Now that Christmas has christmased and the year has been new, and holiday season is officially over, the hardest part of everyone's life is going back to their routine. Now we have to snap back to reality as Eminem would say. As a kid, I remembered all the yelling and the rushing because I can't wake up early on the first day back to school every January.
One of the great things about homeschooling is we get to decide when and how we deal with holidays. I myself wasn't in a homeschool-y mood just yet but I know that there are deliverables that need to be done. It's a good thing that throughout the holidays, we still have some study sessions even if we started our holiday break on December 1st.
I was actually worried about getting back into our rhythm earlier. Last year, I was in a much lighter mood so my daughter just followed my lead. This year though I know I still have to lead her back into our regular daily rhythm. I wanted to start it off with something fun and easy. Being that I'm not in the presenting mood yet, and I did not want to overwhelm her with too much, I decided on doing arts.
So for today in our homeschooling journey, we started with a little arts activity. Just a refresher on color theory, brush strokes, with Beethoven in the background. I purchased canvas bags sometime ago and she's been practicing on some pieces. This one so far is her favorite.
The instructions I gave her was to put masking tapes all over the bag randomly so she creates several different shapes on the bag. Each shape is to be colored differently according to the colors she wished to use. As part of the refresher, I had her use different sizes of paint brush. We used acrylic for this project. It's a good thing her aunt gave her a whole set of acrylic paint for her birthday last year.
Another part of this activity is having her experiment on color mixing. First she mixed bright red, blue, and white. She did not want to mix magenta with anything else because according to her, it's already a mix of several colors, it was just going to be chaotic. Her next experiment was something she loved. She mixed green, yellow and white. She ended up creating mint. And she was really happy about it.
After all the coloring has been done, we waited for the paint to dry completely. While waiting, we did a bit of Math activities. Nothing too heavy, just some cute Math activity from her Mad for Math book. I have printed out her new The Good and The Beautiful 2 Math book but I did not want to start with the book just yet.
She painted the canvas bag a bit too thick so it took longer to dry. While we're still waiting again, we took to kiddie zumba. My kid insisted I should do PE with her. So for 30 minutes, we did some zumba for kids. It looks like this might be part of our weekly Physical Education activity.
Finally, the paint has dried and we can remove the tapes we put in at the start. The result was just beautiful, I really liked it. By the look on her face, she seem to be very much contented with the outcome.
I can say our first day back to study time was a success. She's looking forward to more arts activity but furthermore, she's looking forward to more lessons. I plan on going full blast on our lessons next week. I just did not want to unnecessarily prolong the already prolonged holiday. It was a nice warm up though. How about you? How did you get yourself started with all your normal routine after the holidays?
