-than-artistically inclined, I’ve created this print-out of a cup and marshmallows. You’ll also want to have some cocoa, mugs, and marshmallows on hand for fun.

Suggested Pose:

I took this opportunity to make myself a truly decadent mug of hot cocoa and I recommend doing the same. Then, if you still have the energy, you can make a mug for your child, too!

Frantz is sitting quite indelicately in a festive mug. A matching mug beside him is filled with hot chocolate, and the day’s prompt and printout rest in front of him.

Activity:

1. Print out the cup of kindness template or draw one of your own. If you have older kids, they might have fun cutting out the pieces themselves. Each page has one mug and three marshmallows.

2. Help your kids brainstorm people they would like to say kind things about, and fill in the line on the mug with the name.

3. Then, on each marshmallow, write one kind thing about that person. It might help to suggest specific prompts, which could include:

   • The word that bests describes you:

   • You make me laugh when you:

   • You are really great at:

   • My favorite memory with you is:

4. You might glue the mug and the marshmallows to a card, string them on a garland, laminate them and turn them into Christmas ornaments, or just glue them to some construction paper. You could even cut a hole in the top of the mug and turn it into a game, with dropping in the marshmallows. Whatever your finished product looks like is up to you, the benefit is in having your kids appreciate others.

5. Have some cocoa to celebrate this love-fest.

Rationale:

This calls back to our earlier discussion of compliments and their power, but it also draws on the idea that gratitude can improve our own personal sense of well-being. This exercise helps your kids remember to show appreciation for kindness, gives them an opportunity to appreciate all of the good people in their lives, and invites them to strengthen those relationships even further. Plus, marshmallows! I rarely need more rationale than that.

Book Recommendation:

Since we’re drinking hot chocolate, it seems like a perfect occasion to read Grandpa Cacao by Elizabeth Zunon. This story describes a young girl baking a cake with her father while learning the story of her family’s history with cacao farming. It’s a great way to learn more about where our food comes from, and a chance to think about the people who make it. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of Grandpa Cacao, by Elizabeth Zunon.

December 22: Empathy Scenarios

Rhyming Prompt: December 22

All the world’s a stage!

So let’s take a page

From theatrical types and act out a scene.

Imagine what you’d do if someone were mean

To a friend you adore, for no reason at all.

Would you comfort your friend in the wake of the brawl?

What would you do to stand up to the hater?

By imagining now what you might do later

You’ll know the right move if the moment arrives

To help everyone best get on with their lives.

Download the prompts for December 21-24 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document. You may have already printed these—I’m just reposting for convenience.

A close-up of the December 22 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a green wax impression of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

You may want to have some empathy scenarios on hand for this one, although I’ve built one into the prompt. I love the Eeboo I Heard Your Feelings Cards, and I’ll be using those. Teaching in Room 6 also has a great exercise on this, and a helpful printout with a variety of empathy-building scenarios.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is being a real ham! He’s monologuing on a windowsill stage before a rapt audience of plush pals.

Frantz is sitting on a windowsill with the curtains drawn like, well, curtains (but the kind in a theater). He has an audience of several stuffed animals watching his performance. The December 22 prompt is on his lap.

Activity:

With your child, act out or simply talk through a variety of hypothetical scenarios.

Rationale:

This is a chance to help your child think through the most empathetic way to respond to specific, plausible scenarios without the pressure of having to do it in real time. The preparation makes it much more likely that your child will be prepared to handle these situations effectively when they arise.

Book Recommendation:

I really like Silly Goose’s Big Story by Keiko Kasza for this. It involves imaginative play and figuring out creative ways to stand up for our friends. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of Silly Goose’s Big Story by Keiko Kasza.

December 21: Active Listening

Rhyming Prompt: December 21

How are you doing, my dearest friend?

Every once in a while, I like to spend

Some time checking in, and listening, too.

It feels awfully good when friends listen to you.

Why don’t you ask someone how they are today?

Then be sure to respond to whatever they say.

Download the prompts for December 21-24 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document.

A close-up of the December 21 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a green wax impression of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

None needed.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is posed with a friend, and they are having a conversation and listening to each other.

Frantz is sitting on a bookshelf beside a frog friend. They’re having a conversation and he is listening. The prompt is on their laps.

Activity:

Invite your child to ask someone how they are doing. This could be you, anyone who lives in your house, or anyone else they want to call.

Rationale:

So many of the questions we ask each other are simply phatic—we’re asking them because it’s an expected social interaction, and not because we actually want an answer. This activity is meant to disrupt that rote element of socialization and encourage our children to really listen to other people.

Book Recommendation:

I really like Quiet Please, Owen McPhee by Trudy Ludwig and Patrice Barton for this. It’s about a boy who talks so much that he often forgets to listen, but when he gets laryngitis, he gets a chance to see how important listening skills can be. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of Quiet Please, Owen McPhee by Trudy Ludwig and Patrice Barton.

December 20: Drawing Difference

Rhyming Prompt: December 20

In all of our reading I’ve noticed a trend;

The characters drawn are all differently penned.

When I look quite closely at people in books

I notice that humans don’t have all the same looks.

Let’s go read a book that celebrates

The ways we are different—I value the traits

That make us unique, and the ways we’re the same.

We can draw our own pictures; it’ll be a fun game.

Download the  prompts for December 17-20 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up image of the December 20 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a gold wax impression of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Crayons in realistic skin tones, paper, and at least one age-appropriate book with protagonists who are not white, heteronormative, cisgender, able-bodied, etc. Race/sexuality/gender identity or expression/disability does not need to be the theme of the story.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is sitting on a pile of art books. I thought that for this activity, it could be fun to see how various artists have handled representation.

Frantz is sitting on top of a pile of art books holding the prompt for the day.

Activity:

Read the book with your child. As you read it, ask them questions about the characters. I find this short video from Jemar Tisby to offer some great examples for how to use the lens of fiction to frame early conversations about race and identity with children. Once you’ve read the story, have your children practice drawing the book’s characters.

Rationale:

This is designed to build on yesterday’s activity, where we began chatting about intersecting axes of identity. Today, you’ll want to chat a bit with your kids about race, using the frame of the story to do so. You have likely had these conversations already, but I find this guide from PBS to be a helpful resource. If you’re hoping to get into some more detailed conversations about race and racial justice, this list from the Center for Racial Justice in Education has a wealth of resources. And, if you’re just fully overwhelmed by this topic and don’t know where to start, this guide from Parents tells you exactly how to begin to approach the issue depending on your child’s age.

My family is fish-belly white, and we live in an extremely homogenous region, so my main goal today is to continue the process of helping my children realize that people have a wide array of appearances. For so much of my lifetime, whiteness has been invisible because it has been coded as the norm. The hope is that as white people like me become increasingly aware that our culture is a racial construct that has been used to other BIPOC, we will stop assuming we get to set culture’s terms. My family reads a lot of books starring diverse characters, but I’m hoping that by drawing those characters, my kids will be better equipped not to think of whiteness as a neutral default. My kids’ art is currently quite abstract, so I don’t anticipate their drawings will resemble the art on the page, but the benefit is in the practice.

