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Making holidays count for your homeschool is a terrific way to get kids interested in learning. It’s great for homeschool co-op groups or the family homeschool. Everyone loves a party! Why not celebrate holidays from around the world as a fun way to enrich your homeschool studies?
Holidays Around the World
Introduce students to rich culture, foods, traditions, music and costumes. These celebrations and studies can be as simple as watching a few videos and reading about various holidays, or as extravagant as creating costumes. You are only limited by your imagination.
Although these studies are based on holidays, it opens the door to explore much more about the history and culture in any area of the world. You can extend each study for the week or for the month, depending on how in-depth you want to get.
15 Creative Tips for Holiday Studies
Loads of inspiration and information is just a click away online. Take a peek at this list of holidays worldwide to get started with your party homeschool plans.
Use these simple tips to create lessons for your family:
- Bookmark Wiki-pedia or country websites to read together
- Add countries and sites to a list (Google Drive is free & makes a good choice)
- Select a few pictures from the site to add to doc or notebooking page
- Use maps, atlases, or globes to identify location of country with students
- Have students make and “stamp” pretend passports
- Google recipes from your country of choice and cook together
- Use a notebooking sheet or journal to list country information
- Learn a few words in a foreign language
- Learning a song or listen to music from each country
- Create artwork like traditional art from that region or related to that particular holiday
- Watch movies
- Make colorful diorama or giant poster board filled with national pictures & icons
- Film a “news report” from a historical event or holiday
- Write a one-act play to perform
- Use the Delight Planning Unit Study Planner – to put together wonderful lessons
Traditional Holidays
While studying holidays from around the globe certainly adds a wonderful creative layer of geography lessons, it is important not to overlook the obvious traditional American holidays. Along with learning about the Christmas Story, Christmas is a terrific opportunity to teach your children about serving others. Bake cookies to take to a local shelter or retirement home, send packages to soldiers overseas or support their families serving at home. Help with a local church party, participate in Operation Christmas Child and any number of service oriented projects. See our article about Delight Directed Learning with Project Based Learning for more ideas.
Thanksgiving, Valentines Day and other major (traditional) holidays can be great jumping off points for even more delightful learning. Use our list of 15 Creative Tips for Holiday Studies combined with traditions to create delight-directed learning opportunities for your students.
Amanda Bennett has written several great unit studies on holidays, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, and St. Patrick’s Day.
Silly American Holidays
Another option revolving around homeschooling holidays is to do studies based on silly American holidays. While you may not want to celebrate every silly holiday, it certainly can add some fun into your week and can also be a creative launching point for learning to research and investigate most any topic! Get fun ideas (here) and learn about the origins of lighthearted holidays such as National Marshmallow Roasting day Day.
Holidays Through the Rest of July
These are just a few of the ideas for fun holidays through July:
21 National Junk Food Day (grab these unit studies on pizza, popcorn, and cookies)
22 Hammock Day
23 National Hot Dog Day & Vanilla Ice Cream Day
24 Amelia Earhart Day (grab this Amelia Earhart unit study)
24 Cousins Day
26 Parent’s Day – fourth Sunday in July
27 Take Your Pants for a Walk Day
28 National Milk Chocolate Day (grab this chocolate unit study)
30 National Cheesecake Day & International Day of Friendship
31 Mutt’s Day (grab this Dogs unit study)
Getting Started Right Away
Use the following resources to enjoy your own Vanilla Ice Cream Day and Amelia Earhart Day to get started with delight-directed learning based on holidays.
Vanilla Ice Cream Day is July 23rd. While eating ice cream does not constitute an official “homeschool study,” with a little bit of investigation, you’ll find that it is rich in more than just flavor! Read about ice cream history here, get a recipe for an ice cream in a bag experiment and learn the science of ice cream. Have kids pretend to be news journalists, take notes in a note-pad, and make a video about the origin or science of ice cream. Suddenly, instead of a single-dip ice cream cone, you have reading, writing, creative thinking, public speaking, history, and science. It’s a super tasty homeschool day right in the middle of summer!
>>Purchase the Amelia Earhart Download N Go for just $3 with code 3DollarsAmelia through July 24 <<
>>Purchase the Holiday Celebrations Set of Download N Go unit studies at $10 the already discounted price with code HolidaySet10OFF through July 25 <<
Follow up with Amelia Earhart Day on the 24th. Read about her here – watch this video from TIME for Kids. check out these books from your library or purchase for your own library:
- I am Amelia Earhart by Brad Meltzer
- National Geographic Reader: Amelia Earhart
- Who Was Amelia Earhart? by Kate Boehm Jerome
- Who Was Amelia Earhart? Audio for $1.95 or 1 credit HERE
- DK Publishing – Amelia Earhart
- Amelia Earhart Download N Go
Do you currently make holidays count in your homeschool studies? If you have other creative study ideas to add – we’d love for you to share them in the comments!
Kelli Becton is a homeschool mom of 3 boys and resides with her husband, on the coast in Southwest Florida. They have been homeschooling almost since 2003 and have developed their own hands on learning style with Wildlife Adventures Unit Studies. Kelli shares their adventures and loads of freebies at www.AdventuresinChildrearing.com – Facebook & Pinterest.
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I would also love to invite you the community inspired by this series, as we strive to inspire, encourage and empower our readers in everything homeschooling.
