Couch Fun
Six short years ago
A homeschooling friend who’s expecting a baby asked for ideas for fun learning activities to do from the couch. Others chimed in with suggestions; here was my contribution:
I second Erica’s Signing Time recommendation!
Jim Weiss CDs (holler if you want to borrow some of ours)
The Horrible Histories video for English monarchs—we watched it every day for a few weeks until we had them all by heart.
Look for Koosje Koene drawing videos on Youtube. (If the computer is accessible.) Short simple how-to videos that we have found quite inspiring.
Clapping games like Say Say oh Playmate, my kids love when I dredge these up from memory.
This silly parts-of-speech game we used to play in the car. 🙂
Plus other wordplay games like the one where you pretend you’re packing for a trip and the first person packs an A thing (apple), second person adds a B thing (brush) + says the A word, and so on—see how far through the alphabet you can get. (I am blanking on the name.)
If you have cable you might have a karaoke channel, surprisingly entertaining.
Good time to work on a foreign language
Impromptu spelling bee
Round robin storytelling—one person starts and you take turns going around the room. I can see your girls having a great time with this!
For times table practice sometimes I make them run up and down the hall while I call out problems. For beginners you can give the problem and they give you the answer when they get back, it gives them time to think.
Count all the squares/rectangles/triangles etc in the room. This can get tricky! Doors and windows can have many subdivided rectangles, etc. (I remember once looking at a large window at our church in Virginia. Jane asked how many rectangles I could see. I counted something like 16. She then pointed out to me a total of 37 different rectangles!)
Book scavenger hunt: assign a subject, like a lion. Everyone goes off to look for a book with a lion in it.
Oh how this makes me miss our baby days! Huck turned SIX today, how can that be possible???
sarah says:
Happy birthday Huck!
On January 13, 2015 at 9:42 pm
sarah says:
Happy Birthday, Huck! Six years…feels more like six months. Has he lost any teeth yet? Have fun celebrating!
On January 14, 2015 at 4:41 am
Penny says:
Happy birthday Huck! Wishing you joy forever!
On January 14, 2015 at 4:45 am
Ellie says:
Six sounds impossibly OLD! (Even moreso, of course, to the mama of the baby six-year-old). Happy birthday to Huck and happy Birthday to you, Lissa! {{hugs}}
On January 14, 2015 at 6:20 am
Donna says:
We have a little one due in March, and I’ve been looking for some ideas of things to do with my boys while I am otherwise occupied with the baby. These are great! Thank you for sharing.
And, Happy Birthday to your little guy!
On January 14, 2015 at 8:17 am
Sarah says:
Happy Birthday to your little guy! This is a great list. We started our family by adopting infant twins two years ago, then adopted another infant by surprise this summer and are now expecting our fourth. It was only a small gap between kids, but I’d completely forgotten just how much time one spends sitting on the couch coaxing formula or milk into a baby. It’s much more noticeable once you have two year olds wailing about being ignored every time you do it! Many of these activities are too mature for them, but several are great ideas to try implementing in our house. We also do reading aloud (“Little House in the Big Woods” right now, because picture books require too many one-handed page turns compared to chapter books) and singing; we grab the hymnal or book of carols and sing through lots of songs, all the verses. The kids love it, and have picked up on a lot of music along the way. For these very little folks still learning basic words, just playing the simplest of games like “Where is…[a bookshelf, the computer, the baby, Mama, a plate]” also helps get us through the rough patches.
On January 14, 2015 at 10:47 am
Mary Beth Patnaude says:
Happy Birthday, Huck! My baby turned 7 on Sunday…where does the time go!
On January 14, 2015 at 3:30 pm