Homeschoolers' Birthday Celebration

Our parish has launched a homeschoolers' co-op this year. On Friday mornings are academic courses in the classical style for older students, then there is a brown bag lunch for all, then in the afternoon there are some fun classes, such as art, chess, and drama. My kids are still a bit young for anything that is offered in the afternoon, but they will definitely appreciate the once monthly liturgical celebrations and sports play.

Today we celebrated (a week late) the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which I happened to be organizing. We started by having all the kids sit in a circle and it was quite funny to see John sit down with all the other kids when (as some of my friends know), I had a totally unreasonable meltdown earlier this week about how my boy doesn't know how or want to do "circle time" with me at home. As all my friends said, if he were in a large group of kids, he would do circle time--not that it matters one whit anyway!--and that was true. It was interesting to see that he chose one child in the group to imitate so he would know what to do. He whispered to me, "That little girl is kneeling. I am going to kneel too!" And then I watched that, as the little girl casually switched positions several times, John switched positions exactly the same way.

One boy read a page about the feast day, then a girl led us in a decade of the rosary. There were a few quiz questions about the Virgin Mary, we sang "Happy Birthday," and then ate cupcakes!

Yum!

We had three craft options. First John made a rosary bracelet out of beads, then he moved on to the table with black-and-white pictures of Mary to color. Last, he dictated to me a spiritual birthday gift to the Virgin Mary, which I wrote on a paper flower and put in a basket before a statue of the BVM. His gift was: "I will help Mama wash the dishes." The children sang "Hail, Holy Queen" before cleaning up the room.

Then, we moved on to free play in the gymnasium. I thought it was precious to see that when we first got there, the kids of all ages burst into spontaneous play of simply running wildly from one end of the gym to the other, back and forth, back and forth. Who needs rules and organization to have fun? John was hesitant at first, telling me that he couldn't run as fast as the other kids, but I pointed out that the smaller kids weren't running as fast as the bigger kids, and that he could keep up with the smaller ones. Then he was off, having fun.

The moms pulled out these sitting scooter thingies, as shown above, for a game sort of like soccer. The kids had to remain sitting on these rolling scooters, and each team tried to get the ball into the goal on the other side. The little kids had no clue how to play, but very happily scooted around randomly over the playing field.

John was proudly on the green team and has been talking about his "team" ever since we got home. Also, when we got home, I got to listen in on a private conversation between John and his sister in which he was animatedly telling her all about the event in hopes that she would come too next time. He told her all about the "big kids and the small kids."



I took this video early in the scooter game and you can see how John is copying the older boy's movements to learn how to use the scooter.

After the scooter game, there were scooter races by age. John came in second in the under-five race.

On more thing I noted--as usual--is that groups of homeschoolers tend to be really gentle amongst the wide range of ages. The big kids are accustomed to having little kids around because of their many siblings. The bigger ones are kind and helpful to the littler ones. I'm sure it happens sometime, but I have yet to see cruel teasing in these settings, something which is normal in mixed age groups at typical, big schools.

It was a really fun afternoon and we look forward to participating again!