Book Recommendation:

Oh, so many! My family’s favorite is We’re Different, We’re the Same by Bobbi Kates and Joe Mathieu for its simplicity. I also love Malcolm Little by Ilyasah Shabazz and Ag Ford for slightly older picture-book readers. I love this entire list from Embrace Race on great picture books for 2020, too.

An image of the cover of We’re Different, We’re the Same by Bobbi Kates and Joe Mathieu.

December 19: Identity Artifacts Museum

Rhyming Prompt: December 19

Lots of things shape someone’s identity.

Where I’m from, who I love, and my family

All add to the picture I have of my being,

And sharing these things can really be freeing.

Let’s make a museum of what makes us us

And since it’s the holidays, we could discuss

The traditions our loved ones enjoy this season

There has to be more than just being freezin’!

Let’s make something cool that represents you

Then we’ll put it out where it’s easy to view!

Download the  prompts for December 17-20 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up picture of the December 19 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a small gold wax impression of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Clay and/or other crafting supplies, like coloring equipment, paper, and recycled materials.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is posed like a museum display himself, here. We have every small moderately artistic object in our house located up high on our bookshelves so tiny toddler hands don’t mistake them for toys. I’ve lumped them all together on the mantle to create a gallery effect for this prompt.

Frantz is sitting among other objet d’art, as though he, himself, is in a museum. These objet include a small bronze statue of a minimalist female body with wings reading a book, a carved granite bison, and some folk art carved wooden birds.

Activity:

This exercise is very slightly adapted from Teaching Tolerance’s “Identity Artifacts Museum” lesson plan.

The first step of this exercise is deciding where you want to go with it. You could a) talk about holiday traditions, or b) go more in-depth into social identifiers/identity descriptors/intersectionality.

If you choose a), chat with your child about all of their family traditions. At Christmas, my husband’s family always had poppers and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas. My family always read The Night Before Christmas and made a bigger deal out of stockings than presents. Now, those traditions have been passed down to the kids, and we’ve added some new ones of our own. We’ll talk about all the traditions and where they came from, then create an “artifact” that represents how the holidays feel in our family.

If you choose b), you’ll help your child think through all of the things that make them them. You can start with the easy intimate things: Lucy is Lucy because she loves giraffes and she could eat her weight at every meal; Clementine is Clementine because she adores spooky things and she wants to fly with all her heart, etc. Once you move through those things, you might suggest the following axes of identity:

• Ability/disability

• Culture

• Family structure

• Gender

• Language

• National origin

• Race

• Religion

• Socioeconomic status/class

Brainstorm all the aspects of your child’s identity, and your own, and then model how you might represent the most important aspects of your identities through art. Family is really important to me, so I might try to draw my entire family, as many generations back as I am able. I might model a book out of clay, since books are basically my religion. What makes it into the physical representation doesn’t matter as much as the conversation that leads to the craft.

Rationale:

This is a gentle way to introduce your kids to the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, which is meant to function as “a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.” You can watch Crenshaw’s powerful 2016 TED talk on the subject here. By chatting about how we construct our identities, and how social groups and legal structures sometimes construct them for us, we can help our kids disrupt patterns of bias and violence. As Crenshaw notes at the end of her talk, “if we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem.”

Book Recommendation:

There is no day this month that has a more perfect book recommendation: Mabel and Sam at Home by Linda Urban and Hadley Hooper. This book revolves around siblings who have just moved to a new house. As their parents unpack, they make sense of their environment through imaginative play. At one point in particular, they examine the uncanny way the furniture of their childhood feels both familiar and alien in a new environment by turning their living room into a museum filled with the artifacts of their lives. Whenever we read this book, my kids let their imaginations take the reins after. It is a gem. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of Mabel and Sam at Home, by Linda Urban and Hadley Hooper.

December 18: Plan the Day

Rhyming Prompt: December 18

One thing I love doing is planning surprises

As I’ve done for you. It emphasizes

How well I know you, and what you’ll enjoy—

If I didn’t know that these rhymes might annoy!

I think you should try it for one you adore.

They’ll be so grateful! And what is more

You’ll have the pleasure of seeing their smile

When you show them some fun in your own special style.

Download the  prompts for December 17-20 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up image of the December 18 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and nestled in a lit Christmas tree. There is a gold wax seal of a frog in the lower righthand corner.

Other Materials:

TBD, it depends on what your child chooses for the activity!

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is perched on a tower of large fort-building blocks, as if to suggest one particularly easy activity to plan for a sibling.

My pose is quite self-serving today. I have Frantz perched on the fort-building blocks in an effort to steer my older daughter in that general direction.

Activity:

Work with your child to plan a fun activity for someone else. This might be a sibling, someone else who lives in your house, a pet, or even the frog himself. I’ll have both of my kids plan and implement a fun activity for each other. If I had to guess, Clementine (4) will want to build a fort filled with board books for Lucy (age 2) and Lucy will want to set up a tea party for Clementine. It should be pretty cute.

Rationale:

This is all about perspective-taking. In order to pull this off, your child will need to carefully consider what someone else would enjoy.

Book Recommendation:

This is an odd choice, because it’s a picture book about Ramadan, but bear with me. Lailah’s Lunchbox, by Reem Faruqi and Lea Lyon, is a lovely book about a young girl fasting for Ramadan for the first time. The reason I like it for this activity is because it gestures toward the ways in which acts of kindness need to be specifically tailored for different recipients. Because Lailah is fasting, she comes to school without lunch, and she is initially reluctant to tell anyone why. Her classmates and teacher offer her beautiful and tempting food, which is objectively kind, but of course because Lailah is trying to fast, it is contextually unhelpful. Once Lailah reveals her reason for fasting she is allowed to enjoy the lunch hour in the library so she won’t be tempted, and the class is excited to learn about her culture. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of Lailah’s Lunchbox: A Ramadan Story by Reem Faruqi and Lea Lyon.

December 17: Love in the Mail (Part II)

Rhyming Prompt: December 17

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night

*Nor pandemic sickness nor other blight*

Stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Their work this year has known no bounds.

They’ve brought us packages big and small,

And I for one have loved them all.

Let’s say thank you to the delivery crew

Who have brought the stuff that’s seen us through.

Download the prompts for December 17-20 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document.

An image of the prompt for the day. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a gold wax imprint of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Whatever you’d like to thank your postal worker/delivery person. For us, this will be a card and a clearly labeled basket of packaged snacks we will put out for all of our delivery people (granola bars, and a few other snack packages and some canned seltzers). USPS employees are allowed to accept gifts worth less than $20, but not cash or anything that can be converted into cash, like a check or gift card.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz the Frog is dangling from a bannister, surrounded by holiday cards that are pinned onto a festive ribbon garland. The daily prompt is balanced on his shoulder.

Frantz is hanging out with our bannister of holiday cards. They’re such a nice reminder of all the joy our letter carrier has brought us this year!

Activity:

Work with your kids to find a way to thank your delivery crew. This can either be with snacks, with cards or drawings, or just with waving. Anything to let them know you appreciate them.

Rationale:

An image of a Tweet from @123SaySpieeeze that reads “There’s really only 2 types of days in quarantine: days packages come and days packages don’t come. I found this meme through the great Laurie Rogers.

