Homeschool Fun Days: Jamestown

Whether you're teaching at a homeschool co-op, or just trying to bring subjects to life for your own reluctant learners, mini, fun based learning units are a must. 

If you’re new here, I’m Tonya Johnson, founder of Helping Hearts Ministries where I specialize in helping ministry minded homeschool moms educate the next generation for Jesus. I believe that it’s important to stay ahead of the crowd when it comes to keeping the attention of our children. As homeschoolers, we have the unique advantage of being able to tailor our child's education in a way that fosters that child/parent relationship and ignites their love for both learning and Jesus. The world is fighting for their hearts; we need to fight 10x harder. 

I'm currently teaching through different time periods in history for our middle school co-op, so I'm creating mini (60-90 min long) lesson plans that incorporate all five sense. For the Jamestown lesson plan we have:

You can download all of the resources for this lesson by enrolling in our Homeschool Made Fun Academy. By ordering through this link, you'll get your first pack for free and then each month you'll receive a new pack with new learning centers as well as 50+ character building and fun, themed activity pages for only $5. You can also buy the pack for this lesson only by clicking here. So now that you have the 30k foot overview, let's dive in to each section individually. Some of these are affiliate links, some of these are just links I've pulled off of websites, so I can share certain products with you. 

If you're not familiar with Seat Work, it's simply work that can be done independently either during the first few min of class, or before class starts while kids are arriving. Some teachers use busy work for this. Personally, I prefer to create seat work that goes along with that day's lesson. 

For this lesson, I chose not to include seat work because I knew our lesson portion of the schedule was going to be longer than normal, so we jumped in right away. 

I know I always say to keep the lesson to 10-15 min with lots of kid interactions, I broke my own rule on this one. Our lesson was about 45 min long, but, we played the game while we learned, so it wasn't all me just talking to the class. In your pack, you have two options for game play. There is an individual size board, and a life size board. My class is 16 kids, so I divided them into groups of four creating players 1-4. Each team had their own dice and just passed it down to their next teammate when their turn came around. Whoever rolled the dice answered the question. During the lesson time, we played the first round of the game. This was learning time, so the questions were asked in order allowing me to teach that segment of the lesson as gameplay continued and then also allowing the kids to write the answers in on their worksheets. We went through the vocabulary cards as we came to them in the lesson. 

No craft today because we spent our craft time playing the game a second time, this time competitively. The kids absolutely loved this game. You can decide if you'd like to let the kids work to answer the questions as a team or not. You can also decide if you want to allow them to use their worksheets to find the answers. I allowed both, but I did have them wait to help their teammate until the teammate asked for help. Some kids take a little longer to find the answers and that's ok, so this prevented anyone jumping in and answering the question when the original child was still looking for the answer. 

At the end of class, the kids enjoyed vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting. Funny story on this. Our class was set to meet on the day that Hurricane Helene swept through our little town in South Carolina. The night before, my daughter spent several hours making Boston creme cupcakes from scratch that turned out delicious! We got a text about 9pm saying class was canceled because the storm was supposed to cause a small amount of damage to the roads for people that lived out in the country, so I sent the cupcakes to work with my husband instead.  Turns out the hurricane did a little more than a small amount of damage. Majority of our town was without power for 8 days with a few areas out for 12 days. By the time class time rolled around again, I still couldn't find eggs in any of our stores. I subbed applesauce in the cupcake recipe, and while they were deliciously moist, they weren't firm enough to fill, so we ended up with plain old cupcakes. The kids still ate all of them. Hopefully you're planning this lesson during a time where a natural disaster isn't coming through your town and you can make the original recipe. 

This mini unit is included with your November "Homeschool Made Fun Academy" Subscription. If you enroll after November, you'll get immediate access to the vikings unit as well as all other completed units. If you'd like to purchase just the pack for this unit, click here.

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