Homeschool Fun Days: The Mayflower

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 Mayflower 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 let the kids choose between doing a coloring sheet or doing a word search because we have wide range of ages and learning styles in this particular class. 

Remember to keep the lesson to 10-15 min with lots of kid interactions. 

This craft turned out super cute, and took only pipe cleaners and pony beads. Here are the full directions, and then if you look at the top of this blog post, you'll see I wrote out how many beads you'll need of each color depending on how many colors you'd like to use for your corn craft. 

Today's game was one that dates back to the early explorers, although they didn't play it with pen and paper, tic tac toe! The early colonists called this game naughts and crosses. We held our own naughts and crosses tournament, and the kids loved it! 

Our snack was a simple corn cake to symbolize the hard tack they ate while sailing on the Mayflower. To make it more palatable, we served it with optional butter and honey. 

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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