Skylines

Please enjoy this curated and crowdsourced list of ideas to help entertain and educate our families – and ourselves – while we socially distance ourselves and flatten the curve!
Submitted by Michelle & Jerry Bargo

Activity Ideas:

• Virtual Video Chats (consider scheduling weekly friend/family hangouts)

• Plan a virtual “Family Reunion”

• Yard Work / Garden Planning

• Find a penpal from another country to write letters to (email or snail mail is even better!)

• Learn a new instrument

• Cooking/Baking project (or even better, make a family cookbook and share with others)

• Art projects (learn a new craft, knit, crochet, paint)

• Music (learn a new instrument, write a song)

• COVID-19 Living History Project (see image on the last page from a Toledo Public School teacher)

• Scavenger Hunt (around house and yard)

• Family Game Night

• Movie Night with fun popcorn flavors

• Puzzle races: put several puzzles (20+ piece puzzles) in a paper bag and shake it up. Pour pieces out and give each person the puzzle box they are to put together. Go! (Cooperation tends to be a result as pieces are traded.)

• Building Forts (fun for all ages!)

• Outdoor Activities

• Write a play where the family plays each character and then make a movie

• Duolingo Language Classes (Free): Pick a language as a family and then have a language night where all practice speaking the language!

• Learn / Teach a new card game

• Organize closets, cabinets, etc.

• Another resource: Giant List of Ideas for being at home with the kids

• House projects (paint, rearrange furniture, decorate, spring cleaning)

• Change a Habit! Everyone picks one habit a week to work on. Each family member can report back on how they did that week and what they learned. Or, blog about it!

• Creative Cooking: Find two+ ingredients in your home that need to be used, and make something edible out of it! Then, enjoy!

Virtual Volunteering:

• Zooniverse: Volunteer on a project with Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

• Humanitarian OpenStreetMap: Map out places in the world that are literally not on the map to help humanitarian organizations do their life saving work.

• LibriVox: Help record free public domain audiobooks for access to all, in all languages. Readers are free to choose the books they wish to record.

• MicroMentor: Mentor entrepreneurs from around the globe.

• CardMaking: Make and send cards to local hospital or nursing home

• Wikipedia Editor: Edit the world’s largest free encyclopedia

• UpChieve: Tutor underserved high schoolers remotely

• Be My Eyes: Help blind and low-vision people with visual assistance through a live video call

• United Nations Volunteers: UNV connects you with organizations working for peace and development in need of skills like research, writing, art, and design. There are already over 12,000 volunteers from 187 countries lending their talents to organizations around the globe.

• Catchafire: This volunteer search tool is exclusively for online volunteer projects. Each one has a timeline that can range anywhere from an hour to a few weeks. So whether you have an afternoon or several, you can help not-for-profit with tasks like writing thank you letters or editing photos.

• Smithsonian Digital Volunteer: Help make their collections more accessible by volunteering online to transcribe historical documents or edit Wikipedia articles related to their artifacts and research.

• Amnesty Decoders: Operated by Amnesty International, this network of digital volunteers helps conduct research into global human rights violations. Volunteers have used their phones and computers to verify the location of oil spills, find evidence of drone strikes, and flag abusive tweets to women politicians in India.

• Translators Without Borders: For those fluent in more than one language, check out this nonprofit that combines language skills with humanitarian aid. Volunteers provide translations (10 million words a year!) to international organizations that focus on crisis relief, health and education.

• Crisis Text Line (18 years or older, min 4 hours/week): Here’s a perfect example of technology being used for good. Become a volunteer to help the Crisis Text Line continue to offer free, 24/7 support for those in crisis. If you’re at least 18 and can commit to volunteering four hours each week, you can apply to be trained for free.

• Project Gutenberg: Founded in 1971, this may just be the virtual volunteering effort that started it all. The goal is to create the largest digital library, and so far they’ve amassed 59,000 free eBooks. Volunteer by donating eligible materials, transcribing books into a digital form, or proofreading others’ work.

