Twice a year, our homeschool co-op gets together to decide what classes will be offered for the upcoming session. The brainstorming meeting for the spring session is coming up in a few weeks, so I asked the kids what they might be interested in studying. Poppy said she’d like to study puppets, pets, baking, sewing, snow and candy, and Pete would like to further explore robots, superheroes and ham.

I’m not sure exactly what we’d do in nine sessions of Ham Class, but I’ve been thinking about (and Googling) some of their other ideas and I think some of them are feasible and might even be fun.

For example:

Puppetry study

For this one we would probably spend the first half of class talking about and watching videos of different “schools” of puppetry — shadow puppets, puppetry around the world, etc — and the second half making some kind of puppet. Then we’d spend the last couple of weeks working on a puppet show to perform at our co-op’s end-of-session demo night. We also have a local puppetry group that I’d like to contact to see if they had anyone who might come over and do a demonstration for the kids.

Resources

Susana Abell’s “Puppetry in the Writing Curriculum” includes instructions for building simple puppets, advice on developing a character and guidance on how to map out a story.

This study guide on Chinese puppetry from the Center for Puppetry Arts was made to go with some sort of distance-learning program, but it enough really nice templates and links to other resources to be helpful without access to the videoconferencing.

I found a lot of great instructions for making simple puppets at Enchanted Learning, a ton of sock puppet ideas at Danielle’s Place and a guide to making giant puppets at Child Drama.

Candy study

I’m pretty sure that what Poppy was envisioning when she suggested a candy class was a solid hour of eating candy. Which isn’t exactly what I’d offer. I’m thinking we’d do some geography by trying candies from around the world and mapping common candy bar ingredients; a little chemistry by examining the properties of different kinds of sweetener; and a bit o’ history by researching the origins of popular candies. And the ace-in-the-hole on this idea would be a field trip to my favorite local chocolatier. I’m betting I could drum up a few willing chaperones for that one.

Resources

This “Sweet Science” unit from the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute looks fantastic. I could probably just follow it and we’d have a great class.

The candy timeline at Food Timeline is text-heavy and packed with information.

The World in a Candy Bar would be a terrific geography study.

We could start every class with a Candy Math exercise.

Superheroes study

This one has quite a few possibilities. We might spend a few weeks talking about different mythological heroes, we could develop our own superhero personas and we could study real-life heroes. I think this one would be a hit with the little guys.

Resources

Robin Lady’s “The Superhero Project” is a fully-planned unit for fifth- to eighth-graders. Pete would be pretty upset if I taught a superhero class that he was too young for, but I think there are some ideas I could mine here for a class for younger kids.

The superhero study ideas at No Time for Flashcards, on the other hand, look perfect for preschoolers.

What do you think? Would you sign up for any of these, or would you prefer the Nine Weeks of Ham?