This one is just about noticing hard, often thankless work. I imagine this year has been really hard for delivery people. If you are part of the USPS, you likely spent much of the year worrying about your job security, even while working extra long hours during a pandemic.

Book Recommendation:

We’ve talked about other gratitude books here before, but today I want to recommend The Thank You Book by Mary Lyn Ray and Stephanie Graegin. You can watch a read aloud here. I also love the Ezra Jack Keats A Letter to Amy about just how special the mail is (and how challenging it can be to deliver it). You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of The Thank You Book by Mary Lyn Ray and Stephanie Graegin.

December 16: Portrait of Your Generous Self

Rhyming Prompt: December 16

Since I arrived we’ve done many good deeds,

We’ve listened, and learned, and tried to fill needs,

But one thing I’ve learned now that I know your heart

Is that you’ve had a generous soul from the start.

I’ve given you prompts to do many nice things,

And we’ve recognized all the joy kindness brings,

But more important than that is just knowing yourself.

Why don’t you go get coloring things from the shelf?

Then draw a self-portrait of you as a being,

Your generous self, whom I have been seeing.

Download the prompts for December 13-16 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up image of the December 16 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a green wax imprint of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Crayons, markers, or paints and paper. I’ll be breaking out these Crayola multicultural crayons today.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is showing off his art skills! He has drawn his own self-portrait, and it waiting with supplies for the kids to draw their own.

Frantz is sitting on our coloring table beside his own self-portrait. The prompt and the box of “colors of the world” crayons are beside him.

Activity:

Have your kids draw their own self-portraits. It might be fun for them to use a mirror for this exercise, but it’s not necessary, since you want them to focus on how they feel as a person more than how they look. It does not matter if the picture looks like them at all, in fact. It only matters that the picture represents their best, most empathetic self.

Rationale:

In the Introduction of Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. famously opined that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (1966, v). It’s a book about pretending to be a Nazi during WWII and how that pretense can curdle your insides. Vonnegut tweaks the adage of actions speaking louder than words; for him, actions speak louder than self-image. He writes: “If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides” (1966, vii). As Vonnegut insinuates, those insides that are secretly virtuous won’t save any lives, and they certainly won’t change how you’re remembered. You are your actions, whether you see it that way or not.

For the last two weeks, we have been helping our children perform empathy, and now we want to use Vonnegut’s observation to help them realize that those actions define their character. They have comforted a sad “friend,” they have donated to people and animals who need assistance, they have given up beloved snacks to preserve an environment that is so essential for animals and people alike, and they have practiced inhabiting another’s shoes. We want them to internalize the idea that they have been living empathetically, and therefore they are empathetic people. The hope is to encourage them to continue to practice empathy even after the frog has left, simply because it is part of who they see themselves to be. If empathy is part of their self-identity, they won’t just be the type of people who volunteer at a soup kitchen for Thanksgiving; they’ll be the people who support their community at all times.

Book Recommendation:

The book I am Human, by Susan Verde and Peter H. Reynolds, pairs very well with this exercise, partially because it is about seeing empathy as part of our humanity. You can watch a read aloud of the book here. If you have older kids, today might be a great day to consider It Began With a Page: How Gyo Fujikawa Drew the Way, by Kyo Maclear & Julie Morstad. This picture book is exquisitely beautiful and is about Japanese internment, the importance of representation, and how to help others see you as you see yourself through artistic expression. You can watch a very kind teacher read the book to her students here.

The cover of It Began With a Page, by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad.

December 15: Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Rhyming Prompt: December 15

I woke up feeling a little bit blue,

Just down in the dumps. I don’t have a clue

How I can snap out of this terrible mood.

But I’ve noticed that you are really quite shrewd.

Do you have any tips for how to feel better?

I’m usually happy; a real go-getter,

While everyone feels sad once in a while,

I think that I’m finally ready to smile.

Download the prompts for December 13-16 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up image of the December 15 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border and a purple wax seal of a frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

I truly love these Eeboo “I heard your feelings” conversation cards, as do my kids, but they aren’t necessary.

One of the cards. A bear is sitting on a rock looking dejected, while a concerned rabbit approaches from behind.

The back of the card asks some questions about the illustrated scenario. How is Bear feeling? How does Rabbit know? What could Rabbit say to Bear? Should Rabbit leave Bear alone? How will Rabbit know? I find these prompts immensely helpful, and we try to run through a couple every morning that we have school activities.

An image of a forlorn Frantz. He is tucked into a wooden toy crib with a pink and purple baby quilt. The prompt is on his torso, and The Rabbit Listened is on the floor beside him, along with the box of I Heard Your Feelings cards.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz feels like he really needs to stay in bed today (and that’s ok!). He’s all tucked in, and he has some books and emotional intelligence tools nearby to help his friends support him.

Activity:

Have a chat about how to cheer your Festive Frog. If your child feels silly comforting a plush toy, that’s OK, too—just have a conversation about how they might comfort their friends, play-act scenarios, or share a story about a time you successfully comforted a loved one. We’ll run through several scenarios for how to effectively comfort people at the breakfast table using both personal stories and the I Heard Your Feelings Cards.

Rationale:

The vast majority of people respond to other people’s sadness with empathy. That is why sadness in other people can make us feel personally uncomfortable; we may be at a loss for what to say, or how to act, because we can all-too-easily imagine the grief and sadness the people around us feel. Children also feel empathy for those experiencing sadness, but while adults know that it’s important to push through our own personal discomfort to extend condolences to a grieving friend, or check in on our relative with depression if they withdraw, our children may not yet have the emotional and social savvy to do so. Some theorists have surmised that children’s still-developing self-awareness can interfere in scenarios that demand comforting behaviors, making it more challenging for children to distinguish their friend’s fraught emotional condition from their own (Hoffman, 2000, 2007; Kagan, 1981; Moore, 2007). Regardless the reason, in the vast majority of studies, children do not respond prosocially to their friends’ sadness, and instead become distressed themselves. As Nichols et al. note in their consideration of children’s reactions to other people’s distress:

Experiencing a peer in distress may be especially likely to generate contagious distress in toddlers if only because another child’s crying is so like their own. Thus, the social understanding demands may be uniquely challenging for mounting prosocial responses to a distressed peer. Indeed, in naturalistic studies prosocial responding to peers’ distress is quite rare. For example, one study found that toddlers in a daycare setting responded prosocially to their upset peers only about 3% of the time (Lamb & Zakhireh, 1997) while more than a third of the children became distressed themselves instead. In the more familiar home context prosocial behavior was slightly more frequent when toddlers played in dyads; between 12% and 37% of 12- to 30-month old children comforted, helped, or shared at least once when the peer was distressed. At the same time, however, up to 40% of children further provoked the peer and increased the distress (Demetriou & Hay, 2004). (Nichols et al., 2009, p. 5)

While this reaction improved with age, it did so incrementally. In other words, children experience an empathetic response to the distress of the people around them, but that response rarely translates into supportive helping behavior.

