A great picture book gives children something to wonder about. Play gives them a way to explore it. Learn how the Playful Book Club format can work for your homeschool co-op.
If your homeschool group has ever struggled with finding the perfect balance for your youngest learners, you are not alone.
Sometimes, classes for this age group become too academic, school room focused and worksheet heavy. Other times co-op classes for littles just seem like a glorified playroom or day care.
But children under 8 learn through movement, exploration, conversation, imitation, creativity, imagination, and play.
The co-op setting is a perfect environment to help them learn and grow through playful experiences. The goal shouldn’t simply be to keep young children occupied while their older siblings take classes.
Their class can be meaningful, intentional, and joyful too!
This post will walk you through how to create a meaningful class using the formula and format of the Playful Book Club curriculum. You can print off and use this free planning template to help you create a magical class for your core phase learners.
Start with a story
Walt Disney once said, “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main…and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.” (The Official Walt Disney Quote Book)
A picture book is the perfect foundation for any core phase homeschool class. Books draw littles in and spark their imaginations and creativity!
A great picture book provides:
- rich language
- beautiful illustrations
- interesting characters
- humor and emotion
- new ideas
- opportunities to wonder
- a shared experience for the group
Books in the Playful Book Club have been carefully curated to captivate kids ages 4-7. A rich story gives everyone in the class a shared experience. It introduces new ideas and vocabulary, sparks questions, invites imagination, and gives children something to talk about together.
But a book is just the starting point. You then need to ask, what can we do with this story? How can we make it come alive? How can my class connect with the concepts, ideas, and themes of this book?
This is how a picture book becomes so much more than a read-aloud.
It becomes an experience.
Add in Exploration Activities
Now that the book has opened up a new world of opportunities, help your class explore them! Give them something to investigate or dive deeper in connection to the story.
This might be sensory exploration, a simple science investigation, a movement activity, sorting, building, experimenting, or exploring interesting materials.
Let them do something with the idea.
For example, in the 3 little pigs the wolf was able to blow down a straw house, and a stick house, but not a brick house.
What could your students blow over? Set out a variety of materials and ask them what they think they could move with their breath. Teach them about making predictions. Then let them try huffing and puffing and blowing things over!
Exploration activities are also a great time to teach children to work together and be a part of a group.
Give them a challenge or project that they can do together. Build something together, work to solve a problem, or create a group mural.
For example, in the book Little Blue Truck the dump truck gets stuck. And he can’t get out until all the farm friends work together. Can your class move something heavy by working together? This exploration activity not only brings the book to life but helps the kids learn to work together.
These experiences naturally create opportunities for children to practice:
- taking turns
- communicating
- sharing materials
- listening to others
- negotiating
- solving problems
- contributing ideas
Give Them Something to Create
Arts and crafts are commonly used in preschool and early elementary classes. This isn’t anything new, but by connecting it to the book and allowing it to be child-led, magic happens!
Give the students in your class the opportunity to make something of their own. Let them do the creation.
It doesn’t need to look perfect.
It doesn’t need to look like the teacher’s example.
It doesn’t need to be something the adult mostly makes while the child watches.
Give them the materials and an invitation and then they decide what to do with it.
This is where creativity, fine motor skills, decision-making, and confidence begin to grow.
Their final masterpiece also acts as a powerful take home piece that will allow them to share their experiences with their families at home. The craft or artwork will remind them of the story. It connects them to the experience again so they can relive it when they share with their family at home.
Invite the Class to Play
A quote often attributed to Fred Rogers. “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”
This is the final step in bringing the book alive.
Invite the children to play.
Turn the classroom into the world of the story. Let them pretend to be the characters.
Move and act like animals.
Set up a pretend shop, restaurant, forest, construction site, spaceship, or dinosaur world.
Give children the opportunity to take the story somewhere you never could have planned.
Because this is where play-based learning really shines.
Provide the invitation, the spark, and then let the magic happen!
What Are Children Learning?
A lot more than it might look like at first glance.
When kids move, build, create, explore, and play together, they’re developing skills across many areas at once.
They’re strengthening fine motor skills as they cut, glue, draw, manipulate materials, build, and create.
They’re developing gross motor skills as they move, balance, carry, crawl, jump, dance, and act out stories.
They’re developing language as they talk about the story, explain their ideas, negotiate with friends, and create pretend worlds.
They’re practicing social skills as they share materials, take turns, collaborate, and work together.
They’re developing problem-solving skills as they experiment, make mistakes, try again, and figure out what works.
And they’re building something just as important: the belief that learning is something you actively participate in.
They are learning to love learning.
Meaningful Learning Can Be Playful
When we give young children a great story, interesting materials, meaningful challenges, and the freedom to play, we create something much more than a class designed to fill an hour.
We create an experience.
An experience where children can wonder and ask questions.
An experience where they can use their hands and their whole bodies.
An experience where they can create something that is uniquely their own.
An experience where they can practice working with friends.
An experience where learning feels joyful.
And perhaps most importantly, we give children the opportunity to discover that learning is something they get to do—not something that is simply done to them.
That’s the heart of play-based learning.
And it’s the heart of Playful Book Club.
Meet the Playful Book Club
The framework above is exactly how we designed Playful Book Club.
We wanted to create a curriculum that would help homeschool co-ops give their youngest learners rich, meaningful experiences without turning co-op into another day of traditional school.
So we started with something children already love: beautiful picture books.
Then we built an entire experience around each one.
The result is a class that feels playful and joyful, but is also intentional, rich, and full of opportunities for learning and growth.
32 Weeks of Books That Become Experiences Planned for You
You can absolutely use the framework in this article to create your own co-op classes.
But if you love the idea of books that become experiences and don’t want to spend your evenings planning them, that’s where the Playful Book Club comes in.
With The Playful Book Club, you get a full year of inspiring picture books paired with thoughtfully planned opportunities to wonder, explore, create, connect, and play. You don’t have to choose between a class that’s meaningful and a class that’s fun. You can have both!
Each lesson plan includes suggested discussion questions, supply lists, and step by step instructions, making it easy for any parent to teach this class.
With The Playful Book Club you can easily give your young learners a magical co-op experience!