Last night when I went to set up the table for school this morning, I realized I really didn't feel like school. I didn't feel like workbooks. So instead of setting their math and language books and assignments on the table I set a whole lot of "stuff"...
- Great States game
- Candy Land
- Spellominoes (sort of like dominoe cards with CVC word families on them)
- blank note cards and rubber stamps (to write a letter to someone)
- UNO
- Bingo ( I wrote up Cale's silent e words and mulitsyllable ones for Rylan and letters for Cohen)
- items to make this experiment
- a stack of story books
- a few puzzles
- dice and white board with written numbers to play "Knockout"
- items to do this experiment
- a handful of paintbrushes and a large roll of paper
Cale walked into the playroom this morning and said "Mommy what is all that stuff??" I told him it was his school work. That caused Rylan and Cohen to come running. They were pretty excited to get started.
We haven't cleared the table yet. We planned to save Great States and UNO for when Lakin was napping. And we'll do our mural painting outside this afternoon. We also might take a trip down to the Greenback Public Library. We live about 5 minutes away from it, yet we've only been once. Usually we go to the Blount County Library, about 20 minutes away...because...well the Greenback library is about the size of my living room.
If the weather holds up we may go out to the Hot Air Balloon Festival. It hasn't rained for weeks, but it might tonight...
But overall I think the boys are enjoying the "easy" day as Rylan puts it (although he did fight me on the letter writing, but in the end he did it, and did it well).
taking time to show the boys that you can learn through fun, less structured, activities is so worth it. as a teacher I used to do things like that every few weeks and the kids always loved it
ReplyDeleteWhat a great idea! Every now and then I scrap a subject (say english) and swap it with a game (say boggle Jr, or CVC word bingo) and that is fun. A whole day of this and my kids wouldn't know what to do with themselves!
ReplyDeleteHave a great day!
Val
Wow.
ReplyDeleteFor a laid back day, you guys sure got a lot done. You're on your way to unschooling. :-)
(grin)
Great job ma!
I think it's great that you followed your gut and changed things up. I wish I had more of that in me. I guess I'm too much of a box-checker.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a week we have had this week. Those are so much fun!! I think we are having another week like these this coming week because we have dr. appts. 4 out of the 5 days.
ReplyDeleteLooks like they had a blast!!
Sheila