Valentine Social Skills

Valentine’s Day is so much fun for many homeschool kids. It is a time to show love and share love. It is a time to be a friend. Valentine’s Day is a great time to work on social skills.

Talk to your child about showing love and sharing love with family members, friends, and neighbors. Have your child make a special craft for a family member. It can be a bookmark, college of the family doing things together, a lacy heart with a picture of the family member and them, or anything that catches their fancy.

Food is another way to share love. Food seems to bring folks together. What about making a heart shaped pizza? Simply make a pizza, but shape the dough into a heart. Add your favorite toppings. Heart shaped cookies are fun, too! Use a heart shaped cookie cutter. Decorate the cookies with red, white, and pink icing. Add sprinkles for fun, or use a fine tipped tube of icing to write Love, Family, Be Mine… on the cookies.

A treasure hunt is a fantastic way to have fun and practice social skills. Divide the kids or family members into teams. Use red and pink construction paper to write down clues for the teams. Hide clues around the house and yard. Each team leader get the first clue for their team which will propel them on a fun hunt. The team members must work together as a team. At the end of the hunt, the winning team will find a special Valentine’s Day gift as their prize. The prize could be candy for each team member, a holiday bookmark, a box of candy hearts… Look at the Dollar Store for prizes.

Most of all encourage your child to have fun and be friendly as they spread a little love.

Carschooling

Do you use carschooling or roadschooling for your homeschool? They are a little similar. Essentially, carschooling is educating your child while they are riding in the car. Diane Flynn Keith coined the term. It has become very popular in the last few years, not to mention how fun it is. We all have errands to run, vacations to take, rides to grandma’s house, time stuck in traffic jams, carpooling to soccer practice, trips to the bank, and so on. Roadschooling is hitting the road to school. Visiting places you are learning about.

Since you have a captive audience, use that captured time wisely. Quiz the kids, ask them to look for familiar or unfamiliar words around town, practice directional terms, tell stories, listen to educational CD’s (how to speak Spanish, addition facts, various music styles…). Play memory games, or if your kids know their ABC’s, you can call out a letter and have your child see if they can spot one thing for each letter of the alphabet. For example, if you say the letter “B”. Your child might say billboard, barn, or bench. It depends on what they see around them.

The point of carschooling is to work a little educational fun into lost minutes in your day.