This data supports my own anecdotal experience; as a kid, I found that my sadness made people uncomfortable, but not particularly kind. I had Complex Regional Pain Syndrome as a child and adolescent, which is poorly understood even now, and was a veritable mystery then. The treatments were fairly medieval (Epidurals! Hallucinogenic drugs! Pain exposure therapy!) and the symptoms were odd and inconsistent. Sometimes my legs would be ghost-pale and ice cold, sometimes I wouldn’t be able to move them at all, sometimes I had to use mobility aids, and I was almost always in a great deal of pain. I missed huge stretches of school, birthday parties, field trips, organized sports, and other social activities. When I did make it to school, I had inexplicable ailments that my peers struggled to understand and I failed to adequately explain. Why was my leg jerking involuntarily when it had never done that before? Why was I crying in pain when I looked uninjured? Why had I been missing for four months? Why did I seem fine one day and at death’s door the next? My peers had invasive questions and I, like my doctors, had few answers. My peers did something completely natural that was nevertheless devastating: they withdrew almost entirely. The people who stuck around often said the wrong thing, but I loved them just because they tried. Of course they were uncomfortable with my sickness and sadness and confusion, but their relentless willingness to be in my life at all was a remarkable salve.

Some experts suggest that the best way to help kids translate their natural empathetic response to witnessing sadness into helpful action is to encourage them become comfortable with discomfort. I’m inclined to agree. Clinical psychologist John Duffy notes that we can help children comfort people by:

1. Running through hypothetical scenarios to practice tough interactions,

2. Emphasizing how important it is to simply be available,

3. Discussing how we might respond to other people’s spoken and unspoken social cues,

4. Clarifying that an awkward attempt at support is better than no support at all.

He notes that “It’s even OK to say 'I'm really sorry. I don't know what to say.’” What matters is letting people know you’re there for them, even if it feels inadequate.

By having our children comfort the frogs, we are giving them an opportunity to practice appropriate social responses to sadness. The next time our children need to comfort a friend, perhaps on the playground or at school, they probably won’t be able to consult us before they either act or decide to walk away. If we’re lucky, they may remember the scenarios we discuss today. We get to play, practice, and model all at once.

Book Recommendation:

Today’s recommendation is The Rabbit Listened, by Cori Doerrfeld. We first encountered this book because of the inimitable Dolly Parton, and it’s been in heavy rotation ever since. I love its minimalist illustrations and its emphasis on persistence and availability. You can watch the author read it aloud here.

The cover of The Rabbit Listened, by Cori Doerrfeld

References

Hoffman, M.L. (2000). Empathy and moral development. Cambridge University Press.

Hoffman, M. L. (2007). The origins of empathic morality in toddlerhood. In C.A. Brownell & C. B. Kopp (Eds.), Socioemotional development in the toddler years: Transitions and transformations (pp.132-145). Guilford Press.

Kagan, J. (1981). The second year: Emergence of self-awareness. Harvard University Press.

Moore, C. (2007). Understanding self and others in the second year. In C.A. Brownell & C. B. Kopp (Eds.), Socioemotional development in the toddler years: Transitions and transformations (pp.43-65). Guilford Press.

Nichols., S. R., Svetlova, M., & Brownell, C. A. (2009). The role of social understanding and empathic disposition in young children’s responsiveness to distress in parents and peers. Cognition, Brain, Behavior, 13(4), 449–478. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359013/

December 14: Love in the Mail

Rhyming Prompt: December 14: Love in the Mail

My family lives far away from this place,

And sometimes I wish that wasn’t the case.

I think I shall write them a letter today

To tell them I miss them while I am away.

Do you have some people you’ve been thinking of

Who might want a card that shows them some love?

Perhaps we could write them together and say

We really do wish they were with us today.

Download the prompts for December 13-16 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A picture of the prompt for December 14. It is printed on cream colored cardstock with a green border, and it is nestled in a lit Christmas tree. It has a purple wax seal on it with an impression of a frog.

Other Materials:

Whatever you want to have around for making cards. We’ll have stickers, cardstock, watercolors, and crayons.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz has a store-bought card, which is not nearly as fun as a card that is homemade! He is holding a fountain pen and preparing to write something in verse, which I strongly advise against in letters. No one likes an unsolicited poem.

Frantz is sitting on my desk, holding a red pen, and preparing to write in a greeting card with an image of a dog on the front. The December 14 prompt is sitting in front of the card.

Activity:

Help your child make and mail a card for someone they won’t be able to see in person this holiday season.

Rationale:

While it is obvious that empathy is an essential ingredient of strong relationships, it may be less so that strong relationships are needed to build empathy. When we have people we care about and stay connected to, we are more likely to relate to their point-of-view and understand why it’s worth attempting to do so. As Frans de Waal notes in his book on the subject, apes are much more likely to exhibit empathetic behaviors with those with whom they are bonded. I have spent a lot of time this year texting, Zooming, and chatting on the phone with the people in my life, but it has been much more difficult for my kids, who have spent the last several months almost entirely isolated. They hate Zoom. They can’t be trusted to give enough space to make socially distanced playdates viable. We are currently homeschooling them, since they are not yet of public school age, and my husband and I are lucky enough to be able to work remotely. Mail has been an essential tool for the kids this year—a way to remember their friends and attempt to strengthen those bonds—despite all the distance. And that, too, is a way to build empathy.

Book Recommendation:

Today’s book is an absolute romp and one of my favorites from childhood: The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters, by Janet & Allan Ahlberg. Our favorite fairy-tale figures mail each other letters and model the intricacies of their relationships. If you celebrate Christmas, there is a Christmas version, too! My kids love both, and I hope you do, too.

An image of the cover of The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters by Janet & Allan Ahlberg.

December 13: Bring a Story to Life

Rhyming Prompt: December 13

The thing about books is that they come to life.

The stories I pick out tend to be rife

With villains and heroes, and magic and wonder,

With friends to be made, or with treasure to plunder.

The words on the page are important, it’s true,

And so are the pictures that somebody drew,

But the rest of the alchemy comes from my mind!

The book and my brain, when they are combined,

Create a whole world that is detailed and rich

And somehow it comes off with nary a hitch.

Let’s read a story, and then act it out

It’ll be a fun game, without a doubt.

Download the prompts for December 13-16 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A picture of the prompt for December 13. It is printed on cream colored cardstock with a green border, and it is nestled in a lit Christmas tree. It has a red wax seal on it with an impression of a frog, but that is not particularly visible, because it has not been highlighted (gasp)!

Other Materials:

A book of your child’s choice.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is reading again. It’s almost the end of the year, and he’s really anxious that he won’t make his Goodreads Reading Challenge goal.

Frantz is sitting on a plush elephant chair, perched atop an open copy of the Beatrix Potter Treasury, with the daily prompt tucked under his arm. He is in front of a plain pine bookcase filled with children’s books.

Activity:

With your child, choose a favorite book (or two). Read the story. Then find costumes, set the stage, and act out the narrative. Let your child take the lead as much as possible, and play along with gusto.

Rationale:

The goal of this exercise, again, is perspective-taking and developing an emotional vocabulary. By personifying the characters of a favorite book, your child will have the opportunity to practice perceiving the world from another’s vantage. It is important that you let your child choose the story they would like to act out today, but ideally, either today or another day soon, you will also encourage them to try this exercise when reading books by and about characters who live lives and inhabit bodies that are unlike your child’s own.

