casual Fridays Archives - Growing In Grace

Casual Friday activities

January 16, 2012Tracy

Last fall, I implemented our casual Fridays or “fun” Fridays, as the kids call them, where we lay aside our structured day for more relaxed learning. The workbooks, the readers, even the schedule are laid aside, and we tackle a little more “living” learning. It has worked out so well for us, such a nice finish for our week. Not only do the kids need it mentally, but I’ve found that I really need the change as well.

We make flip-books of the animals from the country we’ve studied or bake some cookies together or play games. Here’s a peak at what we did this last Friday.

Dice add-up game from Living Math Ideas. He played this nearly all day! It was a huge hit. Roll the dice, write the two numbers in the blank, add it up!

Math supplement notebook — I put together a math supplement notebook from the printables at schoolsparks.com. The little one was thrilled, and she worked out of this notebook nearly all day!

They chose to do these activities at the dining room table. “Fun” Fridays are our day to get out of the school room a little bit. I was really surprised at what a huge hit these two activities turned out to be. They kept pulling them back out to work on them again and again. Before lunch, after lunch, after nap/quiet time, after supper (to show Daddy)—and then they asked to do it again the next day. I’d say these were definitely worth repeating.

We did take a little break to get a few more things in, like reading. My son chose the back porch area for this; and as it tends to get a little chilly back there, we all grabbed our favorite throws and blankets and cuddled together while my son read to us.

Usborne Very First Readers: "Knight Fight" — I chose this book from our Usborne Very First Readers set, since it reviewed our special sound of the week: "igh."

My son's choice and a hit with my daughter, too: Big Pig on a Dig.

Usborne Bible Stories — The story of Noah—this book is a dual-reader. My son read the top lines, and I finished the story with the text at the bottom of each page.

Next, we took a moment to remember last year. I’d made a “yearbook” of sorts using Shutterfly, and then bided my time waiting for a significant sale. The sale code finally came, and I finally ordered a book of last year’s memories. The kids had a lot of fun reminiscing.

The blur of the photos is from the fact that I could hardly get pictures: the two of them were excitedly jumping and pointing and bobbing up and down. It was a fun stroll down memory lane.

And that was our day! A nice break from routine while still covering the essentials.

Learning Casually

October 11, 2011Tracy3 Comments

My newest experiment with our schedule has been our casual Fridays, breaking up the week with a little more informal learning—rather unschool-ish.

One of the fun activities that we got to do the other day was play one of our Dr. Seuss board games.

The particular game is based off the Dr. Seuss ABC book, one of our family favorites that I happen to have memorized. (I’m sure I’m not the only mom who has one or two of their kid’s favorite books on immediate recall. Please tell me I’m not.)

The game is simple. A spinner lets each player choose to go a certain number of spaces or to go to the BIG or little letter nearest to them. Each space is designated with and upper or lower case letter, and after landing on the space the player gets to find and collect the matching card that has both the letter and Dr. Seuss phrases (from the book) that use the letter’s sound (i.e. “A”=Aunt Annie; “a”=alligator). The object is to collect the most cards before the first player crosses the finish.

A little bit of a review for my son, but lots of fun for him to help teach his sister her letters and sounds, and definitely a lot of fun for a casual school day.

Casual Fridays

September 28, 2011Tracy

Last week, I initiated our first casual Friday, primarily because my children can’t remember anything we’ve studied during the week. I finally concluded, why not learn casually instead of fighting the trend?

Thus, on our first casual Friday, we made fall-shaped gingerbread cookies.

And, we worked on our animals of South Africa. First, we made a flip book of our animals.

Flipbook South African animals — The little one was able to review size sorting.

Flipbook SA animals — And we learned one interesting fact about each animal, such as every zebra has a unique pattern. The little one also thought it was hilarious that the lion was part of the cat family. She nearly fell over with the giggles.

I made a pocket by glueing an envelope (sealed and cut to correct height) to a piece of paper. That way, instead of a bunch of flipbooks littering the bedroom floor by the end of the year, they’ll at least have a place to put them in their notebooks.

Next, we took a second set of pictures of those same animals and classified them. For this lesson, all the animals were mammals. So we spent some time talking about what mammals are and how each of their animals fit into this classification. This page also went in their notebooks behind the mammals section.