Holbrook Heroes: National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week

As the title suggests, this week was National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. So, we focused more on these two issues as well as Thanksgiving which is coming up way too quickly!

We did some of our normal routine stuff such as the Letter Mini Book of the Week (Letter Pp), the Reading Eggs program, money in math, and some games with spelling/recognizing words.

Bean bag toss game for spelling words

Using Boggle dice to spell out words

Counting coins worksheet

For working on hunger and homelessness awareness, we read several books (which you'll find listed in the "Books We Read" post), did some group activities and discussions which I found from the 2003 Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless website. They have several lessons listed for different grade levels that were very helpful. For us, we identified our basic needs (food, clothing, shelter) and completed a "What Do I Need?" worksheet together, and we identified ways that we can help homeless people and families. In doing that, we decided to partipate in the Sulzbacher Center's Stocking Stuffer Drive. We went to Walmart and to the Dollar Tree store to purchase gloves, hats, socks, chapstick, coloring books & crayons, calculators, pocket calendars, coloring pencils, etc. The week after Thanksgiving, we'll be taking all of these things to the Sulzbacher Center in downtown Jacksonville, and we'll be getting a tour of their facility. In addition, we are also collecting canned goods for the Second Harvest with our homeschool group.

For Thanksgiving, we read more books (also listed in the "Books We Read" post). After reading each of these books, we did some sort of activity such as a pilgrim hat craft project, made harvest bread and butter from shaking heavy cream, made pumpkin muffins, and we added a new leaf to our Thankful Thoughts tree each day.