The importance of adopting alternative perspectives in the safe, manageable dimensions of make-believe is perhaps best exemplified by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In her extremely famous TED talk from 2011, Adichie discusses “The Danger of a Single Story.” Adichie’s point, or one of them, is that if you only encounter oversimplified narratives of how other people live, then you may be capable of pitying them, or fearing them, or envying them—but not of empathizing with them. She contends that by reading diverse stories, where people from historically underrepresented populations share their perspectives, we can engage in the much more complicated task of connecting with people unlike ourselves as “human equals.” Adichie admits: “If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.” If we only learn of Africa from colonizers and missionaries, or of women from men, or of history from the victors, our worldview will be both narrow and exclusionary.

Adichie is right—diverse stories matter and they cultivate our capacity for perspective taking—but her brilliant commentary on empathy makes her recent comments about the trans community all the more baffling and infuriating. In 2017, Adichie gave an interview in which she answered a question about whether a transgender woman was “any less of a real woman,” by responding that “trans women are trans women.” She elaborates that because trans women “switched gender,” they have enjoyed male privilege and therefore have not shared the same experiences as women. These comments were quickly decried by the international trans community and were seen not just as a rallying cry for TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), but as a particularly devastating blow for the Nigerian LGBTQIA2S+ community where homosexuality can still be punishable by death. Instead of apologizing for the uproar, or elaborating on her position, Adichie dismissed it as “trans-noise,” withdrew her support for trans writers’ books, and doubled down. In a 2020 interview, she defended J. K. Rowling’s essay on sex and gender, which has also been widely critiqued by the trans community, calling the position “perfectly reasonable.” So what happened here? How can someone who builds a career by saying exceptionally eloquent and true things about empathy—about amplifying marginalized voices and relating to what they have to say—be so unwilling to acknowledge the trans community’s perspective? And, importantly, how can we avoid making the same mistakes or replicating this kind of bigotry in our children?

My answer, perhaps irrationally, is to take Adichie’s advice, despite her shortcomings. I still believe that reading broadly and diversely can help us acknowledge other people’s perspectives and empathize with viewpoints unlike our own. I can speculate that in the aftermath of Adichie’s initial 2017 interview, her desire to relate to famous feminists like Rowling occluded her capacity to empathize with people like non-binary trans Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi, whose career she reportedly attempted to sabotage. Recent scholarship investigating “empathy bias”—an inclination to relate with our own social group compared to other groups—indicates that high levels of empathy for members of our own group can decrease the empathy we feel for “outsiders.” A study, which considered how Americans regard people from the Middle East, Hungarians regard Muslim refugees, and Greeks regard Germans, suggested that “When one group of people feels a decreased sense of empathy for another group, and a high sense of empathy for their own, it implies less motivation to help people from the ‘outside’ group – even when they’re suffering” (Ganguly, 2018). In other words it is not just a dearth of empathy that drives us to behave monstrously; a surfeit of in-group empathy can have the same effect. If Adichie closely identifies with “famous feminist writers who have said and anti-trans things and been thoroughly dragged for them,” then her empathy for figures like Rowling might cause her to further harm the trans community. It may be a case of misplaced empathy, rather than a lack of empathy at all.

It is becoming clear to me that empathy is a pharmakon: a cure when it is both broad and nimble, but a poison when it is unilateral and unbounded by critical thinking skills. And the solution, then, is to help our children be able to relate to as many intersectional identities as we ourselves can envision: to listen to and amplify their stories; to never punch down; and to assume a position of cultural humility in the face of realities we will never fully understand.

Book Recommendation:

Your child should choose the book today, but since we’re chatting about Adichie, I want to recommend three books I’ve been loving lately. The first, Julián is a Mermaid, by Jessica Love, is beautiful and whimsical. You can watch a read aloud here. When Aidan Became a Brother, by Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita, is more explicitly about being trans, handling sex and gender with people who have not yet had the chance to articulate their own, and second chances. You can watch a read aloud here. We also love It Feels Good to be Yourself, by Theresa Thorn and Noah Grigni. You can watch a read aloud here. Also, if you’re looking for some Nigerian authors to read who haven’t been transphobic, you can find a great list here.

A close-up of the cover of When Aidan Became a Brother, by Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita.

References

Bruneau, E. G., Cikara, M., & Saxe, R. (2017). Parocial empathy predicts reduced altruism and the endorsement of passive harm. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 8(8), 934-942. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617693064

December 12: Share the Love (of Reading)

Rhyming Prompt: December 12

I love to read books whenever I’m able

And I wonder if you might just feel the same.

The gifts I love most are stories and fables

Whenever those pages unfurl I exclaim!

Let’s go to your bookshelf and choose one old tome

That you think you’re ready to give away.

Then let’s visit the library near our home

And give someone the gift of a new book today!

Download the prompts for December 9-12 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience). You may also want to download and print the prompts for December 13-16, here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document.

A closeup of the December 12 prompt, printed on cream colored cardstock with a green border. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree, and has a green wax frog seal highlighted in gold.

Other Materials:

A book to donate.

Suggested Pose:

Where else? Frantz is nestled into our bookshelves where he has been browsing all night.

Activity:

With your child, look through your books and choose one that your child has outgrown, or that just hasn’t been a particular favorite. Then, take a walk or ride to your nearest Little Free Library and leave it for some lucky child to find.

Rationale:

We have done lots of donations already through this project, but this one is something your child is choosing on their own. It gives them the opportunity to have some control over the generosity, to get the rush from sharing their wealth and treasure with another, and to see that this is not something that only adults can direct. Because they may be able to get a new book of their own at the library, too, this gives them a chance to inhabit another child’s perspective quite directly. Both your child and the person who chooses their book will feel the same joy of plucking it from the tiny shelves, tucking it under their arm, and reading it cozily at home.

Book Recommendation:

Read the book your child chooses to donate one last time, and then, if they choose one to replace it at the library, read that one, too.

December 11: Make a Gift

Rhyming Prompt: December 11

Like everyone else, I like to get presents,

They make me feel loved, supported, and known.

The thought matters more than the package contents

The exchange is a feeling more than something to own.

One year I made my sister a gift

To show her how much I valued her

And I could tell that it gave her a really big lift

And I never had to set foot in a store!

Let’s work together to make someone a treat;

When we pull it off it’ll be quite a feat.

Download the prompts for December 9-12 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A closeup image of the December 11 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and it has a teal wax seal of a frog, highlighted in gold. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

This depends on what you would like your child to make. I have loved having my kids make salt dough ornaments in the past, and if you would like them to make those, you might check out these instructions from Wholefully. My kids and I will be making these easy lotion boars from Common Sense Home. I’ve tried lots of variations on lotion bar recipes, and this one, which I make with coconut oil, shea butter, beeswax, and just a dash of vitamin E oil, is my hands-down favorite. If you go this route, you’ll also want some silicon molds (ice cube trays work fine), tins or bags for storage, and a pot and a bowl or a double-boiler. If you don’t have ingredients on hand, Mountain Rose Herbs can hook you up with sustainably sourced ingredients (and you can pick up at the mercantile if you’re in Eugene).

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is really mailing it in today because Mommy is grading. He is sitting on top of his lotion bar ingredients like an over-zealous manager.

