Twice a year, our homeschool co-op gets together to decide what classes will be offered for the upcoming session. The brainstorming meeting for the spring session is coming up in a few weeks, so I asked the kids what they might be interested in studying. Poppy said she’d like to study puppets, pets, baking, sewing, snow and candy, and Pete would like to further explore robots, superheroes and ham.

I’m not sure exactly what we’d do in nine sessions of Ham Class, but I’ve been thinking about (and Googling) some of their other ideas and I think some of them are feasible and might even be fun.

For example:

Puppetry study

For this one we would probably spend the first half of class talking about and watching videos of different “schools” of puppetry — shadow puppets, puppetry around the world, etc — and the second half making some kind of puppet. Then we’d spend the last couple of weeks working on a puppet show to perform at our co-op’s end-of-session demo night. We also have a local puppetry group that I’d like to contact to see if they had anyone who might come over and do a demonstration for the kids.

Resources

Susana Abell’s “Puppetry in the Writing Curriculum” includes instructions for building simple puppets, advice on developing a character and guidance on how to map out a story.

This study guide on Chinese puppetry from the Center for Puppetry Arts was made to go with some sort of distance-learning program, but it enough really nice templates and links to other resources to be helpful without access to the videoconferencing.

I found a lot of great instructions for making simple puppets at Enchanted Learning, a ton of sock puppet ideas at Danielle’s Place and a guide to making giant puppets at Child Drama.

Candy study

I’m pretty sure that what Poppy was envisioning when she suggested a candy class was a solid hour of eating candy. Which isn’t exactly what I’d offer. I’m thinking we’d do some geography by trying candies from around the world and mapping common candy bar ingredients; a little chemistry by examining the properties of different kinds of sweetener; and a bit o’ history by researching the origins of popular candies. And the ace-in-the-hole on this idea would be a field trip to my favorite local chocolatier. I’m betting I could drum up a few willing chaperones for that one.

Resources

This “Sweet Science” unit from the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute looks fantastic. I could probably just follow it and we’d have a great class.

The candy timeline at Food Timeline is text-heavy and packed with information.

The World in a Candy Bar would be a terrific geography study.

We could start every class with a Candy Math exercise.

Superheroes study

This one has quite a few possibilities. We might spend a few weeks talking about different mythological heroes, we could develop our own superhero personas and we could study real-life heroes. I think this one would be a hit with the little guys.

Resources

Robin Lady’s “The Superhero Project” is a fully-planned unit for fifth- to eighth-graders. Pete would be pretty upset if I taught a superhero class that he was too young for, but I think there are some ideas I could mine here for a class for younger kids.

The superhero study ideas at No Time for Flashcards, on the other hand, look perfect for preschoolers.

What do you think? Would you sign up for any of these, or would you prefer the Nine Weeks of Ham?

JJ T. Cat was in a deep, deep sleep next to me just now. Then he woke up and yawned, and my olfactory receptors immediately submitted a petition to the White House to put an end to such actions. The cat’s breath stinks, is what I’m saying. Which doesn’t have anything to do with homeschooling, unless we decide to do a unit study on feline halitosis — we’ll read “How Kitty’s Breath Made All The Flowers Wilt”; we’ll learn how to spell “halitosis,” olfactory” and “please stop yawning, JJ”; we’ll do a lab wherein we brush his teeth every day with a different toothpaste to see if any of them make a lick of difference; and at the end of the week we’ll take a field trip to the vet to make sure he doesn’t have sinusitis or something — but his breath was so distractingly awful that I completely forgot what I was going to write about.

But anyway, here’s a little of what we did this week:

Extracurricular

Pete’s first basketball game is tomorrow. His team is made up of 5- and 6-year-olds, and I think he’s one of the youngest on his team. You can read into that what you will. He’s beyond excited about the game, and he’s been practicing his game face all week.

Poppy’s piano teacher told her she’d dance the polka if Poppy practiced this week, so as you might imagine there’s been a lot of piano practice happening around here this week. Miss Kari tells me she did indeed dance the polka for Poppy yesterday, and by all accounts it was exhausting.

Reading

Poppy has been going through a free-reading draught lately. She’s usually very hesitant to read a book that I pick out for her, and yesterday was the first day in awhile that I hadn’t been solo at the library. She picked up two Magic Tree House books — “Civil War on Sunday” and “Revolutionary War on Wednesday” — yesterday, though, and she finished the first and is halfway through the second already. So I guess maybe I need to stop making suggestions? I don’t know. I’m not sure what to do on that front.

Pete, meanwhile, really wants to read some Star Wars chapter books, so he’s ramped it up on the Bob books front. He knocked out another one this week (it was about someone who tries to give a bunch of cats a bath). I haven’t had any luck convincing him to try to read anything outside of the Bob oeuvre, though.

History

I had every intention of doing All The Crafts with our Story of the World studies this year, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this week’s. We studied Charlemagne, and the craft was to make a crown and glue jewels to it. I don’t have any jewels on hand for that sort of thing (or any other sort of thing), so we skipped it. I believe next week is Vikings, though, so we’ll almost definitely be building a ship and setting it on fire or something.

How was your week?