Welcome to Saturday School, Principled Discovery’s weekly foray into the practical side of homeschooling. Feel free to add your links in comments if you have any lessons, projects or instructional strategies to share!

For my daughter’s ninth birthday, we took her, my parents and four of her friends to a little tea house downtown. The girls had a lovely time in their best dresses, drinking tea and conversing over scones, tea sandwiches and delightful little dessert items. Serving tea could be a Saturday School post of its own, but this week we are doing something a little less educational. I suppose we are learning about gratitude and showing appreciation to our friends through thoughtful thank you notes. But mostly I remembered making these as a girl and selling them at craft shows while my mom sold her items. I shared that with my daughter last week, and now I am sharing it with you.

How to make candy airplanes

Materials:

1 roll Smarties
1 Rubberband
2 Life Saver mints
2 Sticks of gum

Step one: Thread a rubber band through the two Life Saver mints.

Step two: Place the roll of Smarties between the two wheels.

Step three: Insert the sticks of gum through the opening on each end of the rubber band to make the wings and hold the plane together.

Note: If the gum has a paper wrapper around the foil, you only need one stick of gum.

Here is our little fleet:

I thought this was a nice, simple project to share for the holiday season. They make good favors, party activities for children, gift tags and ornaments.

And a few more practical posts I noticed recently:

Dawn of By Sun and Candlelight offers a unique, home made advent calendar of sorts. Making the wreath is a lesson in itself, and then you have 37 days of mini-lessons to share with your children!

Speaking of mini-lessons, Mimi of The Homeschooling News Cafe explains them well in Focused Mini Lessons.

And some cookie recipes from Who Said Learning Can’t be Fun? OK, so they are from last year, but Cathy is back! She was one of my first readers from outside my little Principle Approach “clique” and she took a long absence from the internet. I am jumping up and down for joy and therefore you get to visit her blog and make the cookies she made last Christmas.

You can click on the Saturday School category for more practical homeschooling from Principled Discovery and enjoy your Saturday!

[tags]homeschooling, lessons[/tags]