cwist Kids Challenge: Travel Activities

I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting for CWIST. I received a promotional item as a thank you for participating.

How do you get your kids to do things? Do you use positive reinforcement with them? I was pretty excited to see a new website that offers kids challenges with a twist. This is a great way to get kids to do some pretty great things.

About CWIST

cwist – kids’ challenges with a twist – is a parent-educator collaboration that provides an interactive library of educational, community service and outdoor challenges that help kids make a healthy connection between the things they want and the effort it takes to get them. Our interactive library includes thousands of educational, community service and outdoor challenges for kids, contributed by parents and educators.

For example, kids can:

• Create a totem pole to learn about Native Americans.
• Spend a day at a Farmer’s Market to better understand where your food comes from.
• Learn how to play a new sport, from baseball to tennis.
• Make a difference in the world by cleaning up a stream or park.

cwist also motivates kids to earn the things they ask for by setting goals and rewarding them for their accomplishments. Children make a wish, and parents assign a challenge that the kid will love doing because it’s tailored to their interests and it’s fun.

cwist makes parents’ lives easier by connecting them to a community of parents and educators and a library of “crowd-sourced learning” challenges that motivate kids to earn the things what they want. Parents love it because it teaches their kids life, literacy and work ethic. Kids love it because the challenges are exciting and rewarding.

I only signed up my Kindergartner for this site. Once I signed up via Facebook, I added my daughter’s information. I scrolled through the cwists and the wishes. I added ones that would work well for my daughter, her age, and personality. I also added wishes that I knew she’d love. Wishes included toys, games, homemade, music, clothing and so much more.

We wanted to do something simple for our first cwist. So we picked, “Are We There Yet?” – this means taking a road trip without electronics. The result is hopefully a fun trip with more family interaction and car games.

We traveled on Saturday a little over 2 hours in the car – no electronics. We did listen to Christmas music. And played games. Here are three car games we like:

1. Counting Christmas Trees – how many are on the tops of cars.
2. I Spy
3. I Packed My Grandmother’s Trunk: alphabet game

What are your family’s favorite car games?

The wish we choose from was a dessert of choice. Because she completed her cwist, she picked out a slice pumpkin pie with whipped cream as her wish.

This is just one very simple example of a cwist. There are so many more. I love that you can narrow them down by age. You can also filter out ones that don’t require parental help.

cwist For Kids

Similar to above, this section of cwist enables kids to earn gifts for kids in need. cwist will give $1,000 worth of gifts this holiday season. All you need to do is pick a child, pick out a gift, and assign a cwist to your child.That is an easy way to give a child a gift! We chose a 4 year old girl to give a doll too. This is all done via the website.

I looked through the cwists available for my daughter and choose “The Twelve Days of Christmas Cost What?”. While looking at the song we figured out how much the gifts would cost if we had to buy them all – over $100K! {Fun, right?} This teaches my daughter that gifts really do cost a lot of money. It adds up quickly. So many families in our own country, state, and town cannot afford to give their kids gifts. cwist has enabled our family to help a child easily this holiday season!

Won’t you try cwist for with your children?

Signing up is easy and free.

Check it out today!