TV-free activities day 190: Scribble dinner
Why should we eat dinner together more often? Most American families are starved for time to spend together, and dinner may be the only time of the day when we can reconnect, leaving behind our individual pursuits like playing video games, emailing and doing homework. Dinner is a time to relax, recharge, laugh, tell stories and catch up on the day’s ups and downs, while developing a sense of who we are as a family. - Dr. Anne Fisher "The Family Dinner Project"
So how can we linger at the table? We made our table a scribble pad and it sparked conversation and a few more TV-free moments.
I like to suggest easy projects that working parents can actually achieve. I hope this is easy for your family too.
You will need: a roll of butcher paper, or brown mailing paper and colored pencils That's it
We used two long pieces to make our table cloth. Set out colored pencils and asked everybody to doodle something that happened to them or make up a story. This one was at breakfast...the toast was terrified of the toaster.
Jayne's book recommendation for this activity:
Scribble by Deborah Freedman (Random House 2007) seems like the perfect book for tonight's bedtime story. The imaginative story won lots of awards and is a fun look sibling rivalry.
Connecticut Book Awards - 2008 Finalist
Fuse #8 - Best "Under the Radar" Picture Book for 2007
Rocky Mountain News - 10 Best Children's Books of 2007
Association of Booksellers for Children - Best Books 2007
Book Sense - Children's Picks 2007.
Review from Publishers Weekly
In this unpredictable blend of comic strip and children's drawings, two short-tempered siblings compare their magic marker artwork. Proud older sister Emma shows off her picture of a sleeping princess on bubblegum-pink poster paper. Defensive younger sister Lucie, less practiced with her pen, chooses mustard-gold paper and draws "a kitty" with a crude teardrop-shaped head and sticklike limbs. "It looks like a scribble," Emma tells her. Indignant, Lucie grabs a pen and scratches tangled loops, like twisted vines, all over Emma's Sleeping Beauty. This sibling squabble takes an unexpected turn, however, when Lucie's scrawled kitty, christened Scribble, decides to rescue the damsel. He leaps onto the pink page with Lucie and her actual pet kitten in hot pursuit. But "before Lucie could stop him, Scribble scrambled into a Giant Thicket, where deep within he discovered the Princess Aurora, who had been asleep for One Hundred Years." Scribble unravels the inky loops and finds an unlikely true love, a la Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line. Freedman, in her picture book debut, pictures the dueling sisters and their white kitten semi-naturalistically in pen, ink and watercolor, depicting their showdown in tidy comic panels with voice bubble dialogue. She creates their drawings in the naïve style of Lauren Child, and when Scribble comes to life, this anarchic, digitally enhanced art fills the pages and breaks the frames. The juxtaposition of realistic portraits and more playful designs results in often chaotic spreads, but Freedman's willingness to color outside the lines pays off-she's created a clever gem of a book. Ages 3-6. (May)