My homeschooling method should be described as “kid at heart”. I love playing games and coming up with creative ways to teach lessons. One medium that I have found to encourage educational play along with being frugally sound is the use of shower curtains. That’s right, shower curtains! You can find shower curtain liners at your local store for under $5.00. Once you have an opaque or clear shower curtain, you simply need a colorful supply of permanent markers. Your project will determine how many colors you want to have on hand for your shower curtain games. To keep your shower curtain firmly on the floor, you may want to attach Velcro to the back so it sticks to carpet. For non carpeted areas you will want to place a heavy object on each of the four corners. I used some old bricks to keep my game in place on my porch.
The next step is to determine what lesson you want to teach with your game. A fun game that is easily adapted for a wide variety of ages is a number bean bag toss. On your shower curtain you will draw a grid and in each box write a number. Then have your students throw two beanbags on the game. You then can have the child add, subtract, multiply or divide the numbers. Have older students throw four beanbags instead of two.
If you are teaching phonics, spelling, or letter recognition, draw a grid and put letters or blends in each box. Next, have your student throw a beanbag on a square. Again, this can be used for a variety of age ranges as a child can tell you the letter, tell you the letter sound, tell you a word that starts with the letter, or spell a word that begins with the letter where the beanbag landed.
Are you teaching your child how to tell time? A shower curtain is perfect for a human clock. Simply draw a huge face of a clock on the shower curtain. Either use your bodies as the hands of the clock or make huge clock hands out of another material.
Graphing is something kids tend to get confused with or simply not like doing.
Make a graph on your shower curtain and have your children find coordinates by standing on the x or y columns.
Make a mini football field with your shower curtain and have your little quarterback learn how to count by tens. Your little football player can run the yards, throw a touchdown pass, score, and have fun all while learning the math behind football. My son has learned multiples of 7 to counting by tens to geography all while watching football.
The more you begin to have fun with education the more applications you will come up with on your own. What, you don’t want to store twenty or more shower curtain games? Making a grid will give you the most flexibility and versatility. Go to your fabric shop and purchase Velcro strips. Place one side of the Velcro on each square while placing the other side on squares you make from another material with letters, numbers, historical dates, Jeopardy answers, etc. This way you only have to store one shower curtain with several marked Ziploc bags of game pieces.
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