Good buy - cheap homeschool supplies

A good resource I picked up about a year ago was a set of thin chopping boards from Aldi, which cost about $4 for a pack of 4. They are really thin, and flexible and work excellently as a portable work surface for under paper for drawing with textas, painting, gluing, you name it! The children know, if they want to do drawing or colouring or anything with textas, they grab a board and pop it under their work. Even my 20 month old, Harrison knows to get one if he wants to draw. With these, my children are free to colour or paint or do whatever messy business they like without me stressing over them potentially ruining the rug, blanket, floor, bed, table etc...

Always learning - homeschool plans for our big trip

I don't like to leave an easy opportunity to learn unlearnt so in addition to lots of random things I expect us to encounter, learn and discuss over our trip I have specifically planned the following homeschool activities.

• We went to the library and picked out two junior fiction books. I don't know if we will read both of them or even finish one of them, but I feel like just by starting out this way we are making good habits and planting good seeds.
• New colouring books and textas! I like to be really free with providing new colouring in books and textas. Besides being fun, it teaches the children concentration, develops their artistic skills and their fine motor skills.
• I splashed out on a scrap book for Sunshine and Sweet-pea for each of them to journal their trip. Sweet-pea will probably draw pictures, maybe paste some pictures, and write a word here or there. I plan for Sunshine to write a sentence about each day or so on something she has done or experienced, along with pictures (pasting or drawing). Oh, and when I say write a sentance, I mean she would decide what to write and I will write it on a scrap piece of paper and she will copy it into her book.

Incidentally, by the nature of this trip, there will be lots of socialisation with family and strangers, of different ages. Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, old family friends, cousins, children of old friends of mine, etc. Will be fun! :P

A cheap and cheerful homeschool activity

This afternoon we did 'cutting and pasting'. A fun way to spend an afternoon - Sunshine and Sweet-pea enjoy using sissors and who doesn't enjoy using glue?!

Basically, I look for opportunities to pick up magazines or interesting pamphletes. I have the inflight magazine from a recent plane ride, a travel brochure that I asked for at a local travel agency and a couple of wholesome magazines. We have a few childrens sissors, but I find they don't cut well, so we all share the one good pair we have and I supervise (although I have trained Sunshine and Sweet-pea on being sensible with sissors). Then they are free to cut and paste to their hearts content. I love that the images they are seeing are of far off lands, different landscapes and include things they don't encounter in our day-to-day Australian life.

An extension on the lesson for Sunshine was if she wanted to, I asked her to tell a story from the pictures she pasted, which she just loved to do and present to me and Sweet-pea.

Playin' shop

We like to keep things simple. We don't have a lot of money for fancy toys and we have tried to avoid accumulating a lot of "stuff" for our children. With that in mind, I am always trying to be resourceful and come up with new games or ways of playing with old toys and making the most of them.

I always loved playing shop as a child and from that came up with this game to introduce to my darlings. I cleared off their table to use as 'a counter'. I also cleared off some shelves to use as 'shop shelves' and laid out their play food in lines, like a mini supermarket. I got a container (the blue one on the windowsill) to act as the till, and put special cards in it from a board game (which would be used as the money). I got their Barbie computer thing that was given to us and pretended that was the main part of the register. Then I got out their Easter egg baskets to use. And then, I taught my children how to play shop. It was fun. They enjoyed it as did I! Here is a pic of the shop set up:

I didn't start this game with learning objectives other than to have fun, but I love that in having that fun, I continued a stream of learning which I am enjoying imparting to them (and look forward to continue imparting to them) - that being, commerce. I love teaching them how business works and how to engage in commerce.

Natural learning

Thought I'd share this piece of natural learning Sunshine and Sweet-pea have taken to in the last few weeks. They call it "play the game of [movie]". Basically, they pick a movie and put it on (usually a Barbie or another sort of animated movie), then they choose who will play who and act out the entire movie in front of the television while the movie is playing. They have costume changes (many different outfits for different parts of the movie - shoes included!). They make special swords with wooden spoons and tie ribbons on the end of the spoons.

Earlier today I wondered if it was good for them to be doing this so much. Shouldn't I encourage them to go outside instead? But then I realised what they were doing. They were naturally teaching themselves a range of things. Here is a short list of what I believe they were teaching themselves (that I can think of - I bet there are many more I can't think of):

1. Drama/acting - they were copying the actions of each character. Facial expressions and arm movements etc.


2. Reciting/memory - they were learning the words and speaking them over and over. Experiencing and reinforcing sentence structure and grammar.


3. Teamwork - working together to achieve an outcome.


4. Social behaviour - learning how other people relate and how to relate to each other whilst achieving the goal of "play the game of [movie]".


5. Interpretation - everything they did was an expression of what they were interpreting of what was occuring in the movie.


6. Independence and innovation - they made this game up themselves. They designed the rules and procedure and defined the outcome.


7. To entertain themselves - an extremely valuable skill in my eyes!


8. To experience natural learning and to be guided by their own interests - I believe this is a key to them developing a lifestyle of learning.

So that is just a few learnings that I can think of off the top of my head. I bet there are more. With all that swirling around in my head, yep, I think it is good for them; and I want to encourage them to "play the game of [movie]" without concern that they are watching too much television; and with peace of mind of knowing that even if I am not sitting down at a table with them making them doing structured lessons that they will learn anyway ... and have fun doing it!