Bacolod Homeschoolers hold first activity!
The Bacolod Homeschoolers held an informal activity celebrating Nutrition Day 2016.
For the last two years, we were not able to celebrate events that are normally celebrated in school. So I thought that this year, it would be nice to celebrate some of the events that we have in regular school. Now that we are settled with our homeschooling in Bacolod routine and Dindin is already on her third year, we would have an activity.
Nutrition Month
I think the first of the many events that we celebrate in the traditional school is the Nutrition Month in July. But instead of the whole month, I thought that it would be good to have a field trip in an organic farm and then finish it off with an organic lunch.
While I was asking around where to go, I thought of asking other homeschooling moms and those who are soon going to homeschool their children. Three families responded and so we had four students who joined our activity. The fifth was our little girl, who was just there on a free trip.
We chose to go to the Welcome Home Organic Garden and Cafe at Villa Valderrama Subdivision, Mandalagan, Bacolod City. It is run by the Welcome Home Foundation for the deaf and mute.
The place is where they are taught life skills so that they can also get jobs and function in the real world. They have an organic farm that provides the raw ingredients to their cafe, where we had our organic lunch. The kids were taught how organic plants are grown, from the soil that they use up to the actual planting.
Read: Homeschooling our Children
Welcome Home Tour
Welcome Home offers tours to anyone interested for P500 per person. The tour starts with a sign language session where participants were taught some basic signs that will enable them to converse with the volunteers.
Then they were toured around the garden, starting from the plants to the vermicomposting pit, to the hydroponics system of gardening where some tilapia are grown in the pond.
The kids were also shown how the different types of soil used in planting in order to produce a healthy harvest. With that, the homeschooling in Bacolod kids were allowed to mix their own soil and plant seedlings in plastic containers that they also painted.
We were then introduced to the adult deaf-mute volunteers who were making handicrafts. The kids bought some sling bags from them so that they can also have some income from our visit.
Organic Dishes for Lunch
Our last stop was lunch at the organic cafe. The foods were organic and delicious and were also priced at an average of P50 per order. What a treat.
That was a wonderful experience for the kids to have a farm outing and also to experience how their food was grown and eventually to see them being served on the table. It was half a day of new learning experiences for the kids.
New Friendships
I am glad that I invited the other families to join us because the kids immensely enjoyed each other’s company. They all just hit it off right away. No quarrels at all, even though they have different ages. And the parents enjoyed as well. It was a nice outing for everybody. I just prepared a tarpaulin banner so that we all have a sense of belonging in a group. After all, it was a group event.
During our outing, the Bacolod Homeschoolers also excitedly planned our future events, even up to Chinese New Year. It is a fun way to connect with others and also get excited to prepare for something.
Our next activity would be the Araw ng Wika and we are pretty excited because more families are joining us this time. We will have special numbers prepared and we will rent a function room for our activity. We are also sharing the costs.
Now, our homeschooling journey wouldn’t be lonely.
Those activities are so good for the kids. It’s so enjoyable to them na they took a field trip to celebrate the Nutrition Month. I’m very sure that they’ve learned at lot to this.