Due to technical difficulties and a wonky life schedule, I’ve not been keeping up with posting, but I’ll be slowly catching up and hopefully, sharing ideas that may be helpful and also encouraging those of you trying to share the love of learning and reading, but hitting a few (or a lot) of bumps along the road. With little tidbits of time, I have been updating my sweet website, learning about converting HEICs to JPGs (huh?), and navigating the ins and outs of expanding my book business, blog, and the social media that goes along with it. It’s nothing fancy and will never be, but for now, it brings me joy and allows me an outlet to share what suits MY fancy 🙂
As we moved further into the summer schedule, I tried to weave in summer learning with more themes. I rapidly found out that it was more difficult to do without the structure of the homeschool day. It turns out it’s much harder to do anything “learning” related when you don’t have to 😉 The first theme I tackled was oceans/underwater. Because of learning curves on how to incorporate activities that intrigue both a 12-year-old boy and 5-year-old girl that are used to copious amounts of technology, it was a slooooww process. I had grand plans in my mind that were filled with curiosity sparks and lightbulb moments. Nah. Not much of that. Plus, there was some Mom barking and a wheelbarrow of whining and grumbling. I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this idea of adding a touch of learning to our summer, especially considering the strange Covid season and need for a bit of structure. Sometimes kids need a little nudge and that’s just what I did! I’ll link what I can below, but some of the underwater fun we had involved:
We looked through these themed books I already had on my kids’ bookshelves:
Who knew puzzles could be such fun? We diligently finished a cool Usborne puzzle and enjoyed the beautiful book that came along with it.
My oldest built models of sea animals from an interactive book I found at Costco.
We watched very cool YouTube videos about the ocean zones and sharks and played mellow calming jellyfish videos on Youtube for a few hours! highly recommend!
We created a ocean zones in a jar science experiment (they really liked making this!)
Last but not least, we made a very poor ocean diorama where the kids slapped some blue paint inside boxes and we tossed some plastic sea creatures in there and called it a day (won’t do that again).
As a reward for all of us, we made reservations online, threw on our masks and visited the Florida Aquarium for what I might consider my favorite visit ever simply because of the smaller crowd sizes. It was such a treat to casually chat with my kids as we strolled through and actually made connections to things we’d previously learned (yahoo!)
Hopefully they won’t remember that bit about the sharks when we have our beach week vacation in a couple weeks 😬
Earnest Emily 