The holidays are amazing!! But sometimes they can also create some chaos that distracts from our normal school routine. What if I told you that you can easily take the holiday excitement and channel it into "The Ultimate Homeschool Learning Experience."?
If you’re new here, I’m Tonya Johnson, founder of Helping Hearts Homeschool where I specialize in working with parents and ministry leaders who are focused on building a solid foundation for the next generation. 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.
Whether you're wanting to create a Thanksgiving learning experience for your kiddo, or you'd like to invite friends over for a day full of learning and fun, we've got you covered! Personally, we do both. We love turning the holidays into a two week school period. Week 1: We have a ton of fun crafts, learning centers, and read alouds along with our regular school work. Week 2: Spirit Week! We love to theme this to the holiday and end with a "party day" aka themed homeschool day with friends. Below is the schedule we will be using for our Thanksgiving Homeschool Day this year as well as the spirit week ideas we've put together.
You can download these along with all of our math and literacy centers by grabbing your FREE MONTH of the Homeschool Made Fun Academy. By ordering through this link, you'll get your first month 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. So now that you have the 30k foot overview, let's dive in to each subject 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.
For Bible and History, we're using these two "Early Explorer" Lessons: Mayflower and King Phillip's War. These are lessons I created to teach in our local co-op. For this Thanksgiving learning day, I'm not playing all of the games included, I'm just mushing the lessons together and teaching from the time period that the Pilgrims left England up until Squanto dies after the first Thanksgiving. This lesson is an accurate account of the first thanksgiving, but it's also an age appropriate account. If you like those two, my lesson on Jamestown would also be a good one for your family. I plan on teaching the lesson while the kids are coloring one of these thanksgiving coloring pages.
Another option would be to teach these three lessons, games included, the week's leading up to your Ultimate Thanksgiving Day. Then you can play one of the fun review games during your Thanksgiving school day instead of teaching a thanksgiving lesson.
After our lesson and coloring page, we're going to do a quick Jesus Journaling session. There are journaling pages included in this free journaling pack.
Our Thanksgiving School day is focusing on crafts, so for Math and Language Arts, we are making thankfulness cards, a "how to catch a turkey" flip book, and planning a Thanksgiving Day Parade. These are included when you enroll in the "Homeschool Made Fun Academy" as well as several others you can add or choose to use later. If you'd prefer to buy JUST the thanksgiving learning day pack, click here. We have centers for Pre-K through 5th Grade currently.
For science we are doing a hands on projects that go along with our "How to catch a turkey" flip book. We are building a cage to cage to catch our turkey! In addition, we're building a pumpkin catapult to see how well our cages actually hold up.
We do a ton of crafts during all of our subjects during the Thanksgiving school day, and then we also make an extra craft at the end. This year we're making these super cute wind socks. I've also linked all of my decorations, photo props, games, and crafts in one Amazon cart, and then when you enroll in the "Homeschool Made Fun" Academy, you'll get a bingo game and coloring/painting sheets that you can use at your party also.
I always keep the menu for these days super simple... except this one. I always label this as a "Friendsgiving", so while I don't go all out and make a turkey or anything like that, I do make a fun little, kid friendly, thanksgiving feast. This year I'm making roasted potatoes that will be in the oven nicely cooking as we're designing our thanksgiving parade, meatballs that will be cooking in the slow cooker, and then a bunch of appetizer type foods including grapes, deviled eggs, ritz crackers, ham and cheese cubes, turkey cranberry roll ups, and those fancy little prosciutto wrapped mozzarella sticks because my daughter specifically requested them. To make this as easy as possible on myself, everything is prepped and ready the night before including cubing all of the potatoes and putting them in water. The only thing I have to do the day of is pop the meatballs in the crock pot and cover them with bbq sauce and then season and pop the potatoes in the oven while the girls take a 10 min bathroom break between subjects.
The shocking truth I hear often in my DMs from many of you is that you want to throw all of the homeschool parties, but you just don’t have the finances. I’d love to tell you that it’s not expensive, but I’d be lying. Yes, even dollar store supplies add up.
Now, I’m not saying you have to spend thousands of dollars, but I’ve been in your position. I’ve been in the place where $100 felt like thousands of dollars because we just didn’t have it in the budget
Here’s what I’ve found. Social media is a gold mind for homeschool moms, IF you know how to use it.
Courses
Math and Literacy Centers
Unit Study Packs
Curriculum Planners
Kids’ Subscription Services (Themed Activities)
These are just 5 of 100s of products that my students learn to make through the Homeschool Creator Course. If you can dream it, we can help you create it
Interested? Click Here for more info.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
If you like anything you see, simply click on the picture for more information.
