A Few Simple Christmas Ideas For Inquisitive Kids
My eldest son will be 8 in December. Even before he started school he was very keen on reading, writing and maths. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s a child prodigy and will be sitting his entrance exams to Oxbridge in the next year or so!! But I don’t have to push him to learn as he just loves it. He wakes up in the morning and will have read a book just because he likes reading so much, followed by some maths challenges that I set him and then he’ll practice his spellings for his school test on Fridays. He’s just started learning French at school too and has asked me to incorporate French questions into his daily challenges.
So I wanted to find ways of meeting his current thirst for learning over and above what his school provides but without being a pushy parent. It needed to be fun and engaging while still challenging. I enjoyed learning a lot at his age and I remember reading so much at one stage that I would take out as many books as I could at the library and get through them as quickly as possible so that I could get another lot. At first I started coming up with ideas myself, thinking that it would be reasonably straight forward. But after a few months I started running out of ideas. I even tried junior sudoku but just finding good ones online seemed to be a challenge in itself. There are things like Words with Friends but I wanted this to be offline so that there wasn’t a reason for him to have to go on our laptop or tablet.
Then by chance my child minder mentioned a science magazine called Whizz Pop Bang that was just for children. I looked into it and it looked quite good and so I bought a one off edition to see if my son would like it. He couldn’t get enough of it and so I subscribed to it for a year. Actually, he paid for it out of his pocket money as I’m also trying to teach him about being financially savvy. Well, as much as a seven year old ever can be. The magazine has experiments that they can recreate, cut outs and lots of interesting facts that my son keeps telling me about and I listen as if I don’t already know!!
I then found a newspaper just for kids called First News. It’s a proper weekly newspaper discussing current affairs etc but it it’s written to engage with children in a way that best suits them. He liked that and so yep, I subscribed to that too. This time I paid the subscription. They do have a digital subscription but as you can probably guess I subscribed to the paper format. I’ve just discovered another magazine called Aquila and so when friends and family ask about presents for my son, I’ll be adding that one to the list.
With Christmas around the corner it’s all too easy to get caught up in buying hoards of presents for our children that they then don’t use after a period of time. Don’t get me wrong I’ve already bought the main presents for my boys and they are not educational in the slightest. But with a birthday the week before Christmas, I need to be super organised. Plus with online shopping, it’s not like I have to drag myself around the stores searching high and low for the right present.
Anyway, if you want to get your children something different for Christmas or your friends and family are stuck for ideas then maybe a subscription to one of the following might be just thing. I’ll be getting one of them as a present for one of my god daughters who likes to read even more than my son. Check out the links and see what you think.
Written By Alec Grant