School has started in most states. Is your homeschool in session?
There is always such a fun excitement with “firsts” but it sure doesn’t take too long to figure out what has holding power and what needs serious revision in your homeschooling plans! One of the things that seems to hold interest always is the calendar and weather chart. Maybe the daily changing is what keeps attention…not sure…but the kids seem to love to document the passing of time and changing of the weather.
Here are a couple of calendars that I have used and liked:
This first one is smaller and magnetic, so it is fun for the kids to stick on the appropriate date and weather at the top of the calendar. It showcases the month of the year, day, date and weather.
This one is big, made of fabric with plastic pockets with insertable date cards, and the centerpiece of the room. It tracks month, day, date and special days, but no weather. The general weather of the season is shown on the month heading.
Even a freebie bank calendar will do the trick if you are tracking the date. For older children, I’ve nailed a cheap thermometer to a post of the front porch and out we go, rain or snow, to check it. I mounted a piece of graph paper near our calendar inside to mark and graph the changing temperature at 9 AM when school begins. They have enjoyed seeing the temperature drop in a downward zigzag from late summer to fall to winter… day to day…with an ongoing line graph. And it gets them to school on time: who would want to miss going out on the porch barefoot in a -20 degree snowstorm? Pretty exciting!
Starting the day with a check on the calendar and weather might be a fun jumpstart in your homeschool day too!
Diane Hopkins
Need some ideas for setting up your schedule?
Some of my kids at Arches National Park
Setting Up A Family Schedule
As much as I hate to be confined to a schedule, I have to admit that it is very liberating to the whole family to know what to expect. If I don’t follow a schedule, life goes somewhat like this: get up late, work on something that is high priority (in my nightgown), get waylaid on a long phone call while the kids wreck havoc, read more…
