It's Friday! Yippy! As I sit here typing this my children are doing a variety of things. One is reading, one is stacking blocks building castles, one is watching a video about killer whales, one is still with the grandparents. They still haven't figured out what is going on with my dad, but strongly suspect kidney stones. And two of my children are racing cars.

We got our seat work out of the way early. And being Friday we tend to loose momentum most weeks on this day. LOL So what we usually do is take a break from our normal daily activities and do a what ever day. Whatever day is doing things we have put off, doing things we haven't done in awhile due to time restrictions, planning for upcoming months, after all spring will be here before we know it and it will be time to spend lots of time outside.

As I am doing my whatevers I thought of something we started on the first of the New Year. And thought I would share with you. A little idea for you on the days that you want a change of pace, or feel you need to be doing something else, or need some ideas of which direction to go in learning. It seems this is the month that we look at things and want something different to do, or feel we need to add to what we are already doing, but not sure what.

We have added a monthly events calendar in our home. I found it here at this link. http://www.teachercreated.com/free/calendars.php. Now some ideas to do with this. There are dates for authors birthdays, artists birthdays, dates of firsts, dates of endings, presidents birthdays, etc. We have added doing a couple of lapbooks or unit studies for a few of the dates. You can read books by the authors and learn about their style/genre of writing, you could do an online seach of the artists work, do biographies on the people.

For the little ones you can use to teach the months of the year. And introduce history to them thru the events. You can add your own events and birthdays to the calendar and see what else happened in history on your day of birth. You can use for math by figuring out how long between one event to the next. Or if you share a birthday with someone on the calendar how much older are or would they  be than you. You could use to find quotes of the people mentioned to do copywork. Handwriting gets better with lots and lots of practice. You could even try to replicate some of the scientists experiments. Use caution don't want to see anyone out there with a kite, key, and lightening all around them LOL.

The possibilities are endless! If you are anything like me, every once in awhile you need something just a little different to do, but you get lost in the what. You could even cut up the calendar into individual squares, put all the squares into a bowl or hat. And when the kids ask what they can do, have them draw one out and research the topic.

I hope this gives some of you some ideas you were looking for, or that it sparks some creative juices to flow for you. After 16 years of homeschooling I know I sometimes need someone to spark my creative juices.

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