April Fun Learning Holidays
My kids love a reason to celebrate. Who doesn’t? These fun holidays can be a great way to celebrate and provide fun learning opportunities for your homeschool. Here’s my list of April unit study ideas using fun holidays.
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What to Celebrate in the Month of April
Each month has designated awareness holidays, and these can be a great way to introduce your kids to a new experience or get them to try something new. They can also be used to spend additional time focused on a particular area of interest.
Global Astronomy Month
Many kids are naturally entranced by space. You can start by spending a few nights stargazing with the assistance of an app or dig into a unit study if your kids are into it.
Here are a few resources to get you started.
Stargazing apps:
Websites for learning about space:
YouTube channels for learning about astronomy:
- Crash Course Kids: 6 video Space Science playlist
- Crash Course Astronomy: 48 video playlist covering astronomy (high school +)
- Professor Dave Explains: 45 video playlist covering astronomy (high school +)
- Free School: 13 video solar system playlist for kids
- Astronomic
Astronomy Unit Studies:
- Teachers Pay Teachers listings for astronomy unit studies
- Astronomy Unit Study from Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool Plus
- Astronomy Lesson Plans from Science Buddies
Books to Explore Astronomy
National Garden Month
April is National Garden Month, and the perfect opportunity to introduce your kids to either flower or vegetable gardening. If you’ve got a teen who loves flowers, give her a patch of garden to design a flower bed or put her in charge of flower pots on the patio. Give littles who love digging in the dirt anyway some guidance for planting vegetable starts and seeds and watch them get excited to eat a vegetable they wouldn’t touch if you brought it home from the grocery store.
Here are a few resources for getting started with gardening:
- Garden Lesson Plans from Whole Kids Foundation
- Homeschool gardening curriculum resources from Forgetful Mama
- Beginner gardening suggestions and free garden planner from Hip Homeschool Moms
- Printable garden journal from Mom for All Seasons
National Poetry Month
Introduce your kids to beautiful poetry this month. Check out the resources at poetryfoundation.org or Poetry4Kids. Encourage your kids to read a poem each day, memorize a classic poem, or write their own poetry. You’ll find a great list of 25 short famous poems to memorize at Poem Analysis.
National Humor Month
Dig into the science of humor by analyzing what makes something funny. Have your kids try their hand at writing and performing a short comedy routine.
National Week Holidays for April
These are awareness weeks during the month of April that can be used as homeschool learning opportunities.
Library Week: 1st full week
If your kids don’t have a library card, help them sign up for their very own. Teach them how to use the library, including how material is organized into sections, what types of resources can be checked out, how to check out and return books, how to use the computer system to find books, and introducing them to the alphabetic ordering system of fiction and numeric ordering system of nonfiction.
National Day Holidays for April
These individual day holidays can be incorporated into a variety of learning and fun.
Children’s Book Day: April 2
Celebrate children’s books by reading some of your childhood favorites with your kids, and letting them each pick a few favorites to read to each other. Older kids might like to look up a favorite author on social media and send a message asking a question about what they’re working on or just a thank you for writing a favorite book.
Read a Road Map Day: April 5
While GPS usually gets us where we want to go in the least possible time, knowing how to read a map is still a highly useful skill. Dust off your Rand McNally atlas, pull out your old road trip state maps and teach your kids how to read a road map. You can find a free map skills unit study at Homeschool Giveaways.
Draw a Bird Day: April 8
Included a fun drawing tutorial in your homeschool today. How to Draw a Bluebird from Art for Kids Hub or How to Draw a Bird for Kids from DrawinGeek are both great options.
Zoo Lover’s Day: April 8
Make it a field trip day and head to your local zoo. If that isn’t possible, you can always check out the San Diego Zoo’s live zoo cams to watch the animals in action. They’ve got cameras on koalas, baboons, polar bears, penguins, hippos, apes, elephants, platypus, tigers, giraffes, owls, pandas, and condors!
