Provide children's books to read together, and give each family member a worksheet so they can identify the key elements of the story: characters, setting, plot, climax, problem and solution. Challenge participants to come up with as many nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and articles as they can think of. In another activity, provide photocopied pages of popular children's stories to each member. Mix the pages so they are out of sequence, and work with your children to put the story in the correct order. For another easy activity, give each family member a blank story book with pictures so that you can fill in the details of the story together. Guide and encourage your children without doing all the work for them.
Kids can practice their skills at guessing if you provide them with jars filled with various items, such as beans, buttons or sea shells. The school can award a prize to the family with the best guess. Help kids learn shapes by asking them to draw a triangle, square, circle and rectangle, then work together as a family to find as many examples of each shape as you can. Get a long sheet of paper, then have each family member lie down on the paper so the child can mark their height from feet to head. Work with the children to determine how many inches tall your family members are, and convert the inches to feet.
Families can make their own pliable slime together with school glue, borax, water and food coloring. This is an easy experiment with polymer molecules your can take home. In another easy experiment, pour milk to cover the bottom of a plate. Drop one drop of food coloring in the milk on the top, bottom, left and right, using a different color for each quadrant. Dip a cotton swab in dish detergent, place the swab in the center of the plate and watch as the colors swirl on their own. The detergent changes the surface tension of the milk and changes the shape of the molecules to make them move.
The range of activities varies depending on each child's grade level and the areas of history each grade has studied. An easy activity that any grade level can do is creating a family tree to exhibit their familial society. Kids can work with you to display their ancestry on a tree printout. Kids can also write their family story by filling in blanks in a small book. Entries might include the name of the child's town and state, type of housing, family traditions and occupations. For practice in geography, provide each child with a blank map of the world, and work with your children to fill in the names of continents, oceans, countries, islands and any other feature the child might know.