Fun and Learning Go Together
Christmas has come early to our house. Ray and I have just enjoyed a wonderful extended weekend with our family. We loved our packed house. Our grandchildren and their parents gave us a joy-filled visit.
We experienced a combination Christmas celebration, birthday celebration (for yours truly), and “Notty (that’s Ray) and Little (that’s me) Camp.” Because I was born in the 1950s, our camp theme was the 50s. Our activities were so easy to do that I thought you might enjoy implementing some of them during a homeschool day, a family fun day or fun night, or your own Christmas celebration. Your older children could plan activities like these for the younger ones. You could also use a completely different theme.
As camp director, the first principle I followed was “Be flexible!” Before our family arrived on Friday, I decided that this was going to be a “chilled” weekend. The celebration was not about the stuff we might do; the celebration was about each member of the family. If we didn’t accomplish everything on my list, that was A-OK. (As a girl who likes to finish every idea I plan, this was a stretch, but it turned out great — and much less stressful for me — and our family, too.)
Ray and I put our heads together to think of different ways to celebrate the 50s. I made an index card for each of the activities we planned. I was afraid that I would get wrapped up in the weekend and let it get away without taking a big group picture so I even made a card for Family Photo. I taped each card to the back of the door into the laundry room. Here is a small section.
After we finished an activity, I drew a bow on the corresponding card. By the last day of camp, the children were eager to complete the rest of the activity cards.
One activity was a 50s scavenger hunt. Each team had two members, an adult and a child. Each scavenger hunt team started out with two sheets of paper. One sheet had a list of items from the 1950s. The other had a diagram of our house. As teams wandered through the house and found an object listed on the sheet, the adult wrote the name of the object inside the appropriate room on the diagram.
Ray and I searched through our children’s books ahead of time and found many which were published in the 1950s. When it came time to complete a certain child’s personal “50s book” card, he or she got to pick out one of the 50s books for all of the grandchildren to hear. The 50s books were not only great stories, but the illustrations taught the children what life was like then.
When I pulled out my Dick and Jane reader, the three oldest grandchildren enjoyed reading one story apiece to the younger ones.
Sometimes our children pulled meals together in the kitchen or played a grown-up game, but many times, they joined in the fun. We had quite a chain when we did the “Bunny Hop.”
Long before our camp weekend, Ray and I worked together to scan some of my childhood photos and get them printed for a camp craft. With parents’ help at the dining room table, we used yarn, a hole punch, and scrapbooking cardstock to create a “When Little was Little” photo album. Another craft project was simply to color pages from a giant Christmas coloring book I found at Dollar Tree. During one activity, I taught the children how to create “modern art” the way my first grade teacher taught me.
50s television was a big hit. We watched:
- the segment of “I Love Lucy” when Lucy and Ethel tried to wrap candy on a fast-moving conveyor belt,
- an eleven-year-old blind girl play water glasses on Lawrence Welk’s Top Tunes & New Talent Show Christmas Special from December 16, 1957, and
- a Christmas special of Ozzie and Harriet.
Notty even acted as DJ Records Ray and played some old phonograph records from the 50s. Records Ray was his DJ nickname when he worked part-time at a radio station while he was in college.
On Sunday morning our grandchildren enjoyed a 1950s Sunday School class at church when they helped to tell the story of Jesus’ birth with a sandbox, clothespin people, and fuzzy cotton ball and pipe cleaner sheep.
Psalm 128 ends with words about grandchildren. I say, “Amen!”
Indeed, may you see your children’s children.
Peace be upon Israel!
Psalm 128:6
It was a blast!