I’ve never been one to do lesson stuff with my kids. We like art – and we have a killer craft closet – but anything else almost always ends in:

✓tons of cleanup for me

✓sibling squabbles

✓aaall the frustration

I’d much rather go find stuff to do outside or around town. Hence the slogan for my blog. Go on, take a peek. I’ll wait.

But now Covid-19 has turned our lives upside down. Schools are closed, going places is a joke and suddenly getting out of the house is much more challenging.

So, after a little coaxing, I ended up giving The Wisdom Wonder Project a try. The lessons have really opened my eyes to home-based learning as a worthwhile endeavor – even in our house. And here’s why.

“We make the power, magic, and mystery of learning accessible to our modern world.” – Wisdom Wonder Project

The Wisdom Wonder Project offers easy to follow, home-based learning curriculum packets for families. The lessons are sold in digital download bundles and singles tailored to your kiddos’ ages. The curriculum comes from the San Luis Obispo Classical Academy, which has been operating as a private school in SLO since 2005.

In 2019, the academy made its curriculum public for the first time ever under the name “The Wisdom Wonder Project” — marketing it as a way to share its wisdom and wonder with the world. Isn’t that too cute?? So far, the curriculum includes preschool, TK and Kindergarten. Packages for 1st and 2nd grades will launch this spring.

Our Activity

We tested out an activity in the Little Wonders program for Preschool to Kindergarten. Our packet was from the Fairytale Collection of the Preschool Pre-Literature Summer Bundle. This pack features four weeks of activities structured around one picture book per week. We read Week 1 – “The Lion And The Mouse”  and paired with it one of the five associated activities: Nature.

The only lesson supplies we needed were the storybook as well as a place to explore outside. I also added the baskets the kids and I normally take on our adventure walks, to collect treasure.

You can buy the story for cheap on Amazon, but I also found it in a larger “Aesop’s Fables” book at the Atascadero Library.

In SLO County, you can search for library books online to reserve them here. The WWP lesson plans come as PDF downloads, so you can read them on your phone/tablet/computer or print them out. We printed them out and it was only three pages.

“The Lion and the Mouse” tells the story of a lion trapped by a rope net that a tiny mouse chewed apart to rescue him. The story is short and sweet, and is in the bedtime book range for 2- to 6-year-olds.

Our Experience

We sat on Wyatt’s bed and read the book, looked at the pictures and talked about the story. The kids seem to understand that the moral of the story was little guys can help big guys, and that no act of kindness is too small. Boom: life lessons. 🙂

Once we were done reading and talking, it was time to take the lesson outside. The Nature section of the PDF asked us to “go on a nature walk with your child to see what grasses you can find in your community.” We were looking for grass since rope (like the kind that tied up the lion) can be made of fibers like grass.

So off we went (in our jammies – bc reasons) on our mission to find grasses.  We ended up picking blades of each type of grass we found in our neighborhood – and we found so many! Who knew? It’s always fun to see what you can discover in nature when you’re really looking. Picking the grass samples was my own little spin on the activity because that’s what my kids are used to doing from going on adventure walks before (finding cool rocks and treasure).

Long, short, fat, whispy: here’s a look at some of the grasses we found. We pulled them out at home and talked about their different shapes and textures. How some were pointy and soft and how some were the same and some were different. The kids really love comparing things like that.

I appreciated Nature as one of the five elements of learning because just look at this beautiful day we might have missed otherwise.