This school year marks our third year of homeschooling. We chose this method of teaching because of the hands on learning it provides. The ideas are endless when it comes to visual ways to teach. My favorite way of teaching is with food. It doesn’t matter what the age is, if you add food to a lesson kids just want to listen. We’ve used it for spelling, math, science, art and of course home economics. Who knew that Lucky Charms could be used to help learn addition and subtraction? Kids love it and teaching this way makes learning fun.
My children and I are taking our educating to a local co-op one day per week. This is where we meet up with other families. All the parents teach or volunteer in some way to offer a wide range of classes for our children to take. My son’s favorite so far has been ‘Daring Science Experiments’. They use lots of different foods in that class. I teach a class for second and third graders that teaches them how to cook and make recipes without using a hot stove. At the same time I find a children’s story to go along with our lesson. One of the first lessons we will do is read the story of Anna Banana and Me. Afterwards, we dig in and learn to make banana “chips”. They get to dip their banana chips in a variety of foods that offer different tastes and textures. Last year we used crushed up Cheerios to dip our bananas in. They loved being able to do this on their own.
Our school participates in the General Mills Box Tops for Education program. This is a loyalty program that allows you to clip box tops from participating General Mills products and turn them in to your school. Each is worth $0.10 and the program provides our school with a check in exchange for the box tops we’ve collected and submitted. As you can imagine these funds come in handy when we need supplies. When I shop for my classes whether at home or at our co-op I challenge myself to find products that have Box Tops on them. I’ve even got the kids involved with helping me find the products when we run to the store with our list. The packages that have the bonus box tops are always an eye catcher. You can find select General Mills products at Walmart that have bonus box tops. We went last week and found the Walmart Bonus Box Tops everywhere.
On these specially marked packages you get the regular box top plus a bonus certificate on the package that offers an additional four bonus box tops. This has me really excited. We found the Walmart Bonus Box Tops on numerous items. Now, I’ve just got to sit down and plan out next months learning so I can head back to Walmart and get some more bonus box tops. Learn more about Box Tops at Walmart.My son went with me to shop and as you can see he found his favorite. 🙂
What ways do you use food when you educate? We do it all the time if we really think about it. Maybe you’ll try some crafting, like a Cheerios bird feeder or make a yummy treat for the upcoming holidays. Leave me a comment and tell me how you help support your schools with Box Tops for Education.
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of General Mills®. The opinions and text are all mine.