We have been doing NOTHING around here lately. Like, really and truly, nothing. When our family visited on New Year's, Jeff and I cooked from scratch (me- chili, Jeff- Boston Cream Pie) but that's about it.
I won't bore you with the details of the nothingness, but suffice it to say that it has involved way too much TV. I discovered Heroes, a show which I never saw when it aired, but Sean (our oldest) got on DVD for Christmas. I watched the entire 16 1/2 hours of the first season in about 3 days. I am not proud of this fact, but, there it is. (That show is like a soap opera, but with more interesting problems. The characters aren't very well developed, but they're likable.)
So, if your family has been lounging around in front of the TV like ours and you'd like to unstick everybody (or at least help with their reading skills), maybe this little trick will work…
Mute the volume and display the closed captioning. I used to do this all the time when the kids were younger. It works best when they're early readers, though I did start doing it long before Joey could read.
This does one of either two things…
-They become better readers.
-They choose to turn off the TV and do something else.
For my kids, I think it did a little bit of both.
Of course, you could get rid of the TV completely. Which is exactly what Jeff and I have been talking about doing.
Wish us luck if we go that route. We may have a full scale riot on our hands.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
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6 comments:
Love that idea! I can't get my husband to turn it off so the muting thing may work for us. :)
Great idea! When I was about 10 and my brother was about 8, we both took up our parents' challenge to go a year without TV. (Except for The Simpsons, which we always watched as a family.) At the end of the year, my parents gave us prizes - I got a gift certificate to my favorite bookstore. It was a good experience.
Our TV is in the most unappealing room of our house - a darkish basement family room. I chose the WRONG paint color for the room and the lighting isn't that great so we've cut our TV watching time quite a bit by default. This is a good thing - so I've been a little unmotivated to make the room more inviting.
I discovered Heroes on my Netflix instant watch a month or so ago. I did the same thing. I watched all of the episodes back to back (good knitting time) until I ran out of instant watch hours. Then, I was so obsessed I downloaded the ones I hadn't seen before through Amazon. Geez. I can't imagine how hard it would have been to wait a week between episodes if I had watched it on regular tv!
Sarah, good for you for choosing to not watch for a year. We'd have to get rid of it altogether. None of us have any sort of willpower.
Wendee, Oh, I should have been knitting while I watched those! I just sat there, slack jawed. And I know what you mean about not being able to wait between episodes. It was fantastic to be able to go to the next one when it said “To Be Continued.” Ha ha, not for me, Suckers!
And I ended up watching a lot of them on Netflix too (when the other people in the house were using the TV for Guitar Hero- another thing in our house I am not proud of).
So funny.
We killed our TV right after the ball dropped this year! :)
So far, so good! There is always the internet! LOL!
Love your blog!
RVM
We don't have television reception (it's available - we choose not to access it), and our TV is used for watching DVDs: movies,series we have enjoyed in the past or that are new to us, documentaries, etc. We've lived this way for almost 8 years and we do just fine. We do lots of reading, play games, lego, and creating all kinds of things.
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