Welcome to Saturday School, my weekly look into the practical side of homeschooling. Feel free to leave a link in the comment section if you have shared any practical ideas recently! This week, I am sharing a quick reading activity to help your child learn about a character in a book. The final result is a nice mini-poster worthy of storing in your child’s notebook, hanging on the refrigerator or storing wherever you keep your child’s nice work.

This is a simple “Wanted Poster” which the child fills out using the information in a chapter, story or book. To begin, you may want to look at some real wanted posters and talk about their purpose and design. Here are several. Please note, these are real wanted posters with real crimes listed. For a little history, you can also look through some old-time wanted posters of famous outlaws.

This is a nice format for a character analysis because it helps the child to collect a physical description, some character traits and, depending on the character and story selected, identify the central theme. There is room for creativity as well. My daughter made a “Lost Cat” poster for Benjamin and His Cat Grimalkin, for example. As a reward, she thought a portrait painted by young Benjamin would be appropriate.

A nice template is available from Education World and it downloads as a Word document so is easy to adapt to your specific story. Scroll down to “Ice Breakers” and click on “Wanted Poster.”

And when you are all finished with the serious school stuff, why not make a display of the little outlaws in your own home? Here is our little card shark, helping me win at UNO:

This was made with the free generator over GlassGiant.com. And as usual, feel free to leave links to your bits of practical homeschooling…or even just to your wanted posters since I know my baby’s picture is not going to be the only one run through the generator today.

And a few practical posts which I noticed in my Reader over the course of the week. For some strange reason, Christmasy things dominated the practical postings I read:

Standing on Isaiah 54:13 shares some pictures of the birds they have attracted for a bird study as part of Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day.

It Coulda’ Been Worse shares a nice idea for displaying Christmas cards. Even nicer than accumulating in my basket by the door.

Shanan Trail shares her rather stylish, but homemade, display for her family’s Jesse Tree. It looks way nicer than the colored scraps of paper hanging from coat hangers in my kitchen.

Practical and delicious, Simply a Musing Blog shares some holiday recipes.

[tags]homeschooling, homeschool, reading, lessons, lesson plans[/tags]