Winter brings to mind snowball fights, icicles, pristine expanses of snow-covered lawn, kids rushing outside to play in the first snow of the year. Then comes the reality: freezing temperatures, slick roads, and a 5 minute trip down the road that can take an hour. Winter weather challenges the homeschooling parent to be creative in their schooling activities. Enrichment activities may be harder to get to, or weather conditions may cancel some activities or make it more difficult to coordinate schedules. My family tends to stay closer to home during the winter months, venturing out for only a few extra activities.
Household Management:
More than Home-Economics, teaching household management is a crucial part of our learning plan. As we are stuck more indoors during the winter season, it’s the perfect time to start focusing on what needs to be done to keep a household running smoothly. Some ideas for teaching household management:
- Food Availability—take a look at what foods are grown in your area, the cost difference between in season and out of season foods, what is made nearby or imported from another area.
- Meal planning—give your child a budget and have her plan a meal, show him what a well-rounded, nutritionally sound meal looks like, teach her how to prepare the meal. My seven-year old is in charge of a minimum of one meal per week start to finish. There is an adult on hand to assist with the dangerous aspects but he does most of the work himself.
- Weatherproofing—show your child places where the cold can get into your house and create a plan for keeping warm. Explore different ways of insulating your home from the elements. Let them feel what the area feels like before and after the area is winterized.
- Keeping warm—explore different materials that can be used to insulate you from the cold. Now’s a good time to talk about how plants and animals adapt and protect themselves during the cold-weather months.
Let’s Play
Playing is a vital part of the learning process. Games can be used in a variety of ways to teach and reinforce basic concepts. Mental math drills are used to reinforce basic arithmetic. Games like Yahtzee can help kids gain confidence in their mental addition or multiplication abilities. Scrabble helps to reinforce phonics and spelling for emerging readers and can be used to expand the vocabulary for older children. We use UNO to teach patterns and matching—even my 3 year old likes to match the color or the number on the cards. My husband has even started teaching the older two how to play role-playing games to start them on critical thinking and logical analysis. Let’s not forget how important physical activity is especially when the weather is unfriendly for outdoor play. Schedule some family exercise time—dance together, do some yoga, see who can get from one end of the house to the other the fastest without running.
Holidays
This is a great time of year to let your children practice their letter-writing skills. Give them a list and have them send out some holiday cards. Let go of perfect and let your child shine! Now is a good time to talk about the mail process- how does that letter get from your house across the city or across the country? What about packages: where to the boxes go before they get to their final destination? For many families, wintertime holds significant spiritual meaning as well. Even if you’re not “doing schoolwork”, spending time together in faith teaches your family’s values and beliefs.
Get Creative
Wintertime brings its own opportunities for creating and crafting. My children love to decorate old glass jars with colored tissue paper to make beautiful candle holders. Add a little wire handle around the rim and you have a lantern. A bit of dark-colored felt attached to a popsicle stick and stored in the freezer makes a wonderful snowflake catcher—which can then be used to study the symmetry of snowflakes. Speaking of snowflakes, who hasn’t made their own paper snowflakes using just a pair of scissors and whatever paper you have lying around?
Even without leaving the house, we never seem to lack a variety of fun, engaging learning experiences. Whether we are working together to keep our home running smoothly or talking about all the ways nature takes care of her own, playing games or making gifts, we learn just as much from the comfort of our living room as we do from the classes we take when the weather is nicer. So on the next cold snowy day; don’t worry about missing out on a class. Heat up some cocoa, get down a game, and have fun learning.
~ yummiesprite is a homeschooling mama to four crazy kids who selfishly takes time for herself. See what she’s up to on Luscious Decadence!
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This post was written by hippymom on January 12, 2010
Hear ye, hear ye! 
