An Example Of Why We Want To Homeschool - Columbus Day

As many of you may know, I was homeschooled 5th grade through highschool. You may also know we are seriously considering homeschooling our kids. We began the process of organizing ourselves last year and have continued this year. We thought it would be good to have two trial run years before officially making a go of it. :) Grammy bought the girls some beautiful dress up clothing earlier this Fall and one of the dresses in particular made me think of Spanish royalty and specifically Queen Isabella. It made me start thinking it would be alot of fun to learn about Columbus and act out his story. We took a couple of weeks to create all our props and as well as history we were able to incorporate geography, science, and much more into this activity. Here we are the morning of our voyage creating and coloring our sailor hats.Jackson wasn't sure about coloring his hat so Missy K came and showed him how/helped him out. The two of them got busy together and had it finished up in no time! :) Daddy was pretty funny with his hat...While we created our sailor hats that morning ,we had multiple art projects for a couple of weeks leading up to our Columbus day journey including making and decorating our own telescopes to help us watch for land. We took the opportunity to use this project to discuss geography as well. Throughout our project we discussed where Columbus wanted to go vs where he ended up. One day we took the time to paint a large piece of paper blue for the oceans. I was surprised how challenging it was to get the entire paper painted blue. The girls definitely understood how much of the world is water/ocean by the end. While we had discussed continents previously (with this project and others) I had created continent cutouts for the girls to place on their oceans (I used velcro spots with the idea that they would be able to take them on and off but that didn't work out so well - even though I used cardstock I think paper wasn't quite sturdy enough).Missy K, aka Columbus, ready to go convince Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to finance her voyage with her hand made map and telescope in hand.We began acting out our story by Columbus visiting Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. Columbus was granted 3 audiences with them over 6 years before they agreed to fund his journey. Missy K came and asked Reagan and Jackson if they would give her ships three times before she received a positive answer.Queen Isabella gave King Ferdinand her jewels in order to convince him to fund Columbus' expedition.An extremely excited Columbus that the King and Queen agreed to provide 3 ships to pursue a new route to the Indies!Our little Columbus ready to set sail to find a new route to the Indies.Our fearless crew ready to set sail aboard the three ships we had built. Besides the telescopes and maps we used two scooters and a push toy to build our ships. We used cardboard and then decorated the ships according to what the girls wanted. They helped cut and glue the paper for their boats as well as their waves. Additionally the girls drew pictures for the portholes and then we used popcicle sticks to create our portholes. We also used popcicle sticks to build masts. We discussed the importance of flags and looked up the Spanish flag to create. Then the girls created their own flag to designate their individual ships. Missy K went for a couple shades of her favorite color, green. I was impressed with Reagan, however, who spent time looking through our children's atlas at different flags before determining what should be on her flag. We were also able to discuss a bit of science regarding the ocean and make fish and sea creatures around the bottom of the boat. Missy K and Mommy sporting their sailors hat as we sail past Daddy. We discussed how it took Columbus 71 days to sail across the Atlantic. We also discussed how it takes the earth 24 hours to travel around the sun and that's what designates a day. Because we needed some way to designate how long the journey was we decided to travel around the house 71 times. It took a while but we did it - just like Columbus! :)Columbus leading the way in the Santa MariaJackson in the PintaReagan in the Nina - I have to say if I had to choose a first mate Reagan would be it! She is Miss Loyal. Regardless of how doubtful our mutinous crew (Tim - who wasn't entirely acting although he was a very good sport) was she was a firm believer in Columbus' dream and did her best to get everyone to co-operate. :)We did pack snacks for our voyage. Early on in our voyage we had nice bread among other snacks.Later on, I believe around day 50, we discovered worms (courtesy of Grammy) in our food! We decided the girls may have been a bit more excited about finding worms in their food than the sailors probably were...We also had (gummy) fish and sharks to eat (also courtesy of Grammy). Jackson enjoyed snacking on his goldfish (crackers)Given that we were traveling for "71 days," we all agreed while the boats were fun they were also a bit cumbersome. That said, we did some rotations around the house just walking (and/or running as the case may be - our little Columbus was on a mission and didn't slow down for anyone!). Daddy was a good mutinous crew. Here you can see Columbus asking for 3 more days (notice Missy's 3 fingers held up) or we would turn around and go back to Spain. Lucky for Columbus (and us) we only needed 2 more days before we spotted land. We made it to the Indies (or America or our coffee table which we had moved all the living room furniture away from so we could pretend it was an island) after sailing for 71 days across the "blue" ocean (I'll post it later in a video, but the girls learned the "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" saying. No matter how many times I told them it was the Atlantic if you asked Missy K what ocean Columbus sailed she proudly announced "The blue one!").Even though Columbus never realized he had found a "New World" we went ahead and filled in our maps with North and South America.This was such a fun project and really makes me want to officially annouce we're homeschooling (we're pretty certain that's the direction we're going to go). We have our rough days too where everything does not go as planned, but this was just such a cool way to learn together. We of course read books and had much discussion throughout the couple of weeks leading up to our voyage. One of the best things about homeschooling and a project like this is nearly anything can be used as a learning tool and many opportunities present themselves when you least expect it and not necessairly during your designated "learning" time. I love how you can tie all the subjects together for such a cool learning purpose. So much fun!!!