Gift Guide and Mail Bag

So, one of the suggestions was a gift guide, which we are going to do, and that reminded me that , my plan was to actually talk about what to do if you would like to gift an experience instead of stuff. And what we did last year and how I think it worked. And so we will talk about that. And then, uh, another question from the mailbag was this person would like me to talk about Luigi Mangione, which I don’t really want to do, but we give the people what they want.

And I do have some thoughts about that. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. On the podcast.

So let’s start off with the gift guide. , and we’re going to start off with the original idea, which is what to do. If you would like to gift experiences. I know that lots of people. Myself included, we have so much stuff that the kids end up just like not even playing with, right? So you don’t really want to spend that much money on getting more and more and more stuff because it gets to the point where once you have so much stuff, they can’t even find anything to play with and so they play with it less than if you just had like one toy.

They would go back to that toy every time. So you want to use your money on experiences, but you still want to have the magic of Christmas morning. So here is what we did last year, and I think it worked out pretty well. We hit a bunch of points in some, like, airline credits that were about to expire, and so we decided that we were going to take the kids on a cruise for April vacation. And then we decided, like, let’s give, let’s tell the kids at Christmas that that’s, that’s what we’re doing.

So our kids had been obsessed with The Amazing Race leading up until Christmas. So what we did was, I hid amazing race envelopes under the couch cushions. And so I gave them, we gave them, you know, Santa came, gave those gifts. And then there were a few gifts from us. And then once they thought that they were all done opening gifts, we had them pull these envelopes out from underneath the couch cushions and they had these challenges.

So actually they just pulled out the first one and, um, They did the challenge, and then once they did the challenge, they got the next envelope, kind of like they do in the show. And inside that envelope was the first puzzle piece, and then the challenge to get the next puzzle piece. So in the end, they had four puzzle pieces.

The first puzzle piece said in April we are going to, and then the second one was a code that once you decoded it said on a cruise. The third piece said two. And then the fourth puzzle piece had, a map on it with the little location do hickeys for each of the places where we were going.

So the challenges that we did, I built these just in Canva, , and I bought the. envelopes on Amazon. I’ll put the link up on the website. But the challenges that we did, , we had given them two puzzles. So we told them to choose the puzzle with the fewest pieces and then once the correct puzzle is built, you will receive your next clue.

One tip there is, uh, don’t pick a 500 piece puzzle. That’s, definitely don’t do that because they needed to, you know, part of the thing was they needed to do it independently. So I think the puzzle actually was only like a hundred pieces. It wasn’t 500. There’s maybe like a hundred pieces. That was bordering on too much for kids who stayed up late and got up very, very early.

So maybe pick a 50 piece puzzle. Might be a better idea if you wanted to do that. And then the next one was like a pick one. So we did seek or sing. So either there was like a, there was like a whole bunch of face down cards, kind of like the episode with Kim and Penn, from the Holderness family where they had to like flip over all the rocks.

So, it would be like that, where like, you could flip over three of the cards at a time and it was all over the table. And then once you got the, special pieces and you got all of those, then you could go, then you could turn it in for your next clue. Or you could

do a karaoke challenge with Christmas carols. the next one was use your new nonfiction books. So I got them two nonfiction books. So one of them I got like ancient civilizations and the other one I got like oceans because We were going to Mexico on the screws and so we were going to go see some ancient civilization type things and we were probably going to do like a little bit of snorkeling type stuff so those both related they didn’t know when they opened them they’re just like oh cool.

And so that was how they broke the code, so they had to find sentences, I had copied sentences from the book, but replaced one word from that sentence, with like a blank with the code underneath it, and then, I don’t know, maybe they each had three from their book or something that they had to find the sentence and write down the word.

And then they could use that word to fill in, like, the cipher thing, the, the list of all the letters. And they could fill that in and then go, then once they had that, they could use that to figure out what that puzzle piece said. And then the last one was, pie and pirouette or partnered pencil. So they could either do, like, a directed drawing.

together or, learn and perform a short segment of, , the Nutcracker. I just like found a YouTube video that had the Nutcracker on it. I think they ended up choosing that one. Yeah, so it was really fun. It lasted like well over an hour. And they were super excited once they actually figured out they were like, wait, what we’re, what, what, um, so, and they have been asking me to do it again.

I don’t know if we are doing it again because we’re not going on a cruise in April. So, um, Yeah, I don’t know if we’re doing that, but, um, it was really fun. I would strongly recommend it.

So the challenge is just like, while you’re designing it, just making sure that it’s like going to be at the nexus of challenge and ability, like you want it to be challenging, you don’t want them to fly through it, but also you don’t want it to be well over frustration level. That was a little bit tricky, but we, you know, you can always give an appropriate amount of clues if necessary in the morning if we are feeling a little less than gritty on all of the Christmas cookie sugar rush, adrenaline rush stuff.

