Reenacting

My sisters and I are homeschooled, which naturally leaves a lot of space open for creativity to help us put learning into a certain perspective. Some of my favorite memories from lower grades (I'm a senior this year, graduating in May) have sprung from days when we decided to make history or literature, or some other subject, come alive. Wild science experiments, dressups like book characters, little skits that helped us to remember what we were learning about...our photo boxes are happily stuffed!
But reenacting a Bible story, building a food pyramid out of plastic food, or any other sort of fun hands-on approach to integrating these bits of knowledge into the brain doesn't have to be school-related. Sometimes it's much more fun to come up with something entirely on your own, gathering your siblings together to put on a show for your parents or taking something you learned that morning and making a performance out of it. Giving life to what's on your mind or your lesson plans is one of the best ways older siblings can get involved, and younger siblings to remember what they learned. My parents have often been pleasantly surprised when we decided to perform something we learned on our own; it shows them that we value what they teach us enough to spend unstructured time dabbling with it.
I'll give you an example that happened just today; my two little sisters have been learning about the pilgrims on the Mayflower, so we cut up some cheese and salted some lunch meat, got out some Saltine crackers, and put some leftover rice in a bowl for porridge. We draped a bedspread over our dining table and everybody, including Mom, crawled underneath the table and we all pretended to have a Mayflower meal! We rocked back and forth for the waves and "hurled" into a water pitcher. We substituted cranberry apple juice for ale, but it was still a big hit. If you've read any posts about my family prior to this, you can guess there was some hiccuping going on. But the point is, it was a great way for the Girls to associate something with their study of the Mayflower pilgrims. We actually did this activity a few years ago, when I was learning about that time period, locking ourselves away into a closet with much of the same foodstuffs.
Be creative with this and really make it your own. You might get some "book larnin' " out of this, but you're sure to get some great memories and photos! Post them on your blog and put a link here; we'd love to see what you come up with!
(It should be noted that soon after our Mayflower meal, my baby sister knocked an entire bottle of Italian salad dressing off the counter, and while we were all cleaning it up, my other sister says, "Well...sister Mary barfed again.")