Homeschool Chronicles Pt.2

All About Family

Welcome to The Homeschool Chronicles, a weekly recap of our homeschool adventures where I strive for two things: to remind myself that I am, in fact, doing right by my kids in terms of their home education, and to show other parents that they can do it too! Click here to read last week’s installment.

This week our theme was FAMILY! We did some little crafts, read some great books, and had some conversations that I thought were going to be harder than they ended up being. Let’s get into it:

The Prep

My go-to preparation method for my homeschooling themes so far has been to log into twinkl, which is an education resource site with tons of printable activities and worksheets. There are countless sites like this, but I was getting overwhelmed searching through them all, so now I keep it simple and stick to this one!

I type in my theme, filter by grade level (my kids are 6 and 4, so I’m using resources for pre-k, kindergarten and grade 1) and download a bunch of material in various subjects. Then I print out what I want to use, and add them to my weekly homeschooling binder. After that I kind of divide them up between the days we’ll be teaching and write down a very loose plan for each day. Because of my work schedule, we usually do “intentional homeschooling” from Tuesday to Saturday (although I would definitely argue that home education is happening all of the time).

I decide my weekly themes at the beginning of the month, which gives me tons of time to track down books that I want to use to compliment each one. I actually keep a running list of potential themes for each month that are based on seasons and events, which makes it easier for me to gather books for our own collection (for example, I have an idea of what I’ll be doing in January so if I see something that fits while I’m thrifting I can scoop it up ahead of time), but I definitely take advantage of our public library as well.

Family Theme

We started off this week by talking about our own immediate family, and who lives in our house. The kids had a worksheet that asked them to draw their family and then write down everyone’s names, which gave the kids a chance to practice writing. A fun side story; when my eldest was younger, he used to call me and my husband by our first names when he was talking to grownups or people outside of our own family. He even introduced me as Sarah to a stranger in the grocery store once! It was very cute and also hilarious.

We had a little craft that had us all colour in a little house and draw each member of our family in the windows before adding outer windows on top that could be opened to reveal the people inside. We included their important stuffies as members of the family too and I cannot get enough of how cute they turned out. This was an easy activity that I found on twinkl!

Different Kinds Of Families

Aside from printable worksheets, twinkl also has downloadable powerpoint presentations, so we did one that showed various types of family structures and got to talk about each one. I followed that up with a book that I found while thrifting called The Family Book by Todd Parr, which the kids loved.

We discussed that there are families with a mom and a dad, families with two moms or two dads, single parent families, families with grandparents as caretakers, and with caretakers that aren’t biologically related to the kids. And then we had a bunch of colouring pages of different types of families which the kids got to pick through. We coloured together and talked about the pictures. One thing I really love about homeschooling is how much conversation there is, and how I’m able to give real time to answering my kids questions and exploring their observations.

Family Tree

Another thing I wanted to discuss with the kids was the idea of a family tree. It’s been coming up in conversation with them lately as we’ve been talking about ancestors and grandparents, and I haven’t been able to explain it in a way they could understand. So the timing of this theme was actually perfect.

I found a powerpoint presentation about family trees that laid it all out visually for them. And then we had a “fill it in yourself” family tree activity afterwards. There were two books that I read to them for this part. We started with a book that’s been in our shelf for years called Me and the Family Tree by Carole Boston Weatherford. It’s a super cute book that I think I’ll reference again when we talk about genes.

The other book was one I found at the library called The Family Tree by Canadian author Sean Dixon. This book covered some subjects that I thought would be a bit trickier for my kids; adoption, foster families, surrogacy, IVF and children with divorced parents. I do think a lot of it went over their heads, but they were able to connect a lot of it to talks we’d had previously. For example, when it got to the part about Ada’s uncles using a surrogate for their son Leo, my youngest pointed out that there were two dads, just like in the powerpoint. The foster parents in this story are a mother and daughter duo who wear hijabs and my eldest pointed out that they matched one of the colouring pages we had, so we got to talk about religion, customs and traditions. We had also recently donated some of the boys’ toys and books to a group home that was going to be caring for some kids their age. Reading this book opened up the floor for more detailed conversations about what this might look like for some families. I thought this subject might be a bit intense for the boys, but they just quietly stated “I’m glad my mommy and daddy can take care of me so I don’t have to go to a foster home” and then they moved on. (We didn’t discuss deaths of parents at all because my youngest is going through a phase where he’s really sensitive about the topic of death… another reason I’m glad to be homeschooling is because I know my kids really well and can cater to them specifically when it comes to subject matter).

The Rest Of It

I printed out some math worksheets that were “family themed”, though the theme didn’t add to the value of the sheets at all. They had pictures of people we could assume were moms and dads and siblings and grandparents on them? In this case the point of following the theme was just to help me narrow down what to print out. Counting up to twenty, addition up to ten, and a more in-depth look at place value ended up being what we worked on.

And I’m not strict about sticking to the theme either! I find it gives me structure to plan around, and then we can add other things on top as we see fit. We played BINGO, which really helped my youngest in his quest to recognize double digit numbers. And we played a really fun game that I actually got from another homeschooling mom (who had printed it out but never used it) that was all about simple addition and subtraction, but with a “fall harvest” vibe. There were barns that each had a different number from 0-10 on theme, and stacks of pumpkins, apples and hay bales with simple math equations on them.I arranged the harvestables in different parts of the living room and then had the boys get their toy tractors out and travel to the various “fields” to harvest the goodies. Once they solved the math equation they got to load it in their tractor and deliver it to the correct barn. The hardest part of this whole thing was cutting out all the parts, but I can see us returning to this activity over and over! The boys loved it.

In Conclusion

We had a great week with cute drawings and awesome books. And I don’t think I traumatized my children! So that’s a relief.