Parents & Kids: For the Record...Track Your Quarantine

My note to parents during these strange days of Covid19.

Ask your kids to track their days living under quarantine. Why? 

The future.

(I know: working from home and teaching your kids is asking a lot.)

Ask your children–of all ages including teens and college kids, to make a record of these days. There are lots of ways to get it done:

o   Old-fashioned journaling.

o   Write letters to oneself to be opened in 25 years.

o   Make a podcast diary or a video diary…even younger kids can do this with some help.

o   Make a time capsule in a shoebox. Add small trinkets, tagged with their meaning. Or take pictures and either print them out or have them made at the drug store. Tag them with a caption. Or add the family’s favorite quarantine recipe.

o   (For that matter, make a quarantine cookbook!)

o   Write random thoughts on sticky notes or notecards and put them in an album or a shoe box. Be sure to put the date on each.

Whatever works for your child is best. Years from now, when young people ask your grown-up kid how it felt to be alive during the Great Quarantine of 2020, there will be that notebook, or time capsule or album or thumb drive.  All will be fine examples of

Primary sources

Primary sources, what nonfiction writers like me count on to add spark and color to our work, can be more than words. They can be things. My fav is the notepad my grandpa used in when he was a young World War I soldier. Another is wartime sheet music that’s 100 years old. And, of course, Grandpa, aka bugler Frederick Urban Logan, striking a pose with his friend Oscar Longhar.