By Lindsay Lamb
When the pandemic first hit, Andrea and I wrote a few posts about working at home with our kids. I’ll be honest – I thought it was something that would be over sooner rather than later. Now that we are nearly 8 months in to working and learning from home, honestly, not much has changed. If, like me, your child is still at home learning you might find yourself in need of a break from “zoom-school.”
One thing that got my family through a particularly difficult fall was getting excited about Halloween. Traditionally, our neighborhood goes all out for Halloween. Nearly every house has decorations and several streets are shut down to throw a huge block party. Houses on these streets are open for all to enter. Some are turned into haunted houses and others showcase incredible decorations inside the home (and hand out top notch candy). My daughter had the time of her life with two of her closest friends last year… while my son (who was a little over 1 at the time) threw in the towel rather early in a fit of tears. Oh well, I thought, maybe next year!
Oops.
Since our neighborhood block party and traditional trick-or-treating won’t be an option this year, I knew I needed to do something to keep my daughter excited about Halloween (which is her favorite holiday). As we were walking around the neighborhood one evening admiring the decorations, I thought of something fun for us to do instead (reminder: I’m a data nerd, so my idea of fun might be different from yours!): document all of the Halloween decorations in our neighborhood to determine which decorations were most popular. I made all of us (including my husband and Hayes) hypothesize which decoration would win. I also included a few more guiding questions for Hannah including, would we see more Halloween decorations the closer we got to Halloween? Which streets (or blocks) had the most decorations? What was the spookiest house? Which house had the most decorations?
Every day Hannah took off on her bike with lightning speed and I trailed behind her with Hayes and Lola (our dog) in tow. We stopped to take pictures and document all of the decorations we saw (which was a great way to chat with neighbors). Hannah never complained about riding her bike (which she started to do frequently in the summer); she was on a mission. My little scientist had to collect data.
In addition to Hannah truly enjoying the project, Hayes began honing his skills at spying skeletons, spiderwebs, and pumpkins. I was grateful to get us out of the house, forget about all the seriousness going on in the world these days, and see them truly be happy if even for a bit. When we got home, I helped Hannah document all of the decorations we saw. She made a list of each kind of decoration (e.g., skeletons, spiderwebs) and added a check for each time she saw a house with that particular decoration.
Hannah documenting Halloween decorations. 
Hannah working on her graph.
Hannah tallied how many houses we saw each day (28 was an all-time max!), and how many of each decoration we saw that day. It was fun! As an added bonus, I was sneakily getting her to practice handwriting, math, reading, and PE! It was great!
On our last day, she was excited to see the results come in – although we had a pretty good guess what the results would be.
I helped her count up the decorations, figured out what we saw the most (and least) of, and then we made a graph.
Then I showed her how to make the graph in excel and talked to her about percentages. As we worked, I talked about how I do this type of thing in my job so I can help people make sense of things they want to count. Like the number of students who are engaged in online learning, the number of students from low-income communities who graduate high school and college, the number of high risk students who experience academic improvements because of a community based support model, and the number of teen parents who believe their relationships have improved as a result of an program designed to strengthen relationships.
Now she at least some idea why I lock myself in the closet for a couple hours at a time every day… and maybe she thinks it is worth it. Who knows, we might even have a future data nerd in the family.