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The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
10 Holiday-Themed Kids AI Activities
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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 big thing to know about me is that I absolutely love the holidays this time of year. This 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 4 and 7 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 into these 10 holiday themed kids AI activities. These were created through a collaboration between me five one and Gemini three. Of course. The first project is a kid authored interactive website we'll call My Urine Magic. The idea is a lightweight single page interactive website generated of course by AI through vive 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 repl it, 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. 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 interests 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 10 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 10ish 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 a 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 three to five 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 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. The next one stays on the giving theme and is another one I'm really excited to try. Obviously this time of year, no matter what sort of background or family experience you come from, it's a really good moment to think about people other than ourselves. And so the idea here I'm calling the Underdog ad agency. In short, your child becomes an ad executive or the chief marketer for a local animal shelter. They browse a shelter's website, pick an animal that has been there for a long time, that's the underdog, and use AI to create a superhero movie poster or a trading card profile for that animal. Then with the help of you, the parents, they can share that image to a local neighborhood group, to friends, or even just on Facebook to help try to get that animal adopted. This is a really fun, creative exercise for the child to take the animal's bio and translate it into something cool. So for example, needs a quiet home becomes The Silent Guardian. But it also teaches kids to use these new AI superpowers in the service of others. So how to do this? First off, visit a local shelter website and find some long term resident, read the bio together and then ask what is this cat or dog superpower? From there you can use an LLM to rewrite that standard bio into a more exciting movie trailer script and then use your image generator of choice to create a movie poster in whatever style you most like. Could be Pixar style, Disney style, K Pop, Demon hunter style, featuring of course an animal that looks just like the one in question. This is another one I am super excited to try with our family and I think that they are going to absolutely love number seven for those of you who do the Santa thing, if you are anything like me and my wife, we reference the nice and naughty list fairly frequently in December. So our seventh idea is the North Pole Insider report that uses AI audio to create personalized elf updates. Basically use ChatGPT's advanced voice mode or 11 labs to create the voice of a character, Alabaster, the head elf, for example. Each week the character gives the child a status update on their Naughty and nice rating based on specific real things they did this week. So the way that you would do this is separate from your child. You would tell either Advanced voice mode or 11 labs depending on what you're using. Something like you are Alabaster, the head of logistics at the North Pole. Speak in a hushed, hurried but warm excitement. You're calling to give a status update on your child's name. Mention that their nice rating spiked this week because of some specific good deed. Mention that you are currently double checking their list. End the call abruptly because you hear reindeer on the roof. Once you've got it, you can use your phone's screen record feature to capture the audio and then play it for your child. This one's a little silly, but seems like a fun way to positively reinforce the good deeds you want to see and those specific details. Like I saw you share your Legos on Tuesday in a character voice is so much more magical than just reading a letter. Now for those of you who want something a little bit more intensive, let me introduce you to the Gratitude Radio Hour, a kid hosted mini podcast. This would be a 3 to 6 minute mini podcast episode produced by AI where the kid is the host. Think of it as a holiday micro broadcast for the family. So to do this, you would ask your child two or three questions and record short clips on your phone. The questions could be something like favorite moment this year. What makes you thankful? Holiday wish for someone else. The AI transcribes and builds a script and can add transitions or suggest sound effects or music. You could use a tool like NotebookLM to bring it all together. You could even bring in something like 11 labs to create a co host that asks the questions that prompts it. And now unlike some of the other ideas, there might be a little bit more work to string this together with audio editing software, but it still could be a really fun way for your child to share what they're grateful for that year in a great little package that can be shared with family and friends. Ninth, coming down to the end here and coming back to the Santa list. For those of you who do that, this I'm calling the Living Santa Letter. The idea here is to take your child's letter to Santa or a drawing that they made, take a photo of it and insert it into something like nanobanana 2 to have it turn into some data visualization or infographic which then with VO 3.1 could be animated into something that moves. You could also just take an image that they've created and turn that into an AI image with nanobanana and then a video with VO 3.1. Ultimately the idea is to get that wow factor by having a kid's drawing or writing turn into something that moves. Lastly, another one that we are going to for sure be doing in our house, the family holiday song. Obviously we're using SUNO for this and what we're going to do is ask our kids for the things that they want to include in the song. That could be family member names, traditions, inside jokes, and of course the genre that they want the song in. We'll use an LLM to take all of those inputs and turn them into lyrics and then SUNO can take that text and turn it into an actual song. Now two prompting tips here. Ask for a clear chorus cuz Suno does well with repetition and avoid complex rhyming schemes because they confuse melody generation. This one I am sure is just going to be a massive hit in our household. In fact I think that we are going to probably have a full album rather than just a family holiday song. But imagine doing this every year over the scope of time. It just feels like a really cool artifact to have as something that you can look back on in the future. So there you have it. 10 holiday themed kids AI activities. Hopefully some of these provoke interesting ideas for you. If you do any of these, please let me know in the comments or on socials and from my gratitude perspective, I just wanted to say, of course, a great big thank you for all of your listening and watching and engaging over the course of 2025. The podcast has grown immensely and I'm so appreciative for all of your considered participation. We are headed into uncharted territory, there is just no doubt about that. But interacting with you guys, I am quite confident that on the dystopia to dream perspective, the chances that it ends up a dream are much more likely than I might otherwise have thought. And lastly, for the adults out there who want your own activities to try out all these new models, keep an eye out for tomorrow's episode. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. Until next time. Peace SA.