Does your kid love squishies?
Have you been all around town trying to find one?
And then you finally get home, and what comes next?
Your kid gives it a good squish and….?
What if there was a way for your kid to squish and develop their thinking skills?
What’s an Innovation Challenge?
An Innovation Challenge is a creative prompt to help your child develop their creative and critical thinking skills. Skills essential to be successful in an AI world.
No step-by-step craft kit. No instructions. No supply run. Just a prompt, and your child’s own thinking.
This Week’s Challenge
Challenge your child to create a house for their squishy. A resting place worthy of the squishy.
Use the materials you already have on hand. Your child could build it out of recycled materials, draw it with paper and markers, or even write about it, if that’s what they prefer.
Works the same for squishy dumplings, Nice Cubes, or whatever squishy currently holds the most-loved spot in your house.
Your Job (It’s Smaller Than You Think)
Introduce the challenge and step back. If your child stares at the squishy for five minutes before starting, let them stare. That’s not stuck. That’s thinking.
The outcome doesn’t matter. It’s the process and the thinking that matter.
What Might They Build?
There’s no right answer here, which means there’s no wrong one either.
Maybe a shoebox house with a dish-towel hammock.
Maybe a high-rise of stacked containers with a rubber-band elevator.
Maybe a drawing of a squishy mansion, or a whole story about one, complete with a security system to keep the siblings out.
Some of it will hold together. Some of it won’t survive the hour. It all counts, because it all came from their own head.
If Your Child Lit Up Doing This
This challenge is one small taste of what a kid-directed project feels like: your child chooses, your child creates, and you plan barely anything. If you want to try it start with one Kid-Directed Friday. It’s free, and it takes less planning than tonight’s dinner. Details coming soon.
Leave a Reply