Free Printable Activities to Nurture Curious and Compassionate Kids: Question Jar & Giving Back Tracker for Kids

What’s today’s blog post all about?

As an Operations Consultant, coach and designer, I realize my strengths can bring a whole lot of value to my home life – in particular, habit forming systems! I have a host of fun things I use at home with the kids (they love checklists!) and today, I share some stories that led me to create two fun printables activities for kids to help:

1) create a regular family learning and exploration opportunity and ensure you answer those burning questions your kids have (all day long!) and 

2) nurture compassionate hearts and build a giving back mindset and practice .

We get so caught up in our day to day lives of work, school, routines and forget to truly prioritize the things we value. How do we make sure we make time for it? We schedule it in and make a system for it.

Hey, you have a schedule for when to wake up, take the kids to school, when to go to work, when to come home, etc. If those events are considered important, so are your core family values.

Hopefully, these fun printables will help you make learning, exploration, curiosity, family time and giving back a regular priority in your family!

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Do you all remember the original Jurassic Park movie? We’ve attempted to watch it on two occasions because my son LOVES dinosaurs, but whenever we start it, at some point, it gets too scary and we have to turn it off.

Ok, I can hear some of you already saying, uhhh, Leeann that movie is rated PG13. Our kids are 4 and 6… Let me just back up and explain.

There were a few years in there that we never could watch movies as a family together (not even on Friday “Movie” nights which ended up being the kids streaming kiddie shows that neither by husband nor I were interested in watching with them!).

We couldn’t even watch The Lion King or Moana (both rated PG). My son would run and hide under his bed.

For those of you who know me personally, I’ve never been a tv or film fanatic so I didn’t really mind, but I mean, we couldn’t really get into the mood of “movie night”.

I mean, have any of you ever turned down the lights and chowed down on crunchy popcorn in a movie themed container while watching the same episode of Paw Patrol or Octonauts for the umpteenth time AND enjoyed it? I don’t think so.

Well, I digress.

What I wanted to say is that since the lockdown last year, we’ve been snuggling up to watch more movies together as a family. We have finally been able to watch some great Disney classics (no, still not The Lion King…), Pixar and this winter, the kids graduated to Star Wars, Xmen and Avengers movies! (Don’t ask – I have no idea how we can watch PG-13 action packed movies but not The Lion King).

Well, tonight, the kids asked to try and watch Jurassic Park again (they saw it pop up on Amazon Prime while waiting for us to put a movie on). Not sure if you remember that 90’s movie, but there’s a scene where a young boy is following around one of the scientists, non-stop talking and asking questions. He stops to look at the boy and asks him which car he was planning on riding in.

To which, of course, the boy responds that he was going to go in whatever car the scientist was going in! (insert crying, laughing emoji here – clearly, I have no idea how to add an emoji into a blog post!)

Ok, so that was a (super) long story to finally get to the part where I can finally share my learning.

I am cracking up and telling my husband how that boy is just like our kids, especially our daughter, non-stop talking and asking questions all day. We’re trading funny stories about questions our kids have asked over the past couple days (like recently my son asked if Coronavirus makes holes and we were like what?!).

But fortunately for us, we started this thing called…

The “Question Jar” for Kids

We’ve talked about making this for well over a year now. Well, we finally did it! And I’m sharing the printable template we put together to decorate our glass jar (yay, for upcycling!).

How does it work?

When your kid is following you around non-stop asking hard, weird, silly, strange and/or (insert adjective here) questions, sometimes you just don’t have time to answer them all (or you may not know the answer to them!).

We often put them off until “later” and “later” never comes. Well, now you can just slip them in the Question Jar.

Now whenever I ask a question, my son says I should put it in the Question Jar – haha!

Let us know in the comments below if you tried the Question Jar! Feel free to share a photo. Enjoy!

Giving Back Tracker For Kids

My parents escaped Vietnam in 1981 after the end of the war in a tiny boat. They were fortunate and were at sea for only 7 days before reaching the shores of Malaysia (they have friends who took a different route and spent 2 weeks at sea. Their group was attacked by pirates, and some raped and killed!).

My parents were transferred to the Philippines where they lived as refugees for almost a year, awaiting their paperwork from the US.

And it was there in that refugee camp that I was born.

Before I turned 4 weeks old, I flew for the first time with my parents to the U.S. to live with my uncle’s family who was already living in California.

Needless to say, we were a poor immigrant family living in Marin County, one of the wealthiest counties per capita in the US. My dad worked whatever jobs he could find, leaving in the wee hours of the morning before we woke up and coming home after we went to bed (or not coming home at all when he was traveling around the country for work).

As a young child, I remember growing up as a recipient of government assistance (e.g. food stamps) and the generosity of numerous individuals and organizations like the Canal Alliance in San Rafael.

I was able to attend prestigious private schools like Marin Academy and Bowdoin College due to significant financial aid. All my life I had been given so much. When I graduated from college, I wanted to dedicate my career to giving back. Well, that didn’t exactly turn out the way I had hoped.

After what felt like half a year of 100+ applications, interviews and rejections, I picked up a temporary job in the corporate world, which then turned into almost a decade stint.

And now another decade has flown by, and I take the opportunity to reflect on how I’ve given back (if you’re looking for ways to donate skills based assistance, I highly recommend Catchafire, but also enjoy browsing Idealist and All For Good. I found the current long term volunteer opportunity I’m doing through All for Good).

I’ve mentored and volunteered here and there, I’ve donated and have raised and pledged money for various causes in that time, but now as a parent, with so much more disposable income than I ever had when I was a child, I want to make a conscious effort to raise conscious, compassionate little citizens.

It’s important to me that we instill in them a practice of gratitude for the abundance we have and genuine compassion for those without. While we’ve done one-off volunteering and made birthday donation pledges (check the ideas on volunteering with kids blog post), there are always more creative ways to get involved.

I had been thinking a lot about how my husband and I have selected our own organizations for regular monthly/annual donations, but we also make a lot of one-off donations to causes when we hear about them. And we don’t always talk about them with the kids.

So we’re trying to change that. Not just by sharing about the causes we donate to, but we recently committed to allowing each child to have $5 each month to donate to an organization of their choosing. This allows them the opportunity to sit with us and talk and learn about different causes and organizations.

So I made this fun printable, with a heart for each month of the year to encourage us to do this consistently, and not as a one-off donation opportunity.

It’s a PDF so you can print it out.

Since we’re experimenting with digital journaling/planning, we tried the printable in the GoodNotes app on the iPad and it works well! We hope you like it too!

One other idea I’ve been discussing with my two good friends here in Spain (both from California too – if you’re reading this, Hi C & A!) is setting up a monthly “Giving Back” playdate once COVID restrictions allow us to meet up again.

We have lots of ideas and will be glad to share them with you in a future blog post!

Let us know in the comments below if you tried the Giving Back Tracker Printable! What new causes and organizations have you learned about and are contributing to?