Screen-Free Week: An Educational Tool

Yesterday, I announced that our homeschool is going screen-free this coming week. The purpose of the screen-free week is to create a springboard from which a new lifestyle can be made. It is for the prevention of attention issues and obesity problems. It can also be used as an educational tool. But how?


Here are a few things that we can teach the children:

• Character Training: This is an excellent opportunity to help children learn to differentiate between wants and needs.
• Awareness: We can help the children to see the marketing tactics used in commercials; reinforce that we were created with free will and that these companies are trying to infringe upon that.
• Environmentalism: What happens to all the stuff we buy that we outgrow or become bored with after a while? Yes, it goes into the landfills at some point. How does that affect the environment?

In order to be successful at being screen-free we will be building ourselves up in the the following areas:

• Determination
• Self-regulation
• Commitment
• Creativity
• Perseverance
• Cooperation
• Honesty (in other words.. no sneaking in screen time)

I think there is much that we can all learn here (and we're pretty screen-free!) and am very excited about this as is Alexis. (Lorelai is not quite so excited.. she has to give up Mario games and she's made her displeasure known... repeatedly.)

I am definitely going to be using the Organizer Kit for ideas and activities. I don't have the entire week planned out but I guarantee you that when I return, I'll have much to tell about what we did during the week!

Do you have any other ideas about using this as a teaching tool?


Happy Homeschooling!