This past year at home, I've been trying to find creative ways to supplement educational activities for my 3rd Grade daughter and Pre-K son. Finding fun activities that they'll both enjoy can be a struggle, as we all know well. That's how I discovered the educational site, TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT) and it was a game-changer.
The site allows fellow teachers to swap creative lesson ideas and also serves as an incredible place for parents to access resources. So, I started identifying topics that were important to my family - and decided to go all-in on topics of Race and American History, originally, taking a deeper dive and exploring Juneteenth and Tanabata.
One of our main goals as parents is to raise our children to know of a world beyond themselves. While they may touch on these subjects in school, I like to try to add some creativity to them at home. It was important to me to see what they knew about Black History Month and some of the famous people of color who have had made a significant impact on our culture and history.
Turning to TPT, I explored what other teachers might have created to lead our discussion. There were many free options on the site as well as options that would financially assist the teachers. For Black History Month, I was able to fully develop my plan with all free material.
After pulling together things like an age-appropriate word search for each child, life timelines of 6 pivotal figures in Black History and a file of 20+ Black thought-leaders and change-makers and what made them famous (all from TPT) I was struggling on how to pull it all together.
And then I had an ah-ha moment: I'd create a Museum of Black History in our playroom. Creating this as a special event helped my kids appreciate it as something unique and really grabbed their attention. I made the welcome sign and introduced them to the activities.
Using the large file of images, I taped the color printed versions around the room and gave them the black and white versions as cards to match. They enjoyed running around finding their matches and it gave me a foundation from which I could teach my kids about each person once all were found. Plus, the sheets double as coloring pages, which is another activity for them and a great way to further engrain these history-makers in their memory.
The second activity I focused on was the timeline review area that was set up with a glue stick ready to match the different squares of their life timelines that would best complete the order of the person's accomplishments.
Finally, they came to the word search area and were excited to find all of these names that they had just learned about during the scavenger hunt and timeline review.
As a parent, this took some time to scroll through TPT to find the documents, print, cut, and tape. But once the research was complete, the kids did the rest by having fun while secretly learning a lot about these incredible people who have so greatly impacted our world.