Frantz sits perched on a pink silicone snowflake mold, which rests on a gray tufted ottoman. He is holding the December 11 prompt. Behind him rests the ingredients for lotion bars—beeswax pastilles, coconut oil, vitamin E oil, an obscured plastic tub of shea butter—which are arranged on a red ceramic tray.

Activity:

Discuss the person or people you plan to make gifts for, and chat about what they might like. Then work with your kids to produce that gift.

Rationale:

There are lots of theories about how children develop empathy, but theoretical and empirical researchers seem to agree on three main components that are crucial to the development and maintenance of empathy in children: “1). Opportunities to talk about emotions, both one’s own emotions and the emotions of others (i.e., develop a vocabulary of emotions); 2) Opportunities to take others’ perspectives; and 3) The creation of a caring and inclusive classroom, in which acceptance and respect for others is at the fore” (Schonert-Reichle & Oberle, 2011, p. 133). So far this month, we have been working, gradually, on helping our children focus on these aspects of empathy at home. This exercise is meant to primarily invoke the second element of this equation. In order to give the perfect gift, you have to take another’s perspective—not just what would I like, but what would they like. As adults, gift-giving is one of the moments when we engage in perspective-taking most visibly. While we take other people’s perspectives regularly, that work is often done behind the scenes; it may influence our actions and behaviors, but it’s not necessarily obvious in which ways. When we think through gift-giving, we often specifically verbalize our perspective-taking: “You love bluegrass music and have been looking for a pandemic hobby that helps distract you from screens, so I found you this second-hand violin and some Zoom lessons,” or “I know you have fond memories of baking with your mom using this out-of-print cookbook from the ‘80s, and I just so happened to find it for you on eBay.” This exercise offers our kids a tactile activity, which will help them focus, along with an opportunity to model the mental work that goes into gift-giving.

Book Recommendation:

Another classic today, but one I couldn’t resist: The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. The Giving Tree is one of the most famously controversial, yet enduring, children’s books. It’s so ubiquitous that it was the first present we received upon announcing our first pregnancy. Many people have criticized the book because the boy takes until the tree has been all used up, and if you take the book at face value, it will absolutely spread the wrong lesson. Instead, The Giving Tree should be used as a great opportunity to discuss the boy’s lack of empathy. Because he was unable to take the tree’s perspective, he destroyed her, and if that isn’t an apt metaphor for our times, I don’t know what is. You can watch a read aloud here. I really enjoyed reading this recent consideration of the classic book in The New York Times, and its authors also wrote The Gift Inside the Box, which is an excellent children’s book about generosity in and of itself.

An image of the cover of The Gift Inside the Box, by Adam Grant, Allison Sweet Grant, and Diana Schoenbrun.

References

Schonert-Reichle, K. A. & Oberle, E. (2011). Teaching empathy to children: Theoretical and empirical considerations and implications for practice. In B. Weber, E. Marsal, & T. Dobashi (Eds.), The politics of empathy: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Ancient Phenomenon (pp.117-138). Transaction Publishers.

December 10: Share the Love

Rhyming Prompt: December 10

This holiday season, I feel full of cheer.

Your kindness to me has been really quite dear.

And all of the good deeds you’ve done make me smile,

The truth is I just really like your style.

In fact, so much, I have something to say.

I love you! I hope that makes your day.

Telling someone you love that you love them is great.

It can make them so happy that I wouldn’t wait.

Is there someone in your life you’d like to delight?

Go share the love—set their heart alight.

Download the prompts for December 9-12 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up image of the December 10 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a gold embossed frog in the upper right hand corner, which is highlighted in silver. The prompt is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

None.

Suggested Pose:

Franz has illustrated his love with a haphazard doodle of hearts. He doesn’t have functional fingers; it’s rather impressive, given that. Hopefully the kids will color it in and love it despite the fact that it looks like it was hastily completed by an exhausted and overwhelmed amphibian. It’s the thought that counts.

Activity:

Have your child tell someone they love that they love them. Importantly, this should be someone your child actually and independently loves, and you should try to avoid guiding them toward any one person. Your third cousin who they’ve met once via Zoom is out.

Rationale:

Empathy informs our interpersonal relationships and our emotional lives. In order to practice empathy, we need to be in touch with how we feel and we need to be comfortable expressing those feelings. Inviting your child to verbalize their feelings independently is an important part of their emotional development. This is also a great opportunity for your child to think through the relationships they value without coaching, and to think about how they show those people/pets their admiration.

Book Recommendation:

A classic for today—Guess How Much I Love You, by Sam McBratney & Anita Jeram. You likely already have this book, but did you know there’s an entire cartoon dedicated to it? I did not! It might be a fun family watch. Our always fabulous group member Kate also recommended the book The Invisible String, by Patrice Karst & Joanne Lew-Vriethoff, which looks wonderful. You can watch a read aloud here.

A closeup of the cover of Guess How Much I Love You, by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram, which shows little nut brown hare holding up the ears of big nut brown hare on a patch of grass.

December 9: Thank a Healthcare Worker

Rhyming Prompt: December 9

This year has been hard on us all, I know,

Though you have been brave and upbeat even so.

The sickness that’s made it so hard to go play

Is toughest on one type of person each day.

The nurses and doctors and hospital staff

Are risking their lives and its on our behalf.

They work very hard to help us be well

And they’d love some good cheer from us all, I can tell.

Of course we wear masks and stay home and wash hands,

But let’s make them a present to show that we’re fans!

Download the prompts for December 9-12 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

A close-up of the December 9 prompt. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and there is a purple wax impression of a frog, highlighted in gold, on the upper right corner. The card is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Paper, crayons, whatever crafty card making supplies you have on hand.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz is wearing his mask because he values the welfare of healthcare workers! He’s also hiding under the Christmas tree with the presents.

An image of Franz wearing a rust-colored facemask. He is nestled against some wrapped presents, and the prompt for December 9 is on his lap.

Activity:

Today we’re going to thank a healthcare worker! When I reached out to my friends who are nurses, they both said essentially the same thing: “home made cards or words of support are wonderful ways to cheer us up!” and “If the girls want to make some special art work for the nurses I will bring it to work and hang it up for all to see!!!!” I’ll be letting my kids choose a papercraft to say thank you. If your kids would like to make some art for this purpose and you don’t have a special healthcare worker in your life, and you live in Eugene/Springfield, reach out—I am happy to collect art in town to send with my friend at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend.

Rationale:

As hospitals in Oregon and beyond are reaching capacity, many healthcare workers are feeling depleted. It has been a long and arduous year for us all, but many healthcare workers have been exposed to risk they never anticipated while sequestered away from their families. Taking some time to say thank you to frontline workers is important because it may comfort the people who are risking their lives not just because of a deadly virus, but also because that virus has become devastatingly politicized.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, recent research suggests that the resistance to taking basic precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is, in fact, an empathy problem. In a transnational study, researchers from Aarhus BSS found that it is in fact empathy for people in high-risk groups that motivates us to wear face masks and physically distance. They also discovered that when empathy was induced narratively, by showcasing the stories of people most impacted by COVID-19, prosocial willingness to distance and wear face masks increased.

