Activities to Keep Cousins Busy at Family Events
Cousins Build Friendships by Learning About, Interviewing Relatives
Nov 25, 2008
When cousins meet at holiday events and family gatherings, they may find themselves at loose ends and start fighting. Stop any fighting and promote bonding and good relationships between cousins by preparing a few activities and projects to keep them busy and help them learn about each other and the history of the family.
Have Cousins Construct a Family Tree
If a family get-together is large and relatives are usually so spread out that they do not see one another often, cousins may know some members only by name or not at all.
By creating a family tree, cousins will:
- Learn the names of everyone in the family.
- See and understand in a concrete way the relationships between themselves and other family members.
- Use interpersonal cooperation skills through working together as a focused team, verbal skills in talking to other family members to obtain information about who everyone is, logical and spatial skills in figuring out how to picture the web of relationships in a physical chart, and fine-motor skills in creating the chart.
Provide children with basic art supplies such as poster board, drawing materials, glue, string, ribbon, stickers, and so on. Children can sketch portraits of family members, or can use a digital camera to take, upload, and print off current images of them.
Once cousins have finished making the family tree, invite them to present it to the whole clan when everyone is seated for a big meal or at another time when the entire group's attention can be focused on hearing what the children have learned about the family and their place in it.
Have Cousins Conduct Interviews and Write a Family History Book
While cousins are working together as family genealogists, have them multitask and work as family historians too. Family members interested in preserving fun and important family lore can benefit from enlisting children to collect and record these valuable stories before they are forgotten or lost forever. In this activity as well, cousins will practice good teamwork and speaking and listening skills.
Depending on the ages of the child cousins at a family event, provide children with notebooks for taking notes or (if they can be trusted to use electronics without breaking them) recording devices or video cameras for taping interviews. As needed, help cousins organize how they will conduct interviews. For example, if there are many cousins present, children can pair up and each pair can interview a different list of relatives. If there are only a few cousins at a holiday event, cousins might conduct all interviews together and just move from relative to relative like a mobile news-gathering unit.
Suggest that cousins obtain at least one good story from each family member present. Some older members will have years and years of stories to tell, so some interviews may take longer than others or be conducted over the course of several family events. Suggest that family members bring old keepsakes or family photo albums to family gatherings to help jog memories and give cousins starting points for initial interview questions.
After cousins have collected the family tales, have them use scrap-booking materials or computer word processing programs to begin creating a family history book. If the pages are kept in a 3-ring binder, this book can be added to over time and become a family heirloom (one that will no doubt need to be color-copied and distributed to each branch of the family eventually!).
Have Cousins Document the Present Family Event
Remind cousins to preserve the story of the current event, too. As a final activity before the event ends, have cousins carry around a page for each family member to sign and write down a funny or interesting thing that happened on this day.
Activities such as making a family tree and interviewing family members build relationships between cousins by fostering a sense of teamwork, and by helping cousins from all branches of a family appreciate where they have come from and what they and other relatives mean to each other. At the end of the day, cousins will understand better what a treasure family can be.
Check out How to Help Child Cousins Stay in Touch, How to Plan for a Holiday Visit with Cousins, and How to Help Cousins Get Along at Family Events for more ideas on how to help cousins become good friends.
