2 days before Thanksgiving we had a Luau.
Sounds kinda weird, doesn’t it? It was 40 degrees with the wind a howlin’ outside, but inside it was surf and sand and palm trees!
This was the beginning of a promise I made to myself for this school year…
Do more “extras.”
Now, you know I’m a big advocate of doing what you can and not sweatin’ about being just like Susie Homeschooler down the block, but I have to admit, it is the extras my children remember the most. Like the year we dug up “dinosaur bones” in Grandma’s garden or the year we made a mosaic from M&Ms. And they still rave about the year we had a Greek supper in the middle of the living room seated on cushions before long tables created from upside-down plastic tubs.
Our new school year started mid-October with a mama determined to create more extras for the children this year. Those extras included many of the things I’ve mentioned in my Homeschooling and the Internet posts as well as some off-the-top-of-my-head creative ideas…like the Luau (because we were studying the Pacific Islands)!
Now, don’t think you have to have a big plan in place to pull off the extras. I know just how easy it is to be looking around the internet only to become totally overwhelmed by the things you see other homeschoolers doing. When I feel that way, I always try to keep in mind that most of these mamas have 1 or 2 children who are very young. That’s not where I am right now, but that doesn’t mean my children are somehow shortchanged, it just means that our “extras” have to be on a little different plane. Our luau is a prime example of how easy putting together extras (even for a large family) can be. It took very little planning to pull this luau off, so trust me when I say you DO NOT have to be SuperMom to incorporate extras into your homeschooling experience. Here’s how we created our luau…
*Palm tree, complete with coconuts, made from construction paper.
*Hawaiian props courtesy of our dress-up box.
*Hawaiian music courtesy of Playlist.com (just did a simple search of the word “Hawaiian”)
*Pass the Coconut game played like Hot Potato using our Hawaiian music.
*Report on Food and Fellowship of The Pacific Islands presented by my 12 year old son.
*Hula dance presented by my rather theatrical 6 year old.
*Guitar solo by my 4 year old (because he would feel left out if he didn’t have some sort of contribution to the evening’s festivities).
*Pizza (originally, our meal was going to be a ham and some pineapple and some sort of coconut dessert, but life got hectic. Then, I was going to resort to Hawaiian pizza, but my kids all nixed that idea. So, we stuck with the pizza idea, ordering toppings they would actually eat, and called it good!)
All of this, was thrown together the day of, yet it was perfect! I could have said, “That is too much work right before Thanksgiving,” but I didn’t. I threw out the expectations of what a perfect luau “should” look like and went with an idea that worked for us. The laughter in the house that night was proof enough that perfect isn’t necessary!
So, what extras are you doing in your homeschool?
Nicole from lake view, ny says
Awesome! I love it! The pic of your family dancing is priceless!
Lisa~ says
Y’all are hilarious! We do similar things all of the time. If we’re studying something and an ideas hits….we run with it! It makes the learning all that sweeter. Lisa~
Anita Chamblee says
Those little extras are the memory makers, aren’t they? We have been KONOS users for years and have made lots of wonderful memories with our own family and our co-op partners. We haven’t been able to have a co-op for the last few years or even done much KONOS…we are all missing the extras and I am looking forward to getting back to it this next semester. One of my most precious memories happened in the January following my oldest daughter’s December wedding. As you can imagine our lives had been hectic that fall preparing for a Christmas wedding, so by mid-October school had become more miss than hit. By January we were all ready to buckle down. Our unit character trait was determination. My six year old daughter set the goal that she would learn to read well that semester (she is now my best oral reader!). Under the determination topic we were studying underwater explorers and an activity was to decorate our school room as an underwater area. My boys weren’t that interested, but my six year old daughter was all over it. We covered all the walls with blue and green tissue paper, hung streamers of the same colors from the ceiling, made and hung several jellyfish from the ceiling. My daughter was learning origami at the time and made HUNDREDS of fish to suspend from the ceiling and walls. It was fabulous!! The sweetest thing was when she came up beside me, held my hand and thanked me for spending the afternoon with her creating such a wonderland under the sea! Precious!
Amy says
Anita,
That sounds absolutely wonderful! I’m sure it was beautiful (and obviously very memorable!)
Jen OWnby says
Bless you for posting this. we have so much going on right now butthe kidsare needingthe “extra” right now.Between travling from MO to Indiana every week I have little to plan and their routine is far from gone.This is just what we needed
Tami says
Awesome Amy! Great job. 🙂 (Where’s the hawaiian baby pic????)
Amy says
We did dress the cat up, but not the baby! lol
Brandy says
Awesome! Looks like a LOT of fun!! Those extras make for some priceless memories, don’t they??
mariel says
i love this…sounds like what we did last year. we loved studying the states, cause as we studied a new one, we ate the food of it and listened to the traditional music and such. hawaii was a fave!!