A long time ago, in my very first SIT blog, I wrote about my nephew, Rani. Don’t worry though, it is not like I expect you to rememberJ. Anyway, a lot has changed since then but I’ll mention here just two relevant points: my nephew is now five years old and for the last 37.5 days he has been living in China with his parents and baby sister but unfortunately, without moi.

His move to China was accompanied by many concerns on my part, one of them being how do we manage to maintain our close relationship despite the formidable distance. I was reassured by friends saying that in today’s world, keeping in touch is much easier due to technology such as skype, but I kept wondering nevertheless how that would work when it comes to a 5-year old kid with the attention span of a… 5-year old kid.

37.5 days later, I can tell you: it works! I have between two to four weekly video calls with my nephew, each lasting something like 45 to 90 minutes.

The first time we had a skype video call, it was more of a Q&A type of thing but then I looked around and realized we are surrounded by a lot of elements that can be used to make our chat more interactive, more fun, more captivating and eventually last longer.

Let me give you a few examples of those elements identified and which activities we did using them:

Books: When I was home I noticed some of Rani’s favorite books left behind so I read to him. I just put the book itself close to the camera so he could see the pictures while he heard me reading it to him.

CDs: What I also had at home were his CDs so I put one of his favorite CDs on and we started dancing or actually more like going wild together (not recommended when you have an audience..)

Video camera: Moved the camera around and asked Rani to identify what he sees. He did the same thing and it became kind of a game with points gained for each item identified correctly.

Covered the camera with my hand, made a noise and asked Rani to identify the noise he heard.

Messages:

As Rani is just now learning his ABCs, I sent him one or two-word messages and asked him to read what I sent.

I asked him what he wanted me to write and sent him a message with this text.

Timer: for a kid as fascinated with numbers as this one, simply asking for a reading of the numbers, watching how they advance is considered an interesting activity with Aunt Iris.

Group video: add the grandparents to the chat and to the games. The more the merrier!

Our own faces: a staring competition to see who laughs first at the funny faces the other does. Again, not sure you’d want witnesses for that one…

The movements we do: triggered in me a childhood memory of the game “Simon says”. We added the grandparents to the game, by the way, using the group video which made it even more fun!

I hope that I have made the point about how easy it has been to come up with these practical ideas above simply by using what we have around us or as we call it at SIT our “Closed World”*.

By the way, our chats have become so successful that my sister- in-law actually found a substantial benefit for her. She sets up some of our chats herself to keep little Rani busy only so that she can take a much needed nap herself…