At the time of the holidays, no one, including the homeschool parent, is actually interested in doing any real learning. However a very long break can become a huge brain drain problem when the homeschool students return to the classroom. Here are some ideas to sneak in some educational activities to your homeschool students during the holiday season.
Letter to Santa Claus
Children love to let Santa know what they want for Christmas. It’s a great idea to get younger children to write out what they did all year long and describe what they want to Santa in a written letter. Plenty of writing practice for vocabulary as well as printing. Do make sure that they have a special post box to send these letter to Santa placed in the homeschool classroom. This can also become a homeschool classroom craft activity which can later be magically transformed.
Letter to Your Adult Self
This is an interesting concept for the older, not so much in love with Santa anymore, children. The homeschool students can be asked to send advice to their future selves about what they need to do. Or simply describe what all they are looking forward to doing this month and what they hope they will be doing in the future years as well. It’ll make a good keepsake to add to a time capsule, which is another activity that can be done. Have the homeschool students come up with a list of things that they would like to add to a time capsule, and explain why they think it’s important.
Creating a Board Game
Since the weather isn’t exactly conducive to playing outdoors in the winters, it may be a good idea to get the homeschool students to create board games of their own. It’s going to give them plenty of things to think about and implement. You can even have a deadline for when they need to have the games ready to play. Then everyone sits down together to play all the board games created by the homeschool students and vote on which one was the best.
