Let me start by telling you about Cooper Kits. It’s a quarterly subscription club for dads that provides them with themed kits full of activities they can do with their kids. You can order a single kit with a quarterly subscription, or sign up for a year, and a new kit will be mailed out to you every three months.
Each kit includes hands on learning activities, activities for creative self-expression, conversation starters, and building activities. All the activities are centered around a theme and are designed to be gender neutral. For example, the Music: A Sound Odyssey Kit comes with a vibrating speaker and drums for kids to learn about sound as vibration and a jug banjo and pan flute to learn about pitch. It also comes with hair chalk (for that punk rocker look) and a directions book for building the musical instruments, learning songs to play on them, and suggested activities.
As far as gender neutral is concerned, I think that will really depend on each individual’s point of view, but I think this kit does a pretty good job. Music is something both boys and girls enjoy. The hair chalk may not go over as well with everyone, but it’s a nice option. The building each instrument part is cool, because the push in education right now is to get kids to develop problem solving skills through collaboration and hands on manipulation.
Anyway, Cooper Kits might not be for everybody, especially if you’ve got a really tight budget, but it is an award winning product for a reason. I participated in a similar program when my oldest son was in pre-K and we loved it. It was such a big deal to get the box and open it to see what was inside, to dump it all out and try to decide what to do first. It really was a bonding and learning experience. So, if you can afford it, I would try it out. It’s important to spend some quality time that’s not “screen time” with our kids, and if you’re not sure what to do, at least Cooper Kits gives you the ideas and all the components to do them in one box.