, but yeah, that’s a fun way to reveal an experience gift so it still has like that fun and excitement of opening something on Christmas morning, even though you’re not doing it for another month or two or four. And you could do it for anything, right? Like it doesn’t need to be a cruise or some like big crazy week long vacation.

It could be tickets to something. It could be, a class or something like that. It could be something else that they’re not going to receive, you know, an intangible thing that they’re not going to receive on that day. Anything like that could work for sure.

And of course, the nice thing is that hypothetically, you could finish creating these clues at 11 o’clock on Christmas Eve and still have it ready for the next day, as long as you have a printer. Hypothetically, who would do that?

Alright, the next segment is going to be my gift guide, which I will talk a little bit about, but then I’ll actually put the links on the website, and I’ll put the website in the show notes. So, if you are looking for things that they can use that day, this was some of the challenge that I’ve been going through over the last couple days is just having things that they can play with, especially when it is getting so dark out, so early, and there is so much time to fill between the time they get off the bus and then 20 minutes later when the sun goes down and then bedtime doesn’t happen for many, many hours.

So what can we do to raise citizens and to build the social studies understanding while still creating some fun on Christmas morning? I mean, could you get them a textbook? You could. You don’t have to. So here are some ideas. Uh, one would be books. I love getting books on Christmas. You know, this would depend on where your reader is.

But there are a bunch of different ideas and areas you could go with this. You could do some historical fiction type books. So a couple of recommendations are One Crazy Summer. and that’s about fourth ish, fifth ish grade. And Inside Out and Back Again, which is about I don’t know. 4th through 6th grade.

Inside Out and Back Again is a novel written in poetry about a girl who grows up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War and then moves to the U. S. One Crazy Summer is about three girls who go to Oakland, California in the summer of 1968. Really good.

For younger readers, you might like the I Survived series. There’s a whole bunch of them. I survived World War II, I survived Hurricane Katrina. There’s a whole bunch of them. I still like the American Girls series. They’re still, you know, you can still sometimes get them in the box.

It’s a really nice gift. The American Girl series is another one. Puzzles is the next idea. So if your kiddo likes puzzles or you think that they could like puzzles, there’s a lot of different ways you can go with this. I mean, you could get them like a superhero or princess type puzzle, but if they like the puzzle more than they like the character, then you could kind of expand it.

To something that would build a little bit of background knowledge. So either like a landscape of a place that they haven’t been before or national parks or a country that they haven’t been to before or the maps, the map one that we used for that amazing race challenge. There’s a whole bunch of different puzzles, of course, that you could use for that.

And of course, there’s varying levels of challenge there. You could do 50 piece puzzles. You could do 2000 piece puzzles, depending on the age of your kid

I’m also I’m trying to keep these as last minute gift guides since we are on the 17th or 18th right now. So, , a lot of these you would be able to find on Amazon, but hopefully you would be able to find them in a physical store like Barnes and Noble or Target or something like that.

On that note, the Week Junior is another one that you could use as a gift. You could go into store, buy one copy of the, you know, the current copy of the Week Junior. Give that as the gift, but then sign up for the subscription online and then that would come a little bit later, but they have something to open and then like the rest of the gift would be coming later.

And that would work for other magazines as well, like National Geographic Kids or National Geographic if they’re a little bit older. Or Highlights, we love Highlights, or Ranger Rick, or any of those kinds of kids magazines.

Sticker books are another one. Again, if your kids don’t really care about the princesses or the superheroes that come in the sticker books, they just like the stickers. Or they’re interested in flags. There are a lot of geography sticker books out there. So like flags, flags of the world, states and capitals, continents, countries, all that sort of thing.

So sticker books is another one that you could just twist to a geography, cultural, um, um,

And then the last one would be logic books. So like puzzles and games and thinking, like critical thinking is , one of those big pillars. And of course it does kind of lend to STEM also, but this is a little bit more like reasoning and logic, which is a little bit more on the social study side.

There’s a lot of logic books out there that you can get as workbooks. So if your kids really like the games. on the phone that are like putting puzzle pieces together, sort of like a Tetris type thing. You could get a paper version of that in a logic book, could practice some of those skills. I mean, depends on which one you get.

Some look more like school workbooks and some look more like puzzles. And fun things to do. So that’s part of the decision to make it more fun versus more like boring work. , and then you also could choose to add like a sticker chart to it or something like that so that it becomes more of like that gamified ed.

Thing that happens on the games on the phone that they they could use on paper So just a couple of ideas if you are scrambling at the last minute to add to your sports and Lego and Apparently skincare is a big one Sephora haul for the for the gifts this year.

All right, and because you asked me, even if it was that you were trolling me, I will talk about Luigi Mangione today. So if you’re listening and you don’t remember who that is, that is the person who is arrested and suspected of being the one to euphemism, take out the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York a couple weeks ago.

