{photo by Jenny Bischoff}
We’ve almost got one week under our belt and we’re already looking at a holiday! Labor Day weekend is coming up, and there will be no classes Monday or Tuesday. We’d like to encourage you to use some of that time for what we call “Enrichment and Education” or “E&E” hours. As outlined in the parent handbook, twelve hours of E&E activities are required each trimester in addition to classroom days and assigned home days. SLOCA Academy Classes, Enrichment classes, field trips, and catching up on school work all count toward this requirement, but there are many other fun ways you can fulfill these hours without taking classes.
Today we’d like to offer some suggestions to get you started. Here are several activities to keep in mind for E&E fun:
– Visit a local mission or museum, or other historical or educational site (family field trip!).
– Attend a fine arts performance.
– Go on a nature walk, and study something your kids find or are interested in. Sketching is a great way to study nature.
– Play educational games that build skills in critical thinking, memory, or concentration. These can be board games or activities found online, such as these:
– Try a hands-on home science experiment: here’s one website with ideas, but there are many out there.
– Have fun with art projects.
– Cook or bake with your kids and let them do most of the work.
– Let your kids make up a play or puppet show about what they are learning and perform it for the family (make a video!).
– Read interesting supplemental books that correspond to our history time period.
– Watch historical films or documentaries.
– Do optional enrichment activities suggested by your child’s teacher.
– Explore any topic of interest to your child.
One final idea, pictured in the photo above, is to make an E&E Box to hold small educational games, puzzles, activity books, flash cards, videos, cds, maps, etc. The box pictured is specifically tailored to American History to go along with our studies this year. This makes an easy go-to spot where kids can choose something they’d like to do on E&E days.
When planning E&E hours, you can use the above list as a menu to pull ideas from, or get as creative as you want to and keep adding to this collection of activities. Please let us know what you like to do for E&E, or leave additional suggestions, by commenting below. We can all use fresh ideas!