Would we be in this mess if empathy were more highly valued in American society? A recent analysis of global COVID-19 responses suggests that individualism complicates disaster response and recovery where collective action is an urgent necessity, and goes on to lament that the U.S. repeatedly ranks as the most individualistic country in the world (Bian et al., 2020). The fight against COVID-19 requires us to sacrifice individual preference to achieve a collective goal, and it’s not hard to see how much our failure to muster the empathy required to do so has inhibited our national pandemic response. If we can’t turn back the clock and prevent the thousands of unnecessary deaths that have been driven by a lack of national empathy, we can at least make sure our families aren’t part of the problem. I plan to remind my kids of why we’re doing all this—giving up in-person school, playdates, and family holidays—because our desires must not eclipse another’s right to live.*

*N.B. Please note that if you have to go out and work during this pandemic, or send your kids to in-person childcare to continue working, I am in no way suggesting you have a lack of empathy. That burden falls on the government that has not found a way to make staying home feasible for so many.

Book Recommendation:

I love The Thank You Book, by Mo Willems, and so do my kids. This book helps them see how fabulous a simple thank you can feel, and it stars all of their Mo Willems favorites. I have also really been loving We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga, by Traci Sorell and Frane Lessac, which introduces some Cherokee vocabulary and shares cultural traditions surrounding gratitude and challenges. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga, by Traci Sorell and Frané Lessac.

References

Bian, B., Li, J., Xu, T., & Foutz, N.Z. (2020). Individualism during crises. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3626841

Pfattheicher, S., Nockur, L., Böhm, R., Sassenrath, C., & Petersen, M. B. (2020). The emotional path to action: Empathy promotes physical distancing and wearing of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological Science, 31(11), 1363-1373. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620964422

December 8: Plan the Menu

Rhyming Prompt: December 8

We’ve been thinking of food now for several days,

And I have to admit it’s put me in a daze.

It’s hard work to do all this thinking of food!

Who has it? Who doesn’t? What’s good that I’ve chewed?

I’m guessing the grownups that take care of you

Might also be starting to feel kind of blue

When they sit down to answer the question of dinner.

Perhaps you could help them pick out a winner?

Let’s work with our grownups to plan supper one night;

If we help cook it, too, it would be a delight!

Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience). You can also now download the prompts for December 9-12 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document.

A close-up image of the prompt for December 8, printed on cream cardstock with a green border. There is a silver wax impression of a frog in the upper corner with a gold embossed symbol of a frog. The prompt is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Cookbooks or other recipes would be helpful, and you’ll need the ingredients for the selected recipes once they’ve been chosen.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz has taken the liberty of going through our cookbooks and finding a few favorites, including some that are specifically aimed at child chefs.

Frantz sits on a mountain of cookbooks, including Sesame Street Let’s Cook! and Mommy & Me Start Cooking.

Activity:

Your kid’s goal is to plan the menu for one dinner this week. Your involvement depends on their age. Because my kids are little, we’ll look at pictures and figure out a balanced menu together, but I’ll lean heavily on their input and simply make suggestions as we go. I’ll then work with them in the kitchen on the actual food prep. I love kid-oriented cookbooks for this because they break down which steps are best managed by the kids themselves.

Rationale:

Unlike most of our activities so far, this activity is asking your child to take on some of the labor of the family unit, and in doing so, to feel specific and targeted empathy for you.

Much has been made of cooking during the pandemic. On one hand people have taken up baking to the point of yeast and flour shortages; on the other, a growing chorus of home cooks are confessing their culinary fatigue. Helen Rosner’s recent meditation in The New Yorker on “The Joylessness of Cooking” struck a chord with me, as someone who loved to cook until perhaps even last month. One particularly stressful November week, during which both my husband and I were snowed under by work, we failed to plan any dinners at all, leaving us to scour the kitchen every night in a race to come up with something—anything—in the last hour before kid bedtime. At a cultural moment when cooking has come to feel particularly exhausting and demoralizing, then, it’s perhaps more relevant than ever that in the U.S., women do the vast majority of grocery shopping and meal prepping. A recent PEW study suggests that more than 70% of women handle both chores in their households. As Anne Helen Peterson recently wrote, moms do most of the family labor, which is both invisible and exponentially increased during the holiday season.

For this activity, then, we’re asking our kids to practice perspective-taking by taking our perspective. By planning a meal, they’re performing some of the labor of the family unit, and that labor is also being rendered visible. This is also a good opportunity to chat about all of the work that goes into making your family happy, how that labor is divided, and, perhaps, how they can help going forward.

Book Recommendation:

I recommend a child-focused cookbook for every family. We have gotten a lot of joy from ours, and the best preschool math in our household happens in the kitchen. We like Sesame Street Let’s Cook!, but there are many, and they all look great. Pick your favorite.

I’ll also take this opportunity to recommend Everybody Cooks Rice, by Norah Dooley & Peter J. Thornton. This book is excellent in that it shows what is similar across cultures (rice and table fellowship) while also illustrating differences (cooking technique and spicing). You can watch a read aloud here.

A closeup of the cover of Everybody Cooks Rice, by Norah Dooley and Peter J. Thornton

December 7: Protect the Orangutans

Rhyming Prompt: December 7

The orangutan’s name means “man of the wood”

And they’re known for being both clever and good.

In tropical forests they spread seeds around

And help guarantee healthy plants will abound.

Of all the great apes, they’re in the most danger

Of going extinct, and what’s even stranger,

People don’t know how amazing they are!

Let’s learn about them, then let’s make them all stars.

If all our friends give the orangutans aid

Maybe their homes won’t further degrade.

A closeup image of the prompt for December 7. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a silver seal with a gold embossed frog in the righthand corner. It is propped in a lit Christmas tree.

Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

Other Materials:

If you would like, some money to donate to help protect threatened orangutans, and some device with internet access.

Suggested Pose:

We happen to have an orangutan friend hanging around, so Frantz has been getting acquainted. Aren’t they cute together?

An image of Frantz the frog nestled inside the arms of a large plush orangutan. The prompt for the day is sitting on the couch before them.

Activity:

Spend some time learning about orangutans with your kids. You might want to check out this page from National Geographic that has lots of great information, or this page from the San Diego Zoo that has an excellent orangutan call and printable coloring page. We’ll do our best impressions of orangutans, trying to move like them, sound like them, and think like them. And then we’ll talk about more about the rainforest, how orangutans live in the rainforest, and why we need to protect the rainforest—not just because of climate change, but because without it, orangutans will not be able to survive. Once we’ve had that conversation, we’ll be making a donation to the Orangutan Foundation International and to the Rain Forest Action Network, both of which do crucial work to protect orangutans and the rainforest. The donations, of course, are completely optional.

Rationale:

This exercise is building on yesterday’s. By chatting about how palm oil in the snacks in our kitchen can drive deforestation, and how deforestation can drive climate chaos, we started to help our kids understand why they should extend empathy toward the environment. But, as we’ve already discussed, humans are more capable of empathizing with the familiar. A 2013 study that used neuroimaging to investigate empathy revealed that our brains are actually wired to register the closest members of our social group as overlapping with the self. Their concluding hypothesis “is that altruism motivated by empathy may require some level of overlap in the neural representation of self and other—one that conveys information about this extended self to other brain systems responsible for motivation and action” (Beckes et al., 2013, p. 676). If our brains are built to empathize more naturally with what is familiar—so familiar that it almost seems like an extension of the self—asking them to relate to something that is nothing like us is an almost insurmountable ask. I can think of fewer things I am likely to confuse with my “self” than an ecosystem a continent away, and I’m an adult; my children are still developing empathetically. So how do we make it work?

