The Trip Clip Blog | Make Any List Then:

Looking for a unique gift idea?  Try a magnet pack from The Trip Clip! There are morning and bedtime routine magnets, chore magnets, after school magnets, or a collection of the 20 most popular ones.  Each magnet pack is $3.95 and contains 20 1” magnets. These make great stocking stuffers for kids AND parents!

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For kids who need very specific instructions to learn a task, or remember how to do it, a visual checklist is a great tool!

You can print this as is for free, or sign up on The Trip Clip website to edit this to make it work right for your family.

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My family has made the difficult decision to not gather for Thanksgiving this year. With virus counts increasing everywhere, and elderly, at risk relatives in the mix, we’ve decided we will do our best to find ways to celebrate virtually.

Our plan is to gather via Zoom not for a full meal, but just for dessert. To make it feel a little more celebratory, we’re going to kick off the full holiday seasons with a Secret Turkey gift exchange. We’ll each get assigned a person to get a small gift for which we’ll order online and have them delivered straight to the recipient to be opened on the zoom call Thanksgiving Day.

I also had the idea of having a Scavenger Hunt. We haven’t tried this yet, but here’s the plan:

We will divide up into teams of 2, preferably matching up teams so that no 2 people are in the same household, though they will each need to have their own device to connect with their partner via a phone call, Face Time, or some other app.

One person won’t play but will instead run the game and be the judge.

At the same time, the judge will give every player the list of things to find around their house. You can send them the link so they can print it out, or they can use the list online via a mobile phone using the The Trip Clip website. You can print this list here for free.

With an account on The Trip Clip website you can edit this list to customize it for your family. If you have trouble coming up with ideas you like, use the Bingo Board activity to refresh a Custom Bingo Board with random pictures, and then put those pictures on your Scavenger hunt list. Your family members can get creative to find something to match the picture, whatever it may be!

When the Judge says “Go”, each team should make a plan for finding the items on their list between their two households. When they find an item, and show it to their partner to make sure they agree, they should take a picture of it with their phone and then text that picture to the Judge.

The Judge should have multiple printouts of the scavenger hunt printed out and ready to record when they receive a picture from a team.

The first team to prove to the judge that they have found every item on the list wins! Or you can have a time limit, and the team that has found the most things within the time limit wins. The prize can be something simple like a gift card delivered electronically in email. Or just bragging rights!

The Trip Clip website makes it easy to set up a magnet (or hook and loop) school schedule that is customized for your kids. This is especially helpful for kids who need to be able to visualize their schedule and the progress they’re making through their day so they can understand and be reassured in knowing what is coming next.

Print this and hang it next to your kid’s computer at home. Talk it over with them, too, to make sure they fully understand the importance of verifying information before spreading it farther, how permanent their posts really are, and how easy it can be to be hurtful when you’re hiding behind a screen.

I created this checklist with middle schoolers in mind, but many adults would probably benefit from remembering these rules as well!

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These are all new issues for our generation of parents – we’re all learning as we go. The responsibility of raising good digital citizens is a big one, and we have to learn fast. Each of us sets the tone for ourselves, for our kids, and for our global online community with every post we make. We should all stop and think before we post about what we want that community to look like!

Let your kids participate in election day with their own, kid-friendly ballot! They can vote for what you have for dinner, and help choose how your family will spend the day or evening. It’s a great way to involve them in election day and start teaching them a little about the election process and how it works.

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You can also edit these categories to be whatever you want them to be. If you try it, send me your ballot at molly@thetripclip.com, or just let me know if your kids enjoyed voting!

A visual reminder in the classroom for special needs kids can help them remember all the expectations at school.

You can print this or edit it!

I received some good feedback from teachers about my discount for schools, and have made some small changes as a result.

Individual teachers can now get 30% off

Schools can get 75% off with a purchase of 5 or more accounts

The Trip Clip is a great resource for teachers. You’ll find an easy way to make a picture checklist of the day’s schedule, reading BINGO, a custom word search maker great for practicing spelling lists, and other tools so you can make healthy snack suggestions, exercise trackers, and more!

Click here to learn more!

One surprising impact of the Coronavirus at my house is how many more reminders my middle schooler seems to need now. Although he used to be pretty self-sufficient, the combination of staying at home for 6 months, having no scheduled activities, and mostly playing video games during that time, seems to have set him back. With school fully online, he is struggling with the lack of structure and daily comings and goings that helped him stay on top of everything. Even basic tasks like showering regularly, have fallen by the wayside (and who among us hasn’t skipped the occasional shower when we know we’re not leaving the house?).

To counteract this, we are trying a new organizer for him that I created with The Trip Clip.

Print it for free

Each day he fills this out, making a plan for when he will do each of these things that day, and then it’s up to him to make sure he follows his plan and gets everything done by the end of the day. It puts him in charge of his schedule, and removes the burden for me to remember to check on all of these things each day – I can just ask him how he’s doing on his organizer for today.

Without this list, he was occasionally waiting until an hour before bedtime to start homework, having forgotten that he was also supposed to exercise (because there’s no soccer now), practice his instrument, and leave some time to shower and read before bed. He also wouldn’t check how much schoolwork he had until he sat down to do it, and then would get overwhelmed by how much there was to do. Maybe it’s the fact that he only has his classes 2 days each week, and so the workload is bigger with multiple days break between, but he is having a lot of trouble keeping in his head what he has to do for each class and seems perpetually surprised by all the assignments.

This planner is helping him recognize that he has more than an hour of responsibilities every day in addition to online school, and he’s going to need to work on his time management skills to get it all done.

If you try this, or you have another system for helping your kids get through online school, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!