Winston Churchill Day: April 9
Read Who Was Winston Churchill for a kid-friendly biography of his life. Most public libraries have copies of these books, so take advantage of your library! Choose a few famous Winston Churchill quotes to talk about with your kids—there are a lot worth discussing.
Courage is what is it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
The price of greatness is responsibility.
– Winston Churchill
National Farm Animals Day: April 10
Take a field trip to a local farm if possible, or a virtual farm field trip if you aren’t able to go to a farm nearby.
National Submarine Day: April 11
Do a quick submarine unit study to learn about the history of submarines, how submarines work, and life on a submarine. The Homeschool Forum has a mini-unit study with numerous links to videos and websites that help facilitate a one-day exploration of this topic.
Scrabble Day: April 13
Take an hour to play this classic game today. Feel free to adjust the rules to accommodate your kids’ abilities—they’ll be practicing spelling and expanding vocabulary while playing!
National Dolphin Day: April 14
The Dolphin Project has many free resources for learning about dolphins, including lesson plans, study guides, and video content.
Tax Day: April 15
Use today to begin familiarizing your kids with income taxes. Show them the forms, the IRS website, talk about withholdings and deductions and gross vs. net income.
Titanic Remembrance Day: April 15
Take time today to remember the catastrophic sinking of the Titanic in 1912 with a story, video, or mini-unit study. You’ll find some great resources for a Titanic unit study at Small World at Home.
World Art Day: April 15
Head to an art museum, pull out the paints and canvases, or turn on your favorite how to draw YouTube tutorials to celebrate today.
International Haiku Poetry Day: April 17
Haiku is a fun way to engage kids with vocabulary. A little constraint, the 5-7-5 format of the haiku, requires kids to choose their words carefully. Give your kids a spring topic to get them started: new beginnings, flowers, hope, or rain showers. Haiku is written in the format of three lines. The first line contains five syllables, second line seven syllables, and five syllables in the third and final line.
World Laboratory Day: April 23
If possible, take a field trip to a laboratory! In lieu of an actual field trip, you could check out this video tour of Boston Scientific, along with a kid-friendly video about lab safety.
National DNA Day: April 25
Try these fun activities to learn about DNA from The Homeschool Scientist, including an experiment to extract DNA from a strawberry! And here is a DNA unit study for middle school age from Michelle Kay Anderson.
World Penguin Day: April 25
If your kids are interested in penguins, use today to focus on learning about penguins with a penguin unit study from Year Round Homeschooling. Or watch one of many educational and entertaining penguin documentaries, like March of the Penguins, DisneyNature’s Penguins, or Island of the Penguins.
Richter Scale Day: April 26
There are numerous resources on Teachers Pay Teachers to teach your kids about the Richter Scale. A lesson plan with activities for understanding the Richter Scale can also be found at Teach Engineering.
Morse Code Day: April 27
There’s a lot of interesting history and science to cover with Morse Code. Do a Morse Code unit study with your kids today to learn about Samuel Morse, the electric telegraph, and the way Morse Code revolutionized long-distance communication.
Visit my homeschool resources page for monthly unit study ideas, projects, and homeschool planning help!
How to Use Fun Holidays for Unit Studies in April
The key to using fun holiday lists like this in your homeschool is to keep it simple. Don’t try to celebrate every single holiday or awareness theme. You and your kids will be overwhelmed.
Keep a list of fun holidays and note down the ones you celebrate with the year and what you did. Next year, come back to the list and pick another one or two to celebrate.
There are, of course, more “national days” you could choose to celebrate that are not included in this list, many of them focused on food. It’s fun to choose a few of these as well to add in treats here and there or as a way to have your kids try new foods.
Find additional April fun holidays that aren’t necessarily learning-related in these two articles.
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April Unit Study Ideas for Homeschool Learning
Thanks so much for featuring my Garden Journal for Kids!
It’s so cute and super useful! Thanks for creating it!