Here’s what I will say about it from a social studies perspective. A lot of the standards have this idea of the student will be able to ask and answer questions. I am comfortable in the, asking questions. There are so many details that we don’t know yet that I don’t think we can answer a lot of those questions yet.

But I do think that it prompts a lot of questions that sit in themes five and six of the social study standards. So, theme five is individuals, groups, and institutions. And theme six is power, authority, and governance. So we have not talked about this with our six and nine year old. I have some hesitations about discussing this particular incident with My six year old and nine year old, I think the response to it has been varied, and there’s a lot of gray area in there on how people are responding, and I’m not sure that for a six and nine year old on this action that for them should be a pretty black and white moral issue, like the actual crime that he is suspected of.

Should be pretty black and white, but from an adult’s perspective, there are some areas where people are seeing gray area there, and I’m not sure that they I’m not sure I’ve exposed them to all of the different factors there, and if I should, if it’s developmentally appropriate to introduce all of those other factors in order for them to not just be completely confused, if that makes sense.

Like, if they were in high school, for sure, like, they can understand that, but definitely not 6 and 9, I think, is really pushing it. Also, it’s the holidays, and that’s a pretty big conversational lift, and I just, uh, we don’t have it in us, so we’re probably just not gonna bring it up, and yes. But some background understanding and some interesting questions that I think this brings up is one standard, is identify and analyze the impact of tensions between and among individuals, groups, and institutions.

Identify and analyze the impact of tensions between and among individuals, groups, and institutions.

In the same area is the idea that institutions are created to respond to changing individual and group needs. So I think you could, I think there’s a lot there to discuss in regards to this topic. So the institution being healthcare. And the individuals being the suspect, Luigi, and then also, you know, all of the other people who are responding to this.

I don’t know if you’ve seen, but like on Twitter and other places, it’s prompting people to rehash their individual grievances with the healthcare system. So if institutions are supposed to be created to respond to individual and group needs, Do we think that this is just a failing institution? Do we think that this is the space before a new institution is created?

What else impacts The creation and maintenance of institutions. All of those things are kind of interesting ideas to explore. And then the tensions between individuals, groups, and institutions. I mean, a lot of people have a lot of tension directed at this particular institution, and then there are groups of people in particular, cancer in particular, heart attack in particular.

People who have given childbirth, like, there’s, like, a lot of groups that you could look at who have had very similar experiences with this institution, and so

I think there’s been a lot of projection of those things onto this particular suspect and that’s why I’m not comfortable talking about, like, the conclusions that we’re going to come to here because I don’t actually, we don’t actually know whether or not, the reasons that everybody else is projecting are the reasons why he did it, but, um, it has certainly brought out the tension between the individuals, the groups, and the institution.

That’s for darn sure. And then in strand six, power, authority, and governance, I think the interesting one to look at is analyze and evaluate the conditions, actions, and motivations that contribute to conflict and cooperation between groups and nations. Obviously in this one, we’re talking more about groups than nations. But what are the things that are contributing to this conflict? Is this a one time thing or will it be something that is not a one time thing?

And what are the conditions that are creating this conflict? What are the motivations of the different people within the group? So, you know, what creates conflict? Similarly, there’s two different strands here within this theme, but one of the other, uh, standards in here is the ways in which government meet the needs and wants of citizens manage conflict and establish order and security.

Now, it would actually be interesting to walk through with kids the history of trying to manage this particular conflict and how we have handled it. So going back to like Medicare. Medicaid creation, and, you know, walking through the history of that, and then Obamacare, and the Affordable Care Act, and the fact that that is actually the same thing, and what happened before that, and the change that that created, and how government has tried to respond to this, and then what are the remaining needs that exist here.

And then, of course, people rush to compare. They love to go to that Global Connections one and talk about how different nations respond to this in different ways, right? There’s all kinds of other countries that have universal health care. How does that work? How does that not work? How does that compare to the motivations here in the U.

S.? Entrenched institutions and greed being two of them.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting to look at this situation and Look at it through the framework of social studies through these frameworks that can be applied to a lot of different things because I think it helps zoom out from like this one individual action to making sense of it in this idea that like groups and institutions and individuals are always going to be a conflict that always happens with all kinds of different things.

How are we going to address this? And then how does the government step in? To help with that. So those are two of the ways that I would look at this through a social studies angle and no question asker. I am not getting into the surveillance aspect of it. Thank you. And that’s it for our episode today.

If you are looking to give yourself a gift this season or you are looking to give an experienced gift and really just take that leap of faith and give it as a gift and then Plan it and figure it out later. The workshop for how to plan an adventurous, ambitious vacation is going to be happening in January.

The cart is open now and it will be in through the end of the week. So if you would like to do that, you can hop on the early bird discount, check out now, give yourself that gift this holiday season, and then we will see you in January to actually plan it once we have. Revived ourselves in the new year.

The link for that is in the show notes. It will also be on my Instagram at raising underscore citizens. I hope to see you there.