By Pat Austin
My sons, Peter and Mark, were about 10 and 8 years old. They were getting tired of Myth Busters and Crocodile Hunter on Discovery (back when it wasn’t about Moonshiners and being Naked and Afraid), so we’d all watch the endless stream of prime-time procedural forensic detective dramas that clogged the networks.Nothing stuck out more than a weekly visit from David Caruso.
Standing over a corpse, he’d drop some casually awful wordplay, put on (or take off) his sunglasses and squint into the South Florida glare as Roger Daltrey’s “Yeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh” and Pete Townshend’s power A-chord exploded in triumphant rock ’n roll crescendo. CSI: Miami was the cliched cocktail of low-cut lab techs, salty blood spatter experts and heavy-handed, never-wrong exposition and supposition that delivered audiences a tidy corpse/experts/suspect/plot twist/bad-guy-in-cuffs guilty pleasure, wrapped up in 44 minutes (minus commercials).
The boys loved the stylized super sleuthing and mildly science-y cop drama, prompting conversations about the “powers of observation”. One rainy Saturday, we found ourselves talking about fingerprints, clues and crime-solving challenges faced by detectives. The boys were showing signs of boredom and I had a Caruso-like brainstorm. I reached for my sunglasses.
Who “won’t get fooled again?” This guy… Within a few minutes we were onto “CSI: Living Room”. Cue Daltrey and Townshend, then follow these simple rules for a free afternoon of brain-teasing kidplay:
- Give the youngsters roughly 30 seconds to move about the living room, making as many mental (not written) notes as they can about the space and everything in it. Advise them to JUST LOOK and remind them that no other senses will be required.
- After that, send them out of the room for as long as it takes for you to change 3 things in the room. These are the ‘fingerprints’ the little detectives will, um… detect. You can move objects around, hide them, or introduce new things into the room that weren’t there. Here are the first simple moves we made:
1. Move the remote control from the coffee table to the floor.
2. Take a few pillows off the couch.
3. Turn on the ceiling fan, if it was off (or vice versa)
Tell them to come back to the ‘scene’ and see who can spot the ‘fingerprints’. 2 out of 3 wins the round. Play as many rounds as you can.
Notes and Variations:
- Start out with the obvious, easy-to-spot changes. Then, after a few rounds, make the clues more subtle; maybe just rearrange the pillows or point the remote control in a different direction.
- Mix it up after a few rounds and let the kids think up the clues while YOU become the Gary Sinise or LL Cool J (tied with Ice-T for my favorite hip-hop detective)
- As the game goes on, discuss each ‘fingerprint’ and what it could possibly mean. Get them to think about their everyday surroundings. What their school rooms look like. Can they recall the details of a place they haven’t been to recently? How “photographic” is memory? The conversation can really go anywhere from there. As a rainy-day game, this one is good for a solid 45 to 60 minutes. You can always break out Uno or Monopoly as a cool-down. Or you could find new variations on the game.CSI: Kid’s Room (can be really interesting and funny if the room is already a mess)
CSI: Kitchen, Garage, Grandma’s Living Room (Turn all of the “Precious Moments” figurines 180 or have them square off for battle! Get creative and see just how observant the kiddos can be.)
The fun never ends:
As I write this and remember all the details, Mark came by my desk. Not knowing what I was working on, this nearly 18-year-old high school senior, requested that we play this game again when Peter, now 20, comes home from his sophomore year at college.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.