Homeschooling generally provides a lot of freedom to be creative in how our children learn. Growing up, I loved how my mom used that freedom to find creative ways to make learning fun and memorable. One of my favorite ways she did that was by using an unconventional holidays calendar to teach my siblings and me.
Unconventional Holidays
What are unconventional holidays? Unconventional holiday calendars are the holidays you hear about, such as National Hot Dog Day, National Umbrella Day, etc. There are several different versions of these calendars.
Using Unconventional Holidays in Homeschool
There are no right or wrong ways to use this type of calendar to aid in your homeschool lesson planning. I will tell you how we used this calendar, and then maybe it will inspire you to use it in your homeschool classroom as well. We all have different learning styles, and this might inspire you in your classroom.
How we used our unconventional holiday calendar varied. Our local library used to hand out a piece of paper each month with the unconventional holidays for the month listed. With the internet making it easier to find the holidays, it’s more efficient for long-term lesson planning.
I’ll give you some examples of how we used the unconventional calendar. Once I remember it being National Rice Week (which falls at the end of September), and for every subject that week, my mom incorporated rice. We made dyed rice art, learned about the history of art, tried different rice recipes for lunch, learned about the environments that rice grows in and how it grows, and learned about different cultures that eat rice as a major ingredient and more.
Fun and Unconventional Holidays to Add to Your Homeschool
Not sure which holidays to add to your homeschool schedule? These three are homeschoolers’ favorites:
Whether you choose to stage all of your subjects around these unconventional holidays or just a single subject like art, this is a great way to get inspired to mix up how you homeschool this year. I love making learning fun with my kids, and they love it too! I find they really remember the information when we incorporate these holidays, and it takes a lot of the leg work off, creating a fun learning environment for me too.
How will you use an unconventional holiday calendar this homeschool year?
What a great idea! I remember celebrating some off-the-wall holidays in grade school. And even in college (National Donut Day, anyone?).
I could see this calendar giving me the chance to create unit studies around a theme for years to come. Thank you!