BJU Press Blog

hands-on activities

Role-Play and a Colonial Activity

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role-play to encourage learning
Children love role-play. Toys become props, and a jungle gym, a tree, or even the living-room furniture can become a stage for a unique role-play session. They play house, make up war games, or act out stories they’ve read or seen in movies. And they will use anything—and I do mean anything—that they’ve seen or learned in their role-play, even if it doesn’t exactly fit there.

I remember as a child creating stories with matchbox cars in a doll playhouse. I also remember having a Polly Pocket as a Star Trek tricorder in one hand and a Lego® phaser in the other. As a teen, I watched a group of first graders playing after school. One little girl, the leader, laid out the game they would play. She was drawing from her lessons, her favorite stories, and her own rather wild imagination. It was one of the most intricate and regulated children’s games I have ever seen. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but none of the other kids seemed to mind.

One of the best ways you can get your kids engaged in a lesson is to fit it into a story that they can remember. If you give them fodder for role-play, you’ll see them reusing what they’ve learned in any number of ways. Here’s an activity for creating a hornbook when you’re teaching about how children learned in the New England colonies.

Making Your Own Hornbook

This activity comes from the Heritage Studies 2 teacher edition (Lesson 52). In this lesson, children learn about dame schools and how hornbooks helped the kids in the colonies to memorize their letters and the Lord’s Prayer.

Materials

  • Hornbook pattern and text
  • 8½ x 11 sheet of stiff paper (construction paper, posterboard, or cardstock)
  • 4 brass fasteners
  • 24” length of string or ribbon
  • Sheet protector
  • Hole punch

Directions

  1. Print and cut out the hornbook pattern. Use it as a guide to cut the stiff paper into the shape of a hornbook.
  2. Cut out your sheet protector so it’s the same size as your hornbook. Hornbooks got their name because they were usually covered by a thin sheet of animal horn for protection. You’ll be using a this sheet protector instead of animal horn.
  3. Print and cut out the alphabet and Lord’s Prayer text.
  4. Punch a hole in each of the four corners of the sheet protector, text, and hornbook.
  5. Attach all three pieces together with brass fasteners.
  6. Punch an additional hole at the end of the handle.
  7. Thread the string or ribbon through the hole and tie the ends to make a big loop. Children would often wear their hornbooks around their necks or tied to their belts so they wouldn’t lose them and so they could study them throughout the day.

Role-Play Starters for Using Your Hornbook

Once the lesson is done, use these starters to get your kids’ minds engaged in play with the things they’ve just learned.

  • Pretend you’re the teacher at a dame school and you’re helping one of your students (e.g., a sibling or willing parent) use his or her brand-new hornbook.
  • Imagine you’re a child in the New England colonies and you have to wear your hornbook for the rest of the day.

But don’t be surprised! You may find sometime in the future that your child’s hornbook has become a fan, a pizza peel (the giant spatula used to put a pizza in the oven), or a crossing guard sign as your kids use it in their play.

Time to Refresh Your Homeschool?

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use computer to refresh your homeschool
The holidays have just finished, and you’re probably about to get back into the same old same old. But how did it go those last few days of homeschooling before the holiday break? If you left off feeling worn out and tired, you may not be so eager to dive back in. If that’s the case, now may be the perfect time to refresh your homeschool. Here are a few ideas for adding excitement and energy into your routine.

Add in Field Trips

If you weren’t able to include many field trips last year, take a few moments to plan out some places you might like to visit this year. Or you can leave room for some spontaneous field trips. Field trips are great opportunities to solidify what your children have learned, but they also present new learning opportunities as well. If you visit a zoo, your children may be able to see live examples of different habitats and how animals live together, but they will also get to see many other aspects of life science that may not be covered in their textbooks.

For example, I recently had an opportunity to visit the South Carolina Aquarium, located in Charleston Harbor. In addition to its wide range of aquatic habitats, the South Carolina Aquarium is also home to the Sea Turtle Care Center, which gives visitors an up close and personal look into the veterinary care of sea turtles. They even had some of their instruments on display. History museums, science museums, art galleries, zoos, and aquariums are all full of opportunities to get your children excited about learning!

Focus on Hands-on Activities

Sometimes, it’s easy to let hands-on activities go by the wayside. You don’t always have all the supplies, and maybe your children already have a good grasp of the material. But hands-on activities have a way of bringing even the most ordinary lessons to life. Many of the activities suggested in BJU Press textbooks straddle the line between play and learning. Your children may be learning about the moon and how its surface was formed, but they’re also getting to make their own play dough and getting to shape the dough themselves. And hands-on activities aren’t just limited to science and art. There are many ways to incorporate hands-on experiences into history and math. Such activities are also great for getting kinesthetic and visual learners engaged in learning.

Reorganize

Nothing says “fresh start” like a newly cleaned space. Before the books start flying again, take a moment to assess your homeschool space, clean it, and maybe reorganize it. If you have a spare room, you could set up your own dedicated homeschool space. Or, if you’ve been using a dedicated homeschool space for a while and it’s starting to feel too much like a brick and mortar school, you can relocate your lessons to the kitchen table instead. Regardless of your set up, you can learn from some of the tips other homeschool moms have found useful. Feeling more adventurous? Here are some other ideas on how to add life to your homeschool space!

We hope your new year of homeschooling goes well! Do you have any ideas for refreshing your homeschool this year? Please share yours in the comments!