We walked into his place and he turned on a video of himself at Fire School and plunked the kids down in front of it (the youngest was 5). There was a swimming pool full of jet fuel that they set on fire. Then he stops the tape, rewinds slightly, starts it again and says, “Look, here’s where the wind changes and my instructor catches on fire! There we are putting him out.”

My mind still boggles over the idea that that was appropriate to show 5, 7 & 10 year olds.

I find free events by reading the paper, checking out community bulletin boards and word of month. I love cheap activities! They make this single mom’s life fun.

My sister-in-law usually finds events through either her ‘mommy’ peer groups, she spends quite a lot of time at the local rec centre, lots of groups on facebook whose sole purpose is free events for kids, RFD has a tonne, and local community centre magazines/flyers if you get those.

I agree and I understand the system you are talking about. The RSS email, mailing list, and etc.. I can create a system for it and make it automated. I already developed those system on some of my sites. Check below.
However, the work to fill the mailing list and marketing are the issues.

Check some of the models that I have developed:

http://BizPR.ca – Canadian Free PRess Release Submission http://SmallBizPages.ca – Canada’s Free small business directory
http://SmallBizAds.ca – Canada’s Free Small business Classified Ads

Not sure exactly where you are located, but for Toronto there are at least some resources. Start with City’s toronto.ca, where they publish some of the events, generally the street festivals are all there. Then you can search for public Google calendars on different interests. And for younger people, there are some weekly mailing lists like toronto weekender and others. TTC weekly postings are also helpful for big events, since they tell you where the traffic is closed and why.

But it’s not that easy to find smaller events, as you did. I’ll sure mark next year’s Toronto Fire demo in my calendar!

Regards,
Vasile

Jess –
Another huge challenge would be the presentation of the data – ideally you would want an application that allows the user to pick an area and a date range (and an age range?) and produce a list of applicable events. But some events are local (school fun fair) and some are much larger (Taste of the Danforth) – how do you show both? Or do they have to do 2 searches. This would not be easy.

One solution for the data presentation might RSS email feeds – they can be set up for different categories so someone could sign up for any events in the “Toronto” category and would be notified of all city-wide events. That same person could also sign up for the “Beaches” feed and be notified of smaller events in that area. They could also sign up for feeds from surrounding areas as well (ie Riverdale for example) to keep their options open.

With that model the website would be crap – just a blog with a million unorganized announcements from all over the city but it would be easier to set up. The downside is that the user can’t easily “search” for events on Saturday morning – they have to sign up for the email feed in advance. Of course you could put the event date as a category or tag as well which might make the searching possible.

Another negative of this project (I’m good at negatives) would be the commitment – once you start you have to keep going regardless of the volume of work. In contrast, a blog like 4P can stop posting for a couple of weeks and it wouldn’t really matter.

Maybe someone else, who has a lot time, is already doing it as we posted it here. Time will tell. =)