Homeschool Suggestions for the 2020 Holiday Season

Homeschool Suggestions for the 2020 Holiday Season 

December 16, 2020

Henry T. Hill

 

Family time may present joyful time, and family time may present stressful time. Empty chairs of loved ones who have passed, empty chairs because of COVID-19 travel risks. Overcome some of this stress by creating new Holiday Season traditions. 

 

Start by brainstorming ideas. Use modifications of the Delphi method. 

Have each member of the Holiday Season group write down ideas with no names on the ideas. Have the designated facilitator/moderator write the anonymous ideas on a board. Keeping the ideas anonymous prevents personality, age or any other bandwagon effect or halo effect from limiting free expression and free discussion. Then have the facilitator/moderator direct a discussion of these ideas. Combine ideas and begin to prioritize the possibilities and engage by implementing the ideas. 

 

Children learn to become adults by apprenticing themselves to adults. Young adults learn to become middle age adults by apprenticing themselves to middle age adults. Children and young adults and middle age adults learn how to survive by learning from adults who have survived to old age. 

 

The following present some ways to compress this learning process while celebrating the Holiday Season together:

 

Game playing allows demonstrations of strategies and attitudes that apply to life events. Watch the movie. “The Queen’s Gambit” to see how chess and life skills relate. “Monopoly” teaches money management, budgeting, negotiating, and investing. Puzzles tach patience and persistence. Card games teach valuable lessons. 

 

Apply art to the homeschooling holiday season, Holiday Season cards, ornaments, gifts and even shared art projects that reflect the 2020 year and its Holiday Season will preserve memories. 

 

Watch Holiday Season movies together. The children, years from now as grown adults, will duplicate these experiences with their children. Build traditions.

 

Bake and cook together. Let children learn to double recipes and even experiment. Share the cookies and baked goods with neighbors and friends. Bake homemade bread. Fill the house with smells that will live in memories all year long. 

 

Write Holiday Season greetings and stories. Try the “Snowball Writing Exercise.” One person starts the writing process with a story or poem or a narrative, description, etc., and then crumples the story into a snowball and throws it to someone else to add to the story (you may give the person until the next day), and then that person crumples up the story and throws it to another person. Save the results as Holiday Season Story 2020. Try “Shared Sensory Writing” where a group of two or three work together to use the five senses (sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing) to describe a scene in the house. Compare the responses from the other groups and save the results as Holiday Season Sensory Exercise 2020. See “The Secondary English Coffee Shop” for other ideas.  

 

Every human being binds chemicals in there body, Every human being binds space, geography, in their minds. Every human being binds time.  For example I bind 1943 to the present in my being. I remember the events from age five to age 77. In 1950 at age 7 to 1961 at age 18 I remember the life I lived growing up in the 1850’s.  Start recording family history. When I die, my time bound memories die with me. Young people sometimes die young and take their time bound memories with them. Preserve a time capsule of time bound memories. Recordings and video can help, but as media formats change recordings and videos must change formats and may become lost.  Turn recordings into text and use the internet sources such as Google to preserve the time bound experiences. Think of a Holiday Season five years from now or ten years from now or twenty or thirty years from now. What will these living experiences bring to that future Holiday Season. A family represents the core of any society, the smallest nurturing unit that preserves life. All other units of society come and go - businesses, governments, nations. The family functions as the universal human element of survival. Celebrate the family unit. 

Happy Holiday Season 2020.

References 

“Delphi Method.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method. 

Plans, Presto. “Collaborative Writing Activities.” The Secondary English Coffee Shop, secondaryenglishcoffeeshop.blogspot.com/2017/04/collaborative-writing-activities.html. 

 

For more information about homeschooling, check out my school web site at Marketplace Mission Learning Center and contact Henry T. Hill at 239/682-4291 or henrythill@gmail.com Try a free trial of Ignitia’s 200 courses for grades 3-12.