How ChatGPT helps me entertain my kids during the holiday season and into 2025
The holidays are a magical time, but let’s face it: Keeping a young child and a few energetic nieces and nephews entertained during those long winter breaks can be a challenge. Enter ChatGPT.
Although the AI-powered chatbot is mainly used for adults, it has more than a bit of Mary Poppins in its features. You might be surprised how well ChatGPT keeps kids creative, and not just during the holidays.
I’ve put together some of my favorite methods for using ChatGPT to improve playtime with my very young child and his slightly older cousins, and how I plan to keep this up over the coming year.
Stories of AI
Children love stories, and ChatGPT allows me to create characters that entertain them with endless stories and role-playing games. We started by designing a virtual magical snowman that told adventure stories, but since then we’ve become time-traveling princesses visiting dinosaurs and superhero astronauts going to other planets. I just have to ask ChatGPT to “pretend you’re a time-traveling princess. Tell us about your last trip to the Jurassic Era and the dinosaurs you met,” and I have a great story to tell, especially with the crazy voices I add. And if there are questions I don’t know how to answer, the AI princess is there as a backup. For next year I’m thinking of setting up a long-term interactive story with a new chapter where favorite characters return every now and then.
Art projects
ChatGPT’s AI image maker, DALL-E, is also bringing some visual flair this winter. Sometimes it has to do with the stories I tell, but sometimes it’s just random fun that I show off or suggest. We looked at images created in response to assignments such as ‘A friendly dragon playing in a magical forest’ and ‘A futuristic city on Mars with flying cars’. One fun thing to do is to make pure outline drawings of them and then print them out for the kids to color. For the coming year, I envision a family “art gallery,” where kids can display their AI-powered creations. . We will create themes for each season, and I will encourage them to explain what they saw the AI do.
Storybooks
When a child can’t see his favorite character, sometimes he wants to be the hero. ChatGPT makes it easy to create personalized stories featuring my little one and my nieces and nephews. This is good for quieter times when I don’t want them to be so involved, such as with the interactive characters and art. Instead, it’s a good way to quickly create a story that they’ll pay attention to at nap or bedtime. As the kids get older, I can even put together entire chapter books that combine all their favorite things and make them the stars of the story.
Edutainment AI
Children love to learn if you can make it fun. Even a one-year-old learning to talk gets excited when he finds out that two shapes are the same, and you praise him for it. You can ask ChatGPT to generate trivia games and quizzes at any level, with help from DALL-E for visual questions. You can even include mini lessons to help them learn. For example, I asked ChatGPT to “Make a trivia quiz for little kids about dinosaurs, including asking them to draw some or identify pictures. That was a bull’s eye. I even made one specific to the area of New York where we live, so they felt like it was a test based on their own lives. A small prize at the end for everyone was my own idea, but ChatGPT really brought the afternoon to life. I’d like to make this a full family activity in the coming year, maybe even tailor a family trivia night for the kids or let them help come up with topics so they can be the quiz masters.
AI Maestro
Music is another way to entertain kids, and ChatGPT’s creative writing skills can help you compose custom songs for any occasion. Using prompts like, “Write a fun, rhyming song about cleaning your room, with a catchy chorus,” we created silly jingles that make everyday tasks more fun. With a little finesse, I can even get ChatGPT to come up with lyrics that match the melody of some of their favorite songs. For example, I asked the AI what key and time signature Yankee Doodle is in, and then had it come up with lyrics that matched the style, except that the words were about everything they had to do before going to bed. They’re all a bit young for anything more musically complicated, but one day I’d love to make a whole album of songs we collaborate on, enhanced with AI help in terms of rhyme schemes and musical aspects.