by Eric Weiss
There’s nothing bigger than a child’s imagination. That can be a problem if you have to keep that imagination occupied while you figure out what to do with your child during the summer.
Thankfully, the creative activity of worldbuilding is a great way to keep your kid engaged with worlds that are as limitless as their imagination!
Keep reading to learn how you can worldbuild with your kids, along with some recommendations for follow-up exercises you can use to support their creative education!
What is worldbuilding?
Worldbuilding is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the process of making a fictional world, filled with lost cities, legendary heroes, magic animals, and whatever else you may care to put there (you can learn more in our Worldbuilding 101 blog, or in the FAQ at the bottom of our worldbuilding prompts collection). Worldbuilding is a crucial part of storytelling and role play, and kids do it every day whenever they make up a silly game on the playground.
In other words, worldbuilding is something your kids already love doing. All you need to do is encourage them to follow their creative instincts – and that’s where a resource like Deck of Worlds can help!
How to start worldbuilding with your child
Worldbuilding is captivating because it’s a source of endless discovery. Your apartment, your backyard, and even your neighborhood will all start to feel familiar after a while. In a fictional world, there’s always something new, something that no one has seen because it hasn’t yet been invented.
That's also why worldbuilding is a good answer to the question of what to do with your child during the summer. You can start by drawing inspiration from the world around you, or you can use a worldbuilding tool or game.
Deck of Worlds is designed to add structure to that process. You draw one card at a time to create a setting. Each new card unlocks new pathways and new points of interest that can be used to expand the world, and your kid will need to follow those paths if they want to know what’s waiting at the end of the trail. See how it works in the demo below!
You can guide your kid's exploration with a few open-ended questions. Whenever your they draw a card, ask them how the new prompt connects to the world they’ve already created. They’ll start making the ties on their own, while you get to witness the wonder in their eyes as a vast realm unfolds before them!
Author Seth Ring did just that with his own 9-year-old daughter, and captured the entire process in a post on our blog:
"As the cards continued to land, a theme began to appear, and I could see her making the connections between the different landmarks: a town founded by a secret society, farms inhabited by refugees, a dangerous abandoned mine that was home to an outlaw, and a windswept lake where a now extinct animal once lived."
Make sure you read Seth's full guest blog for more tips on worldbuilding with your kid!
Expand on that idea
Once you’ve finished worldbuilding, there are all kinds of fun activities you can do with the setting you’ve created—all good candidates for what to do with your child during the summer. For example, you could use the world as the backdrop for a story, a game, or a basic writing exercise. Encourage your kid to write a letter from a person in their world, or simply ask them to jot down their favorite part of it with a little more detail. What does the setting look like? What do people eat? What kind of animals live there?
If your kid is more artistically inclined, you could instead encourage them to draw a map of their world, or paint a picture of one of the features in it. Ask them to show you what the world looks like, and then let their imagination bring those possibilities to life.
If you're looking for a structured activity, we have an expansion for Deck of Worlds that prompts creations from your child's world. See it in action in the demo below!
Just give your child the motivation to keep exploring, and then see where inspiration takes them once you open the door!
Make learning fun!
No matter how you choose to do it, worldbuilding is a fun way to help your kid explore their creativity as you figure out what to do with your child during the summer. It’s also a great way to pass the summer months and make the world seem even bigger than it already is.
There are lots of places waiting to be discovered, and different styles of worldbuilding to experiment with. Try worldbuilding with your kids to start exploring them together!
P.S. If you’d like to try Deck of Worlds, you can sign up for our mailing list below and get 10% off your first order.