It's taken me many years to figure out how to balance the mingling of fun schooling with the 'hard core' schooling. I will always consider us unschoolers for the simple fact that I do not in any shape or form believe the current mainstream academic system is what educating children should look like. I am a firm believer that education should be child-led with the gentle navigation of an older advisor of sorts (i.e. a parent). Learning does not have to be boring or only achieved through books ~ it CAN be fun and pursued through hands-on creative exploration. Hence my intentional efforts to incorporate fun schooling into our school year.
Since we have a broad range of children; when we have a holiday or other reason for a fun schooling week, I plan for totschool activities and activities for the older kids, but all the children can participate in either group of activities. Usually the big kids participate in any snacitivty we do while the little kids join in on most of the big kids projects.
Our first Valentines Day fun schooling week activity was to do a 'Bee Mine' directed drawing.
I found this directed drawing for free on Pinterest. The children were allowed to use any medium they wanted to color their drawings. Most chose colored pencils, crayons, chalk pastels, or oil pastels.
Next we did a science experiment with conversation heart candy.
They dropped the candies into jars of water, baking soda water, and vinegar. Unfortunately, nothing happened. {{sigh}}
As a last ditch effort for some kind of reaction, I had the children run next door to their grandparent's house to get a can of Mountain Dew to put the candies into. One of the three candies we put into the soda floated, but nothing else. A friend on Instagram told me that they tried Sprite and that the candies "danced" when dropped into that kind of soda. Maybe next year we'll try to make the little heart candies dance in Sprite.
Then we did a STEM activity where the children used toothpicks and heart gummies to make structures.
All of my children thoroughly enjoyed this project, and told me as much many times!
And as is our custom for pretty much every holiday, we made cut-out sugar cookies using Valentines Day cookie cutters.
We waited until later that night, when daddy was home, to decorate them. We turned on some Christian jams and had an awesome time decorating cookies. (Picture of iced cooked located at the top of this post.)
Of course no holiday is complete without a fun minute-to-win-it game.
The children took the conversation heart candies and sucked them up off of a napkin and put them into a cup. We played the game three times. The first time the children used ten hearts, but that was too many, so we cut it down to five hearts for the last two games.
We did another science experiment with chenille stems twisted into hearts soaked in Borax and water. They were suppose to crystallize around the stems, but that did not happen for us ~ insert groan!! Which meant we had two Pinterest science projects that did NOT turn out this week. I guess sometimes you win and other times you don't. We still had fun doing the projects, and then of course laughing hysterically when they didn't turn out like they were supposed too. Oh well ~ I tried.
Our final project was to complete a Valentines Day interactive notebook that I found on Teachers Pay Teachers. We studies about the history of Valentine's Day. We also watched some YouTube videos on the topics of St. Valentine, The Taj Mahal (referenced in our interactive notebook lessons), and the history of Valentine's Day.
Even though I was really sick with Strep throat this week of Valentine's Day fun, we still managed to pull off a very enjoyable week celebrating the gift of love. There was a time that I kept most holidays super low-key, life has a funny way of evolving and changing. As I mentioned in my last post, having older children and one who is grown and moved out, really changes your perspective in life. I'm 110% determined to make every day count that I have with these children, because there will come a time when all they will have is their memories of me. I'd hate to think I wasted the precious time I was given with them. Creating treasured memories does not mean spending a lot of money or doing elaborate things, it just takes a little bit of time and creativity.
With Love & Hope,
Jennifer
No comments:
Post a Comment