31 Days of Busy Bags & Quiet Time Activities

Who will benefit from this series?

Are you a stay at home mom looking for a few minutes of down time? Are you trying to figure out how to homeschool your children with a baby, toddler, or preschooler at home? Do you work outside the home and wonder how to keep your young child occupied while you fix dinner or just relax for a few minutes in the evening? Do you regularly care for young children? If you answered yes to any of those questions then busy bags or quiet time activities might be just right for you. Coming up in October, we'll be posting 31 days of busy bag and quiet time activities, printables, and links.

What are Busy Bags & Quiet Time Activities?

Busy Bag: a simple, age appropriate activity that can be pulled out, easily assembled and completed by your child. These are perfect for when you need a few uninterrupted minutes but don't want to let your little one veg in front of the television. Quiet Time Activity: generally geared towards older toddlers, preschoolers, or early elementary aged kids who have given up napping. Establishing a quiet time of independent play gives the child a little down time and the parent a little uninterrupted time as well. Even if you work away from home throughout the week, setting up an afternoon quiet time on the weekends can be a sanity saver.

Do these activities really help?

Busy bags and quiet time activities have been such a blessing in our home and we hope they will help you as well! Throughout October, we'll show you how we use these great tools with our own kids and give you lots of resources to begin implementing busy bags or quiet time activities in your own home.

What can I expect to see during this month long series?

During our 31 days series, we'll show you how to make at least 20 different inexpensive and fun busy bags. We'll also show you how we use a daily quiet time for our 4 and 5 year old. As a bonus, we even have a couple baby approved activities ready to share. We'll also highlight great busy bag and quiet time ideas from other moms around the web. Finally, on October 31st, we'll host a busy bag and quiet time activities link up so you can show off the activities you've made!

Didn't you say something about printables?

We're so excited to share with you our busy bag printables. These files will make putting together your own busy bags very easy. The busy bag printables will be offered for free with each of our busy bag posts. Yes, FREE! However, we're also planning on offering the complete set in our Teacher's Notebook store at the beginning of the month for those of you who prefer one download or who want to get started making your own busy bags. Look for the link in our post on October 1st!

Today's Question: Have you ever heard of or used busy bags or quiet time activities? We'd love to hear your thoughts on our upcoming series.

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A Day-in-the-life of our Homeschool Routine

Check out Our (Practically) Free Kindergarten & Preschool Learning Plans.

Since we'll be homeschooling our Kindergartner this year as well as teaching, training, and taking care of three younger siblings, we know that we need to keep our learning plans simple and fun.

We've decided to focus on three to four subjects each day. Bible, Math, and Language Arts will be completed every day and the other subjects will be rotated throughout the week as shown below.

Monday ~ Bible, Math & Language Arts, History

Tuesday ~ Bible, Math, Language Arts, Science (we'll be reading about our subject of trees throughout the week, this is the time we have set aside for a tree activity)

Wednesday ~ Bible, Math, & Language Arts (Library Story Time)

Thursday ~ Bible, Math/Language Arts Review (This is our house cleaning day so this morning's schooling will be very light.)

Friday ~ Bible, Math, Language Arts, & Art

Music and Phys. Ed. get plenty of room in our daily schedules :)

As far as our typical routine goes, we all rise early. My husband, Tim, gets up for work at 3:30AM and is out the door by 4:40AM. The kids normally start waking up around 5:30AM. Many times the earliest riser will find me still in bed (as much as I want to get up early, I'm still waking throughout the night with the baby and find it hard to get up before 5:30). After a few minuted of cuddling I head downstairs with anyone else who is awake. Our latest sleeper usually stays in bed until 6:45 or 7:00AM. Until all the kids are awake, we're typically downstairs reading a book, catching up on folding laundry or just snuggling on the couch.

Once everyone is awake we head back upstairs for our morning chores. We all get dressed, put our PJs away, make our beds and brush our hair and teeth. Then I start a load of laundry as we settle into the kids' bedroom for our Bible time.

During the first part of our Bible time, I get to read the next chapter of the New Testament and write in my SOAP journal while the kids look at Bible storybooks. This only gives me about 15 minutes, but I am thankful to have a way to get into God's word early in my day. When I finish with my reading and journaling the kids join me as I read from their 365 Read-Aloud Bedtime Bible Stories book. We also want to do a spin-off of our Prayer Pail during this time. I think index cards with character traits and fruits of the Spirit would be a good place to start.

When we're finished with Bible, we move downstairs for breakfast. During breakfast we review the Bible verses we've memorized.

After the dishes are cleaned up, the kitchen is tidied, and the laundry is moved to the dryer, we begin our school time. During this hour to an hour and a half we complete activities for math and language arts. Most of our "work" is still considered play and is completed at our small kid's table or on the living room floor.

Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, also have an extra subject each. For History this means reading from our History for Little Pilgrims simple history overview book and completing an activity. Our Science day means we'll be completing an activity about trees to go along with the books we'll be reading throughout the week. Art is also an extra subject that will be completed once a week with other various craft projects falling under this subject as well.

Once we have finished our activities for the day (around 10:30), the rest of our morning is spent taking care of laundry and playing.

Occasionally, Emahry, our oldest, will also have an extra time in the afternoon to "work with mom" on certain skills. These are normally when she hasn't napped and everyone else is still asleep.

The majority of the time our kids don't even know they're doing school. We talk about colors while we fold laundry. We talk about letter sounds while loading the dishwasher. We talk about life cycles while raising baby chicks.

We learn hymns (and geometry) while playing with cars and building towers on the floor. We are learning all the time!

Today's Questions: What does your typical homeschool day look like? (Or are they so different that that is just a silly question?)

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