At Home Learning Activities
It seems I've added to this post too many times and the formatting is starting to get glitchy, with different font sizes that can't be edited. This list is in each of the K - 4 teacher's google classrooms.
Here is a list of ideas and links to help you find something enriching your family can do together and/or learners can do independently. Check back as this post will be periodically updated with new activities.
This school closure is an opportunity to slow down together and look around, have the longer conversations you want to have, but are usually too busy to, enjoy meals a little longer. Make observations and note the things you appreciate and why...
One of the best gifts you can give kids during school closures is time to be bored. It gives them the opportunity to set & live out their own agenda. Trust that they are going to find meaningful independent or group projects to work on. Let them set goals for themselves and see them through. What may look silly to you, is not to them, they are learning some of the most important lessons from their most important teacher... themselves. Even when they aren’t seemingly active they could very well be pondering and processing, putting pieces of information they don’t usually have time to think about together.
When choosing activities discuss the options with your learner about what is doable with the materials you have available. Consider sticking with one at first and going deeper with it for truly satisfying results as opposed to rushing through many. Some of the options presented could be on going and you could come back to them daily or weekly. With that said let your learners try things & don’t force activities that aren’t grabbing their attention, allow them to let them go and circle back to it later. Keep in mind that in school, your child has Enrichment class for 40 minutes a week.
At home enriching activities:
https://youtu.be/MjaYnyCJDdU
Here is a list of ideas and links to help you find something enriching your family can do together and/or learners can do independently. Check back as this post will be periodically updated with new activities.
This school closure is an opportunity to slow down together and look around, have the longer conversations you want to have, but are usually too busy to, enjoy meals a little longer. Make observations and note the things you appreciate and why...
One of the best gifts you can give kids during school closures is time to be bored. It gives them the opportunity to set & live out their own agenda. Trust that they are going to find meaningful independent or group projects to work on. Let them set goals for themselves and see them through. What may look silly to you, is not to them, they are learning some of the most important lessons from their most important teacher... themselves. Even when they aren’t seemingly active they could very well be pondering and processing, putting pieces of information they don’t usually have time to think about together.
When choosing activities discuss the options with your learner about what is doable with the materials you have available. Consider sticking with one at first and going deeper with it for truly satisfying results as opposed to rushing through many. Some of the options presented could be on going and you could come back to them daily or weekly. With that said let your learners try things & don’t force activities that aren’t grabbing their attention, allow them to let them go and circle back to it later. Keep in mind that in school, your child has Enrichment class for 40 minutes a week.
At home enriching activities:
- Play outside!
- Build forts.
- Take photos that tell stories. Create a photo essay that documents this time in history.
- Listen to podcasts. My family's favorite one is about mountaineering in Alaska. It grounds us in connection, as of our friends are interviewed in it.
- Listen to or make music together. Talk about the music and what draws you to it, what you observe about it, what memories it sparks.
- Go on walks together and observe the signs of the changing of seasons.
- Write good old fashioned, stamp and envelope letters or emails to friends.
- Many of the classes have been investigating the Iditarod Sled Dog race that started in Alaska this past weekend. The Iditarod.com web pages has a lot of great activities and resources for kids and parents alike. There's also a Molly of Denali sled dog game as well as many other games available on the PBS.org webpage. The YukonQuest.com page has a lot of great information about the sport as well.
- Plan meals together: vote on the dish to serve, discuss the budget, nutritional goals, make the meals and discuss fractions and proportions, research the culture the dish came from.
- Together with your family get your bikes tuned up and ready to go for the spring. Here's a simple video tutorial.
- The Back-and-forth Drawing Game take turns adding details to the same drawing. This can be done between siblings, parents or kids and parents. This activity is always bound to produce some giggles and a sense of wonder over this shared experience.
- Do household chores together and discuss the efficiencies you put in place to do the job. For example just last night my husband had an opportunity to relate what he does on his job as a builder to my son clearing his plate from the table. My son had made two trips, when he could have made just one and they talked about how being proactive on my husband's job sites pays off and saves him from doing extra unnecessary work.
- Board games and card games are great ways to practices process skills, strategy and logic.
- As a family, record family stories for posterity's sake. Story Corps has some great tips and resources for recording your family's oral history.
- Make codes or use common ones like Morse Code and write notes to each other to decode.
- Provide art supplies: glue, scissors, paint... and/or materials from your recycling bin for the students to invent and create with.
- Read together.
- Do an "If I Built a ____" design challenge - design and draw a dream car, boat, school, house, hotel, amusement park, neighborhood playground etc...
- Do crossword puzzles together.
- Make your own game up.
- Create a menu for your own dream restaurant.
- Draw the floor plan for your house or a map of your neighborhood.
- Draw a map of United States and label it.
- Plan a garden together, decide what you are going to grow and discuss why. Research the amount of spacing the plants you want to grow need & make a map of what you want to plant & where.
- Research the inventors of you favorite household inventions.
- Take apart an old electronic device together.
- Create Rube Goldberg machines with household objects and discuss strategy, cause & effect and chain reactions. Creating chain reaction vidoes is a great way to develop process skills and logic.
- Story Time from Space has videos of astronauts in space reading favorite books aloud.
- Lunch Doodles with author/illustrator Mo Willems! https://youtu.be/MjaYnyCJDdU
- Watch author/illustrator Chris Van Dusen read if I Built a School and his other books on his Instagram account. There really isn't anything better than hearing a favorite book read by its author! We have read most of his books in class this year!
- 3rd Graders - can log on to their Tinkercad accounts here are the links for Ms. Ayer's Class & Ms. Girouard's Class. Student's can continue to work on their "If I Built a House" house designs or they can start an "If I Build a Car" design. Here's a video tutorial for designing a car.
- 4th Graders - can continue to do research on their Passion Project topics through the RES library website, or with parental guidance they can conduct a phone interview with an expert like a grandfather who was in the Air Force, or an aunt that through hiked the Long Trail. Think of questions to ask ahead of time and take notes to record the responses. If your project is to practice a skill such as drawing anime or improving at gymnastics, set a reasonable schedule to work on this.
https://youtu.be/MjaYnyCJDdU
