Homeschool Theater

Creating a collage can be an excellent tool for a homeschool preschooler who needs to work on tearing or cutting skills. It creates focused attention and builds motor skills. It can be used for sorting and classifying if your child has to choose only, say, the square or green pieces out of an assortment. And for a hands-on learner, it’s just plain fun!

Your preschooler may enjoy the very tactile experience of creating a collage art piece . The homeschool materials you need are probably already in your home.

Give your child a background piece, which could be cardboard, thin plywood, a paper plate, canvas, or anything that can support objects glued to it.

A gluestick can be used if all the items are paper. Craft glue is best for thicker objects or fabric.

The materials can be paper, such as tissue, old magazines, ads, junk mail, expired coupons, napkins, candy wrappers, wrapping or scrapbook paper, you name it. Fabric bits, ribbon, buttons, beads, sequins, feathers, stickers, yarn, string, game pieces, tiny toys, etc.

A collage project can relate to anything your child is currently learning about:

–If your little one is learning colors, say, purple, go on a hunt through the house with your child in search of purple bits, and choose the ones that can be adhered to the board.

–Studying birds? How about feathers, nest-building pieces such as string or grass, seeds.

–Plants- leaves, flower petals, seed packets.

–Food groups- food wrappers, ads, dried corn, beans or rice.

–Textures- sandpaper, watercolor paper, foil, wax paper, tulle, burlap, fleece.

–For shapes, you can provide your child a variety of sizes of the shapes you have cut from different papers, or let an older preschooler cut them himself.

Magazines can provide a wealth of images for nearly any study topic.

Provide enough materials for your youngster to choose from to create her art piece, but not too many or she may be overwhelmed (and the clean-up will be too big!).

A collage work, whether to conclude a study topic or for the value and fun of creating, will lead your preschooler through exploring the process of art. And you get a wonderful art piece to boot!

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Michelle B. is a homeschooling mother who’s been at this homeschool curriculum for 20 years.

Homeschool Books- what can you use? Using trade books can be an excellent way to introduce or reinforce a study subject with your homeschool students. “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” is a popular book that my kids and I have enjoyed using. The tale is about weather and food, how the people have adapted to their town’s unusual circumstances and how they react when things go haywire. What study topics can we find in this enjoyable story?

Meteorology: The tall tale Grandpa shares is about the unusual weather a small town receives. This is a good intro to units on clouds, local or extreme weather or weather in general, climates, the water cycle, meteorologists and weather forecasting.

Food: Food in various forms plays a very important role in this story. This would be a fun start to learning about food sources, cooking, food in various cultures, nutrition and the food pyramid.

Social studies: How have people adapted to their food sources in different parts of the world? The townspeople of Chewandswallow had to adapt to a completely new food source when they had to leave their town, which opens up the topic of emigration/immigration. The book also offers the opportunity to discuss sanitation and recycling. You can even discuss safety and emergency preparedness, as the townsfolk had to deal with some scary weather situations.

Language arts: There are at least thirty compound words in the book. Learn vocabulary words such as incident, prediction and pulp. Grandpa told a tall tale; learn about tall tales and read Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill tales, then let the kids either write (creative writing) or tell their own (storytelling). What are some of the crazy things that happened in Chewandswallow? Have your kids write a descriptive paragraph. Compare and contrast the book to the new movie. Spelling word lists can be made up of the foods mentioned or weather words.

The book, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” offers the homeschooling family plenty of opportunities to begin or continue any one of an assortment of relevant learning topics.