We have unofficially began the process of homeschooling. Although my son was just 5 in October, we know that instead of going to traditional Kindergarten next year, we’ll be keeping him home to home-school. There are Many reasons why we’ve chosen this route. (I would actually love to hear from others of you out there who have also decided homeschooling is best for your family – leave your comments below.) I thought it would be a fun project for me to document little steps of our homeschooling journey along the way, and maybe I can offer some helpful tips for those of you stuck in a rut with lessons. I’ve always been super creative. My husband is continually amazed at how I can just jump into pretty much any topic and turn it into a learning experience in our Sunday School class (we teach 4 year old together) and with the kids at home. Technically they’ve been home-schooled since they were born since we do a lot of learning through everyday activities, but now that RJ is getting a little older, I’m trying to add a little more structure to our home-school environment. (btw that is really hard for me because I am NOT a planner by nature!).
We’ve collected a lot of winter theme books over the last few weeks and I’ve just been taking a book every week and we’ve been doing wintery project related to the story. Here is the book we’ve chosen for this week. “The Biggest Best Snowman Ever”. If you haven’t read the book, its about a little girl who just isn’t big enough to help her sister and mom with all of the things they have going on in the house, etc. So, she goes out to play and with the help of her animal friends she builds a HUGE snowman. After seeing her snowman, her family learns that maybe she is big enough to help after all.
Here’s my daughter showing off the book for you. And yes; her hair always looks like that! lol
After we read the book, we went around the house and collected all of the “snowballs’ we could find. After having a fabulous snowball fight with the beach balls, etc.. for about an hour chasing each other around the house 😉 we built our snowman. My kids put them in order from largest to smallest and we laid them all out flat on the ground.
My son (with my help) then traced each snowball shape onto a sheet of large paper (the roll out kind that comes with your easels. You can find these at Ikea or any craft shop.
We then went throught the entire snowman (starting at the very top) and wrote numbers (on one side Chinese, on the other side English). He’s still learning to recognize a few of his numbers and has been struggling to write all of them so that was my main goal in having him do this part. Then on the inside of the snowman we placed the corresponding number of snowflake stickers
Here an up close of part of the snowman.
I then hung this guy up (he reaches all the way to the ceiling) and we’ve enjoyed him for several days now!