• DoSomething.org: DoSomething empowers young people to enact social change both online or off. Volunteer online through one of our campaigns to help solve real-world problems. DoSomething members have used the internet to successfully urge Apple to diversify their emojis, change the dictionary definition of “Black/black”, and create the largest crowdsourced anti-bullying guide.

Virtual Tours & Field Trips:

Parks

• Yellowstone National Park

  • Mud Volcano

  • Mammoth Hot Springs

  • and so much more. Tour Yellowstone National Park!

Museums

• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

• Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• Uffizi Gallery, Florence Italy

• British Museum Virtual Tour

• Boston Children’s Museum walk-through

• Virtual Tour of The Louvre

• Musée d’Orsay, Paris virtual walk-through

• National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul virtual tour

• Pergamon Museum, Berlin

• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam street view tour

• Guggenheim Museum, New York street view tour

• The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles street view tour

• MASP, São Paulo virtual tour

• National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City street view tour

Zoo/Animal

• Panda Cam at Zoo Atlanta

• Animal Cams at Houston Zoo

• Smithsonian’s National Zoo

• Reid Park Zoo Lion Cam, Tucson, AZ

• Ouwehand Park Polar Bear Cubs Rhenen, Netherland

• The San Diego Zoo virtual tour, videos, activities, and games

• Cincinnati Zoo will go live in every day at 3pm ET with a different animal featured daily

• Alaskan Wildlife cams

• Zoo/Animal activities:

  • Do more research on your favorite animal and make a guide.

  • Research the habitat of your favorite animal. Use at home materials to create a miniature habitat.

Aquariums

• Monterey Bay Aquarium live cams

• Monterey Bay Aquarium

• Georgia Aquarium Webcam (don’t miss multiple webcam feeds listed at the bottom)

• National Aquarium Virtual Tour 

• Seattle Aquarium

• Aquarium activities:

  • Research your favorite sea animal and make a presentation.

  • Smithsonian Museum Ocean Life

Science

• Virtual Farm Tour

• U.S. Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville, AL: Saturn 5 Rocket

• Discovery Education Virtual Field Trips

  • Polar Bears and the Tundra

  • Social Emotional Skills

  • STEM

  • Manufacturing

• Explore the surface of Mars on the Curiosity Rover

Travel the World

• Virtual Tour of the Great Wall of China

• Tour England through this 360 video.

• Take a live look at Colonial Williamsburg.

• Go on a virtual field trip to Ellis Island.

• Travel Activities:

  • Plan a trip to a new destination. What would you do, see, eat?

  • Make a travel brochure for the destination you “visited.”

  • Create & write a postcard from that destination. Include details about the place and what you can see there.

• Explore panoramic views of famous sites in 360˚ Street View tours including Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, Temple of Concordia, Taj Mahal, National Palace of Sintra and Château de Vaux le Vicomte.

Music

• Met Opera, Nightly Streams

• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

• Carnegie Hall Listening Adventures

• Detroit Symphony Orchestra Replays

Game Ideas:

Board Games

• Apples to Apples

• Pictionary

• Trivial Pursuit

• The Game of Things

• Codenames

• Catan

• Catan Junior

• Sequence

• Clue

• Pandemic

• Sorry

• Qwirkle

• Ticket to Ride

• Ticket to Ride – First Journey

• Karma

• Set

• KAPLA Wooden Blocks

• Jenga

Card Games

• Spades

• Juker

• Double Solitaire

• Skip-bo

• Phase 10

• Rummy

• Hearts

• Spoons

Preschool Games

• Busytown (3 & up)

At-Home Games (Limited Supplies Needed)

• Charades

• Scavenger Hunt (inside and outside of home)

• Hide & Seek

• I Spy

• Puzzles

• Heads Up

Online Games

• Online photograph jigsaw puzzles 

• Crafts, activities, mazes, dot to dot

• Magic Treehouse: Interactive games based on the book series

• Crazy Games: Many games – some fun, some learning

Mindfulness and Exercise:

• • Fun Mindfulness – Cosmic Kids Yoga

  • Movement and mindfulness videos

  • Mindfulness with Poetry and Music 

  • Free at-home kids yoga lesson plans

  • Kid-friendly workouts