[Zettel Feedback] Podcast with children

ctietze

202301041111 Making family podcast with kids

#podcast #children #memorabilia

Make a podcast with kids: maybe share with the family, but not public.

Then you have memories to look back on later as the kids grow up. Meanwhile, the family has something to listen to once in a while without needing to visit. This could e.g. keep grandparents that don't live nearby in touch with their grandchildren, and a kind of conversation going. (Depends on the age of the child.)

Ideas for topics:

• what questions (about life, the world) do you want answered?
• what happened last week/month?
• what are you playing right now?
• just: what's on your mind? -- free form talk

Idea from this story:

When my daughter was 8 we made a six episode podcast together just talking about stuff. We didn't keep going, but revisiting the episodes is so nice. A couple of episodes had her 4 year old siblings too and hearing their tiny little voices and enthusiastic stuttering is bringing us joy.

I'm glad we did it, and I am now wishing we had more of these sorts of memories.
---2023-01-04 https://mastodon.social/@screenbeard@aus.social/109630263269445123
@nighthawk it was just at an age where they had heaps of questions and I could explain stuff to the best of my knowledge. We sat down and wrote down a bunch of questions on cards and then picked a card for each episode.
One we did on holiday, talked about that. One we went and watched the sunrise and recorded.
The two with the younger kids we talked about stuff they couldn't shut up about - superheroes and star wars.
---2023-01-04 https://mastodon.social/@screenbeard@aus.social/109630315456555280

Will

Hi @ctietze,

I'll take a stab at a friendly critique of your note.

1. The note has two ideas: why and how to make family podcasts. It could be split in two, each being developed and integrated separately as interest grows.
2. The author is referenced in the second mastodon quote but not the first.
3. There are no links deeper into your zettelkasten present.

The content is interesting.
With some thought, the "Ideas for topics" list will expand. One way to handle this is to create a separate linked note. For example, I have a note containing a long list of "conversation starters" over the last year or so; when I've come across a conversation starter I haven't heard before, I add it to the list. A list of topic ideas for what to talk about with kids during a podcast seems ripe for this kind of treatment. Keyboard Maestro can help with this project.

1. What is your favorite cartoon animal?
2. What superpower do you wish you had and why?
3. Let's make up a song and sing it.

I'm sure other ideas will surface.

chrisaldrich

To extend, it could be an interesting exercise to have the kids call up grandmother and grandfather to interview them with questions about when they were growing up, about their parents, and their grandparents. Then you're also getting some of the family oral history together not only for yourself, but for your children as well as future generations.

I have a nascent card very much like yours, but not as well fleshed out yet.

ctietze

Thank you for the ideas!

@chrisaldrich said:
To extend, it could be an interesting exercise to have the kids call up grandmother and grandfather to interview them with questions about when they were growing up, about their parents, and their grandparents. Then you're also getting some of the family oral history together not only for yourself, but for your children as well as future generations.

Yeah, we never got around to spend time with my grandfather to collect some of his stories in a more organized way before he died. -- I'd be game for a recording session with a nice cup of tea in hand and my grandchildren as moderators

@Will said:
With some thought, the "Ideas for topics" list will expand. One way to handle this is to create a separate linked note. For example, I have a note containing a long list of "conversation starters" over the last year or so

This is a good point. The list is not large, yet, but it may become larger, of course!. It feels a bit pre-mature to extract it right way because there're so few items, but making it its own thing and seeing it in isolation prompted me to expand it already.

And when I had this Ideas for (recorded) conversations with children note and read @chrisaldrich's remark, I noticed I don't have a list of topics I would've liked to ask my deceased grandfather. Or things to ask one's parents.

So now I've assembled

• an overview of assorted notes about my grandfather, expanded by stories I do remember
• a note about my family, with a list of the 'important' family members from my vantage point (i.e. for now starting at my grandparents and focusing on their journey and family history, with their plentiful siblings as mere side-players)
• a list of talking points with parents etc.
• the extracted list of ideas for recorded conversations with children

That was quite interesting and opens a new "department" in my Zettelkasten for personal things like this.

Will

@ctietze said:
The list is not large, yet, but it may become larger, of course!. It feels a bit pre-mature to extract it right way because there're so few items, but making it its own thing and seeing it in isolation prompted me to expand it already.

Expansion is led by focus. By taking time to edit, carve up, and refactor our notes, we put focus on ideas. This starts the Great Wheel of Positive Feedback. All hail to the Great Wheel of Positive Feedback.

An application I might suggest here is the Quick Entry Form @Sascha helped develop or Append to List, which is a script that takes highlighted text and appends to a note. These tools make it easy to add to an list of prompts quickly.

That was quite interesting and opens a new "department" in my Zettelkasten for personal things like this.

It sounds like you're excited about this new branch of your ZK. This is one of the great benefits of being an active poster on the forums. Things come at you, exploding from the Gatling gun of ideas, some striking the heart, some only causing peripheral wounds, and some missing entirely.

GeoEng51

@ctietze There are some good ideas for personal interviews with family members, including a list of open-ended questions (in an Appendix), here:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Creating_Oral_Histories

ctietze

@Will Yes, working "in the open" is very advantageous. There're so many interestings conversations to be had!

@GeoEng51 Thanks for the link! These are great questions!

ctietze

Related, I re-discovered this in a note, a quote of @Massimo_Curatella

Massimo_Curatella

Hello, Christian and All!
It's so nice to be pulled back into this cozy place. I've learned so much here and I found some of the best online community members.
I completely forgot that article and, I must say, it brought me just a little tear of joy and nostalgia.
The best consideration about this is how those crazy random articles actually became seeds in the wind. And some of them blossomed.
By the way, I ended up writing one year privately and one year publicly.
During pandemic lockdowns I came up with a "Creazee" writing coaching course that was fun, inspiring and exhausting.
I learned so much during my absence from this forum.
I missed your threads.

---

I love your idea of a family podcast with kids.
And I would be really curious to apply it myself.

Nice to read you all, friends.

Nick

I'd add to it that you want to skew towards personal/life questions more so than what are you curious about in the world and I will explain it to you like you are 5 questions. I think that is more interesting to look back on years later than talking about random trivia facts that the kids are curious about (not saying you can do both though).