Homeschool Help: All Ages Fun
Hi, fellow humans! It’s March 2020, and nothing makes sense.
I have waited to type this out because I wanted to put out several ideas at once that might be helpful to all who might be at home with kiddos over the next few weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Centuries? Millenia? Eons? These are ideas that can be adjusted to different age levels and can be facilitated by some older kids with very little work on your part.
My promise to you is that none of these things involves weird art supplies or cheese cloth or the blood of a blond hyena or whatever else people post on Pinterest. I love Pinterest parents! Thank you for inviting my kids to your kids’ circus themed birthday parties, so that they feel like they went to Disney World for free. But this is not that. These are ideas for people who are stuck in their houses against their will.
Let’s make some memories.
IDEA #1: PAPER CHAIN
This is an old military family trick. When Scott is deployed, we make a chain to tear every single day until he gets home. But this time, we’re adding to our chain. Everyone in our house writes their favorite part of the day on the link, and we staple it together. That’s it. It gives us a moment to appreciate our day and a moment to have a conversation about it. We hung it in our dining room where we do school.
Don’t feel like writing your favorite things? How about a favorite quotation or a scripture or anything else that brings you joy? If you are living a joyless existence, staple a blank strip of paper to your chain and pretend you are in arts and crafts jail, and now you have something to at least help you know what day it is.
IDEA #2: PHOTO SCAVENGER HUNT
The best thing about this is that you can either set this up yourself or have your big kids make them for each other and/or for the little kids.
Step 1: Either you or your big kids take pictures of things around the house. The boys took pictures for the girls of things like the chair I sit in when I read by the fire, the oven, and the back door. For each other, the pictures were things like the edge of a bookcase or picture frame with very little else showing. I told them to make it interesting, and they did!
Step 2: Send the seekers on a scavenger hunt around the house. EASY PEASY. Especially because my big kids did all the work.
Also, this is great because you can do it over and over again as long as people are still interested. Need some serious downtime? Take 100 pictures and tell them to not come back until they’ve found them all (work as a team!)
We did ten pictures for each scavenger hunt, and it took the girls about six minutes to run all over the house finding their objects. The boys took nearly half an hour each looking for their objects because they made it really hard for each other.
Got a super competitive family? Make one and then send them all out at the same time to find the object to see who gets there first. Do not @ me when someone gets hurt.
BIRD FEEDERS
Okay, onto the next thing that isn’t a real craft, but has lots of learning possibilities. Take some Cheerios or whatever round cereal you have at your house. Make it snack time. Tie one Cheerio to the end of a piece of dental floss or thread. Tie a toothpick to the other end.
While the kids are snacking, have them put Cheerios on the string. For the littles, this is fine motor skill practice, and you can also count as you go. One of my big kids wanted to jump in on this fun, so here are some big kid ideas: estimate how many it will take to fill the string, measure the string, use multiplication to figure out how many more Cheerios it will take—lots of math ideas here that can be tailored to whatever grade level you need.
When they are done, thread your toothpick through the end Cheerio to make a “tree necklace.” Then go string some trees or bushes, so the birds can have a snack.
Make sure to have them fight over who is standing closest to the bush to get the full effect. Again, this can be an activity that keeps kids snacking and quiet for a few minutes, or you can turn it into a math lesson using any concepts that apply to your kids’ age. YOU’RE THE BOSS, so you get to decide how to use this.
Some other things we’ve done this week (if you’ve got ‘em, use your big kids to facilitate):
Undirected Play—remember that you don’t have to entertain your kids for all of their waking hours. Tell them to go to the play room or the backyard. For big kids, tell them to grab a deck of cards and teach them how to play solitaire. It is okay for your kids to have to work out their own boredom.
When my girls can’t seem to figure this out, I tell them they can either play or clean, and it’s about 50/50 what they pick. If they want to clean, I hand them a baby wipe and give them a section of the baseboard to wipe down. I will never be able to explain why they like this, but if it ain’t broke, whatever.
I Spy
Hide and Seek
Easter Egg Hunt
Bear Hunt: Hide a bear or other favorite stuffed animal somewhere in the house for them to find—we had a zoo of animals hiding on two different levels today, and the girls were busy for twenty minutes finding them.
And lastly, remember that everything is fun if you talk in an excited voice and change locations. I read a book to the girls while they sat on the dining room table. Why is this fun? I don’t know. But it is.
Also, try to keep your sense of humor. When I saw the apocalypse coming weeks ago, I saw these “perfect attendance” awards at Dollar Tree, so I grabbed them and brought them out to make everyone laugh this week.
Also, go outside if you can. Fresh air is good for all of us.
Questions? Comments? Got ideas that keep people entertained with very little work? Share them here! As always, thanks for reading. I’m working on a big kid post too that I’ll get out as soon as I can. I have to go supervise while the boys finish making dinner—chicken noodle soup from scratch (well, mostly from scratch with store bought noodles).
