I wrote recently about how I had used the Pawprint Badges to structure some of our home ed projects. In previous times, I would have hosted sessions at home for the children and their friends to cover a range of learning oppotunities. However, we can’t do that in the current situation, so I have arranged a couple of things via zoom.
It’s less than ideal but it does allow some contact for the children with their friends and those odd hours in the day help them to maintain those connections and relationships and learn, in a small way, alongside each other.
So, here are some ideas for how you could run some sessions via zoom to focus on learning about Harvest. In hindsight, I might have run some of this prior to the zoom and used a screen recorder to capture what I was sharing and talking about. It would have been good to have the information to refer back to and refine what we were talking about, as well as having something for the children to refer back to afterwards when we were chatting about the session. Obviously, when using a screen recorder you do need to be mindful of if anyone else is present on the meeting (we have been doing a lot online) but they can be a useful tool for preparing lessons to run for children.
Make Scarecrows
This would have been great fun to do face to face and have the children dress each other up as scarcrows, or even attempt to make an actual scarecrow. Instead, we talked about scarecrows, the jobs that children would have held in the past to throw things to scare off the birds and how things have evolved to have drone like things to move the birds on.
We then made our own scarecrows using whatever materials we had to hand. My own children made them with pipecleaners and old material. We then rejoined the zoom call to share our creations. This was only about an hour in total, but it was nice for the children to make something and then share their interpretations.
D even made a scarecrwo using Hama beads which worked really well.
Learn about Sukkot
We learnt about the Jewish festival of Sukkot, we watched a short YouTube video which explained Sukkot and we then broke to make a Sukkah. It was raelly interesting to see how the children had made their Sukkah’s. My own children opted to use Lego to make theirs, others used natural objects to make and decorate theirs. I also put together a small lapbook which my older two did to note down the key parts of Sukkot.
Learn about Rangoli and Pongal
I ran this session for Daniel’s Cub group. The children learnt about Pongal, a harvest festival in India and we talked about the festival and how it looked; how it was similar and different to the key festivals that we celebrate in the UK. We looked at Rangoli patterns and the children had a go at creating their own Rangoli patterns. This was fun and it was interesting to see how they found using materials such as lentils and flowers and how they found drawing the patterns. You could also use Hama beads for this or try this templates available on twinkl.
Poetry Tea Time
Have a go at writing your own harvest themed poetry, or chose a favourite poem to share. Make a cake, grab a hot chocolate and take it in turns to share your favourite or newly written poem.
Bake-Off
This was a session that another family run, but we didn’t attend. But how about a harvest themed bake off? Use your harvest gatherings to make something like an apple cake or perhaps have a go at making a tree or even a tractor out of cake! There are some great and creative ideas you could do for this, and share your makes and bakes with friends via zoom.
Share a game
To found off our Harvest themed zoom meets we had a game of Harvest bingo! I was struggling to find boards that didn’t reference thanksgiving or halloween, so I ended up making my own boards. I dropped off two boards for each player. To claim a ‘Bingo’ the children had to shout ‘Scarecrow’ and stand like a scarecrow. Lots of fun!
After that we played fruit or vegetable. I used on online quiz for this one and, using the shared screen funcition on zoom, asked the children to stand if they thought the item was a fruit and sit if they thought it was a vegetable. Again, a lot of fun and a good way to bring some interactive fun to the zoom sesssions.
There are plenty of different things you can do via zoom. Whilst it will never be as good as meeting face to face, it does offer the children connection with their friends. It also provides something to do with other people for a change and it will certainly be something I will keep trying to offer to friends over the coming months as we continue to see the restrictions to normal life.
good work again – i like the sound of the Harvest Bingo verson