By introducing the orangutans, and situating them firmly in the context of the rainforest, we can hopefully give our kids a relatable tether for an abstract concept. Orangutans have a lot of human features and they’re adorable to boot, so they’re about as relatable as an animal can be. Of course there are lots of reasons for our kids to want to protect the rainforest, but knowing these distant relatives face extinction if we don’t can help us generate a sense of urgency. My kids absolutely love The Lorax, but they’re not particularly emotional about the situation until those brown Barbaloots start getting the crummies. If we can picture a Barbaloot, or an Orangutan, as one relatable victim of the compounding calamity of deforestation, we have a better chance of expanding our empathetic capacity to include less charismatic components of delicate biosystems, too.

Book Recommendation:

We’ll be reading I am Jane Goodall, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos, today. The book doesn’t discuss orangutans specifically, but I love it because it shows the importance of perseverance, critical thinking, and acting empathetically across species-lines. My kids love the comix-style illustrations and the biographical information at the end. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of I Am Jane Goodall, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos.

References

Beckes, L., Coan, J. A., & Hasselmo, K. (2013). Familiarity promotes the blurring of self and other in the neural representation of threat. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(6), 670-677. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss046

December 6: Palm Oil Hunt

Rhyming Prompt: December 6

Rainforests are known as the lungs of the earth;

They make most of the air we have breathed since our birth!

They store up the carbon that humans produce,

And cutting them down only sets it all loose.

I’m sorry to say that the forest’s in danger;

Yet just searching our pantry could be a game changer!

People cut forests to make palm oil

Which makes certain snacks less likely to spoil.

Let’s read the ingredients just to be sure

We choose snacks that won’t hurt the woods anymore!

Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

Close up of the prompt for December 6. Prompt is printed on cream-colored cardstock with a green border and a silver wax seal with a gold embossed frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Snacks that are free of palm oil. You can find a useful list here. We’ll likely do veggie straws, honey maid graham crackers, and fruit. Anything fresh will be palm oil free.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz has gotten in over his head, and now he’s stuck in a bag of veggie straws. Who can blame him? These things are delicious! And palm-oil free!

An image of a bag of Veggie Straws sitting on our dining room table. You can just see Frantz’s feet sticking out of the top of the bag. The December 6 prompt sits in the foreground.

Activity:

Go through your snacks and search for ones that contain palm oil (look for palmate, PKO, palm kernel oil, stearic acid, sodium layer sulfate, acetyl or octyl palmitate, elaeis guineensis, and anything ending with palmitate). Which ones are you willing to live without? If you don’t think you can give them up, try looking online; sometimes there’s an easy substitute that’s free from palm oil available from a different brand. If your kids are older, you might have them help you track down the parent company that makes the snack, and send them an e-mail asking them to stop using palm oil in their products. But the best part, for me at least, is making a list of snacks that are free from palm oil and delicious, so you know what to reach for without guilt.

We eliminated palm oil from our house years ago, but then the pandemic hit, and suddenly we found ourselves picking up shelf-stable snacks and not being able to easily read labels. It is hard to eliminate palm oil if you’re trying to avoid going to the grocery store constantly, staying too long, or breaking the bank. I’m excited for this opportunity to re-commit, but I also advocate giving yourself some grace. Choosing palm-oil-free foods more frequently is a great step, even if choosing them never is impossible.

If you’re struggling, you might want to read up on all the sneaky, alternative names for palm oil. You can also read up on the problem with palm oil here. This satirical commercial (appropriate for kids of all ages), also works to illustrate the relationship between snacks and deforestation, and might be a great point of entry.

Rationale:

For decades, hard-working environmental educators believed that if people knew about climate change they would take action. However, a significant and ever-growing body of research from the last decade has revealed that it’s (unfortunately) not that simple. Sociologist Kari Norgaard notes that while people need information about climate science in order to become invested in climatological issues, information alone is inadequate to prompt the public to take meaningful action in the face of anthropogenically motivated climate change (2011). To put it bluntly, the default climate science communication method of supplying credible climate science to the public has failed to galvanize widespread action in response to climate catastrophe. Yet climate chaos is a wicked problem; it exacerbates social injustice, promises to cause mass extinctions, and is expected to create hundreds of millions of climate refugees. As former President Barack Obama put it, “no challenge -- no challenge -- poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” If our traditional methods of environmental education are ineffective, then we must urgently conceptualize new ways to inspire a widespread and passionate commitment to climate justice.

I have a lot of ideas for how we can do this, but one involves empathy. Not surprisingly, research suggests that the relationship between empathy and proenvironmental tendencies is intertwined. In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that “other-oriented tendencies, such as compassion for others, effectively strengthen tendencies related to the conservation of nature” (Pfattheicher et al., 2016, p. 940). People who exhibit higher levels of empathy toward humans also exhibit higher levels of empathy toward nature and environmental systems, despite their abstraction. Interestingly, too, when participants were given a series of pictures, they exhibited greater levels of environmental empathy if they were paired with instructions to consider perspective-taking (i.e. “It is important for the study that you imagine how the pictured persons feel. Try to feel what the persons are currently going through and how they feel. You can let yourself be guided by your feelings” (Pfattheicher et al., 2016, p. 934). I have plenty of lingering questions about this research—how long does the effect last? How can we use this discovery to come up with something more effective than largely ineffectual environmental campaigns of the 90s that depicted polar bears and other charismatic animals under threat? Does this empathetic sentiment translate into meaningful action? But I am nonetheless compelled. If we can teach our children (and ourselves) to be more empathetic toward the environment in an ecosystemic way, to understand the complex transnational engines that drive climate chaos, and to appreciate the limited role of individual action for a problem that is undeniably irresolvable without major societal reconfiguration, then we may just be on to something.

To that end, the next couple of days are designed to help our kids process on an emotional level how grocery purchases at home drive the deforestation of the Amazon, the relentless slide toward extinction of orangutans, and the loss of one of our most essential carbon sinks. But, uhhhh, in a fun, festive way.

Book Recommendation:

My top recommendation is for Mary DeMocker’s excellent book The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution, which brought us this palm oil hunt. This book has tons of clearly described actionable activities to do with your kids of all ages.

I also love Over and Under the Rainforest, by Kate Messner & Christopher Silas Neal, and you can watch a read-aloud with the author here. If your kids are little, this Deep in the Forest: A Seek-and-Find Adventure by Josef Antòn & Lucie Brunellièreis gorgeous and has been a favorite for both my kids.

The cover of Deep in the Forest: A Seek-and-Find Adventure, by Josef Antòn & Lucie Brunellière

References

Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in denial: Climate change, emotions, and everyday life. MIT Press.

Pfattheicher, S., Sassenrath, C. & Schindler, S. (2016). Feelings for the suffering of others and the environment: Compassion fosters proenvironmental tendencies. Environment and Behavior, 48(7), 929-945. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916515574549

December 5: Build a House

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