Focusing on Schooling around holidays.

This proves to sometimes be difficult in many homes. Anticipation of the holiday & commitments to your friends, family & church can sometimes be overwhelming. As most homeschooling families go we always try to incorporate learning into everything we do. I find that Easter has some wonderful teaching moments. One of our favorite teaching moments is making resurrection rolls. We have been doing this for quite sometime now with our children and its so wonderful that the older children are now trying to take over and teach it to the younger children. With a preschooler easter eggs provide some great review of basic skills and science all in one. We talk about the shape of an egg, where the egg comes from, how to cook the egg, how the dye works etc. We started something new last year which was an easter basket scavenger hunt which is great for critical thinking skills. for your younger children you can print photo clues. We tried to challenge our older children a bit more and gave them some riddle type clues. the older children have asked if the "Easter Bunny" was going to do it again this year.Keeping the focus on education is quite simple when you get them excited to learn about the holiday. Your local library usually will have a display of books pertaining to the holiday and you can incorporate them into your regular schedule. Of course taking breaks from schooling is important as well so if you plan to take an extended break hit the studies hard a few weeks prior and slowly back down to your normal schedule then take that well deserved break. Their are loads of free sites that have great sections for holidays this week so far we have made a fuzzy egg (egg coloring page that we glued colored fuzz balls to it) We made a popsicle stick cross, and we are going to make this tomorrow for our centerpiece. Now its totally understandable if things happen around holidays and you fall behind a bit. My solution is we will cut out our extras for a week or two (extras as in art, science experiments, and other fun time consuming things) Then we have what I call "Super Saturday School" we then take all the fun things we had to skip out on and do them all in a day. They enjoy it a lot. Have a Blessed Easter :)