There is yet another storm day here for public school. It is freezing rain out there, and when I went out to feed our chickens, quail, and turkeys this morning everything was covered in a thin layer of ice. Dangerous! My kids are going to love slipping and sliding around. This begs the question: do you take storm days in your homeschool?
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Storm Days in your Homeschool, do you take them?
We do not take storm days, in fact, my kids don’t even realize it’s a storm day when public schools have them because they aren’t usually up when the bus goes by in the morning to realize it didn’t go by.
Instead of a storm day, we do our lessons as usual: math, language arts, whatever was already on the plan for the day.
For example, right now there is baking happening, someone is working on French lessons, and I am fighting the urge to go back to my warm bed. I do think we’ll be watching a documentary shortly, I just need to decide what we’ll be watching, something educational to go along with our lessons, or something that someone has shown a little interest in, like food from around the world.
What to Do on Storm Days
There is no hard-fast rule that students need storm days, or that you have to either take storm days or not take them. This is the freedom of homeschooling.
If You Do Want to Take a Storm Day Learning Ideas:
- watch documentaries
- read aloud
- head out for an adventure on foot, maybe do some sledding or snowshoeing
- baking/cooking day
- do science experiments
We have both baking and documentaries on the schedule for our storm days. You can easily take a storm day without losing a day of learning. the beauty of homeschooling is learning is always happening. I actually try to do baking early in the morning or the evening before a storm hits just in case we lose power. It’s a great learning opportunity too for my kids to learn to be prepared.
Looking for something fun to do during a stormy day?
Maybe you run outside to grab some freshly fallen snow to do this fun snow reaction in a bag science experiments.
Break out the board games! There is nothing like spending the day, or just the afternoon playing a board game with your kids. On Wednesday we don’t do formal lessons and often have a homeschool group. But on the day we don’t have a group get-together we spend the afternoon playing board games together.
Taking a Sunny Day Instead in Your Homeschool
We prefer to take sunny days off from school rather than storm days. In Saskatchewan, we would often spread blankets out on the ground and read books, or just relax on warm days because, after a Saskatchewan winter, you can’t wait to soak up fresh warm air.
Nothing has changed living in Nova Scotia for sunny days off. We try to end our year a little early to soak up all the nice warmer days. We do a lot of early spring gardening days when kids would normally be in school.
We get to decide what days we do school on, storm days or sunny days.
Snow Storm in A Jar Science Experiment