10 Holiday-Themed Kids AI Activities

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, 10 holiday-themed AI activities for kids. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, well, today is of course Thanksgiving, and this is a surprise episode. Normally, the way that we work here at AI Daily Brief is it's six days a week, not Saturday, and federal holidays are off, and that was the plan heading into this week. But as I was doing the 10 AI projects to learn about all these awesome new models episode that you'll get tomorrow, heading into the long weekend, I had this idea to do one that was a little bit more focused on kids and really got into the spirit of the season. Now, a big thing to know about me is that I absolutely love the holidays, this time of year, the traditions, really from about September 1st through New Year's. This is my favorite time. And we are, of course, entering the peak of that with the Thanksgiving to Christmas stretch. I also happen to believe, it will surprise you none, that done right, AI can be an incredibly creativity unlocking tool for kids. They are going to grow up in this world with these tools. And while there are major questions of how we redesign education, how we redesign the economy, the one constant is that these tools will be there and they will need to know how to use them. And so hopefully some of these ideas are fun ways to get that process started. Now, my kids are four and seven, and that will probably come through in these ideas. This is much more for that set than it is for teenagers. But hopefully these give you some fun ideas for things to do, maybe to kill some time in and around the holidays as you wait for school to start again. But without any further ado, let's dive in to these 10 holiday-themed kids' AI activities. These were created through a collaboration between Me, 5.1, and Gemini3, of course. The first project is a kid-authored interactive website we'll call My Year in Magic. The idea is a lightweight, single-page interactive website generated, of course, by AI through vibe coding that summarizes your child's year. The child provides the memories, and maybe the parent adds some images or videos, and then AI handles the design, theme, copy, layout, animations, and a vibe. Ultimately, what it turns into is a kind of digital scrapbook. Kids get to see their ideas and experiences turned into a website, parents get a keepsake without spending hours designing, and overall, this can model reflection and gratitude in a fun modern way. So how to do it? Ask your child three to five prompts. Favorite moments, something you learned, who are you grateful for? From there, ask them to choose a theme. Rainbow Detective, Snow Dragon, Ninja Robots. Feed the answers and the theme into your vibe coding platform of choice, lovable, replete, you name it, and publish it as a shareable site. Now, any of the modern vibe coding platforms are going to be able to get you all the way to a published website without needing to export it to GitHub or anything like that. So you can do this all in one sitting. A couple of quick prompt tips on this one. First of all, another thing that can make it more personalized to your child is a color palette if that's something that they care about. And the second thing is tell it to stick to illustrations as hyper realistic images could look creepy.
Next up, we have the Gratitude Coloring Book. This is a custom coloring book where every page is based on something your child is grateful for. Rendered of course in simple black and white line art. One of the most common things that I see parents experiment with with these tools and have been for some time is using image generation models to create your own custom coloring pages. They've been really good at this for a while. And of course, you can get hyper specific and niche in terms of your interest in ways that you're not going to find on Amazon when it comes to a coloring book. Once again, this is a fun way to model and think about gratitude and thankfulness. But it also could be a time saver when the parents are trying to get things ready, perhaps for a big Thanksgiving party. So how to do it? Ask your kid for five to ten things that they're grateful for. Feed the list into your AI image model of choice. Like I said, pretty much anyone's going to do a good job with this. I know Gemini 3 would. Generate the items in a consistent line art style and then print and staple them together to create a book. Two prompt tips again on this one. Tell the model to use simple line art with thick outlines to avoid overly detailed images and ask it to match style across pages just so you don't get wild variation and it feels like a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Our next idea is fairly well trodden territory for the parental AI use case, which is of course using AI to generate a story. And I'm going to run through an idea with a particular lens, but really you can do any type of story or framing that would be resonant with your child. With this Forest of Thanks idea, it would be a 10-ish page micro story where your child is the protagonist helping woodland creatures prepare for winter or a holiday feast. You would ask your child to name two or three friendly animals, ask for a very simple moral, maybe give them a choice of a few, such as helping others, sharing or being brave, and then use your LLM of choice to generate a 10-page story, one to two sentences each, and give you an image prompt for each page. Then of course you would use an image model to illustrate it and put it all together. Now, I would be inclined to suggest Gemini 3 for this just because it has that integrated multimodal capability, but of course ChatGPT can do that as well, and if you prefer another option, pretty much any model is gonna do a good job with this one. In terms of tips, I'd suggest instructions like soft pastel storybook style for the illustrations, and tell the model no scary or dramatic conflict. Now, more so than even some of the other ideas, this is one where you might have to modulate based on the age of your child. This is definitely slanted for that younger age. Obviously you can go a little bit more advanced and mature depending on how old your particular young one is. Next up, we take a similar idea from number two, but bring it into the realm of holiday card season. The idea here is to get AI to generate printable black and white holiday cards in simple line art that your kids color and then can give to teachers, friends, family or neighbors. Even though the AI is doing the base image, it's a lot more personalized than just the generic card because the child is A, doing the coloring and B, even inputting into what should be in the images in the first place. So to do this, have your child pick 3 to 5 themes, and remember, you can get really weird in ways that Amazon coloring books or cards aren't going to have. You want snow unicorns, get snow unicorns. You want hot chocolate robots, do hot chocolate robots. Ask AI to generate the card outlines and then either print it on paper and put it on cardstock or print it on cardstock directly depending on your printer or access to a staples or FedEx. Once again, from a prompting tip perspective, add thick outlines for easy coloring and ask it to keep all the cards in a consistent visual style. Although I guess if you prefer, because these are going to be handed out individually, they don't all have to be in the same style if you want to get experimental. The next one is one that I really love. So one of our big traditions is the advent calendar. In fact, we have a bunch of them. I think we are about to start a Disney Lego advent calendar, a MagnaTiles advent calendar, plus we have a little old classic wooden one that has room for one tiny little candy or something sweet in each day, and then my favorite one is this big wooden advent calendar that has openable slots where we put kid coupons in. The idea of kid coupons is it's basically some activity with a kid and a parent where they pull them out each day and can then later on hand one in and get that activity. So for my son, it's going to be something like go to the hardware store. So we're taking the idea of an advent calendar, but instead of getting, we're turning the focus to giving. So the kindness advent calendar would be a custom 24-day advent calendar where each day reveals a simple kindness mission designed for kids. To get this started, have the child choose a theme, winter helpers, elf missions, kindness quests, and then maybe give a few ideas to get it started. Smile at a neighbor, make a new friend, help set the table. You feed the theme and the thought starters into an LLM, and then you could either print this as a visual maybe using Gemini 3 to make it an infographic, or you could vibe code it and turn it into a website that was interactable. I think this one is super fun. It's one that we're definitely going to try this year. Two things I would recommend in the prompting. First, make sure these are small tasks. I'd suggest saying something like make tasks doable in five minutes. And then secondly, I would definitely avoid guilt-based tasks, keeping it fun. It's meant to remind people that giving feels really good and is something that we should do throughout the year.