ATWWK Destination 1: Hawaii

Aloha friends!

I kid you not but we might be the last family in our city to take our kids on a Hawaiian vacation but now’s our chance! Haha!

Since telling my kiddos about my (sans-kid) trip to Hawaii back in 2017, my kids have been asking to travel to Hawaii. My son wants to swim with the sea turtles and my daughter wants to eat shrimp plates on North Shore. Both pretty great choices, right? Here’s our trip itinerary!

Day 1 – Hawaii Intro and Sea Turtles

• Hawaii Introduction
  • Watch – Homeschool Pop does a great job with this 8-minute video that shares some fun facts and history. Now we know why there are eight stripes on the Hawaii state flag!
  • Read – If you have older kids, they might enjoy the additional facts on Nat Geo Kids’ Hawaii page.
• Sea Turtles
  • Learn – If you haven’t checked out Teachers Pay Teachesr website, it’s a great learning resource! I’m certain many public schools are using some of these worksheets in class. We downloaded this free Sea Turtle Life Cycle Pack printable to identify the various stages and to also learn the body parts of a sea turtle. For my older child, I had him practice reading and comprehension with the Close Read in this digital download. This kit also included a craft component which I will detail below under Craft.
  • Read – Since libraries are still closed for us, we are relying on books online, including the many read alouds on YouTube. We listened to “Froggy Goes to Hawaii” on YouTube and read “Sea Turtle” on Epic.
  • Play – My 4.5yo is learning phonics so the ABC Turtle activity was perfect game for her and her brother to do together. They wanted to keep playing this game over and over again! #TeachingWin!
  • Watch – After learning about sea turtles, we watched this incredible video that showed 80+ baby sea turtles making their way to the beach. My incoming second grader was fascinated at the size of the turtles in this Nat Geo Kids video where the host visits a turtle hospital helping injured sea turtles.
  • Draw – Because my kids are 3 years apart, I can’t teach them certain lessons at the same time. So I “buy” time by giving my youngest a coloring sheet (she loves to color!) while I teach the older one something on his level. Here’s a fun coloring sheet of a cute sea turtle.
  • Craft – The Sea Turtles kit from the Learn section above includes a simple craft where you can cut out shapes to make your own sea turtle. I simply printed the outline sheets on colored construction paper and my kids cut out the shapes and glued them together. Then my son practiced writing facts he learned and we glued those facts on the underside of the turtles.

Day 2 – Volcanoes

• Watch – I usually don’t show a video at the beginning of “class,” but sometimes you can really capture kids’ attention with cool videos. My kids LOVE LOVE LOVE the Are We There Yet? series by Nat Geo Kids! Sometimes we watch these during lunch to pretend we are somewhere else. This video follows two young kids (siblings in fact!) exploring a volcano park in Hawaii. Other great videos we watched are this one by SciShow Kids (also one of fav channels) and this one by Peekaboo Kidz. There is a little content overlap but I know my kids learn better when they hear things more than once. Even I was learning some new by watching these with my kids!
• Learn – My oldest loves word searches so this “parts of a volcano” worksheet is a good quiet activity. Then, I challenged him with a geography activity locating famous volcanoes by using latitude and longitude coordinates. Even though this isn’t something he has learned in school yet, after a few tries, he was able to figure it out!
• Read – “Going to the Volcano” is a simple read with a lot of repetitive words (great for reading practice!). It’s a read aloud video but you can mute the sound, pause the video, and read it like a book. While “My Mouth is a Volcano!” is not about a volcano, I thought it somewhat fit the theme and more than anything, the book was teaching an important lesson on managing our thoughts and words.
• Draw – This color-by-number worksheet was great for my color-loving artist.
• Craft – My kids had a blast (pun intended!) with this mosaic paper craft. I didn’t need to download this file but used the pictures as inspiration to make our own. Having my kids rip their own mosaic pieces from construction paper is an excellent use of time (if you catch this mama’s drift 😉). On a sheet of black construction paper, I cut the outline pieces and my kids glued in their ripped paper to create their mosaic. These are now part of our growing in-home art museum.
• Experiment – You know you can’t teach kids about volcanoes without doing the classic science experiment! This video shows how to do one at home sans paper mache.

Day 3 – Beachtime

• Learn – Day 3 for us was a Friday so we did mostly fun learning activities like this Beach Bump Math Game. This is how we played this elementary game with my youngest. I printed out two addition sheets, rolled the dice 2 times (we did 3 after a while), asked my oldest to add up the numbers, and identified that number on the sheet. While my youngest isn’t able to do addition yet, what she can do at her age was to find the numbers on her sheet. We also did the Beach Pattern Cut and Paste worksheet and my son loved pretending to be a teacher and introduce ten frames to his younger sister.
• Read – We have a ton of books illustrated by Jamie Meckel so it was a no brainer to read “Ten Little Surfers in Hawaii”. Another book we read was “Surfer Chick” on YouTube.
• Watch – If you’ve been to Oahu, you know about Diamond Head. This famous state monument is a popular hiking activity to the top of the crater rim (it was once an active volcano!). This video by travel vloggers Perfect Little Planet was a great way to experience the trek without sweating and slow-walking, whiny kids. Lastly, since it was Friday, it was a great day for the “Lilo & Stitch” movie that is available on Disney+.
• Craft – We made super easy tape resist surfboards using washi tape, construction paper, and Do-A-Dot markers. The kids liked designing their own surfboards.

Freebie!

Did anyone else save empty toilet paper rolls as a kid? I remember wanting so badly to construct a DIY marble run with them. So since I knew we would be home for a long time, we started saving our finished toilet paper and paper towel rolls. While looking for tropical/Hawaiian craft ideas on Pinterest, I came across cute toilet paper roll dolls. You can totally make yours following the tutorial on this blog post. Or if you’re short of colored paper, I’ve created a freebie that you can simply print, cut, and glue together.

Recipes

Eating at the yummiest establishments is pretty important whenever we travel. So to immerse ourselves more in our pretend trip to the Hawaiian islands, we made the following dishes.

• Classic Hawaiian Mac Salad – This Hawaiian plate staple is now my son’s favorite dish. This is an easy recipe that can be done with kids in the kitchen!
• Mochiko Chicken – This is one of my husband’s favorite Hawaiian dishes and is also easy to make. The hardest part was to remember to make it the day before so that the chicken can marinade overnight. I kept forgetting to make it each night so the Father’s Day dinner meal didn’t happen until a week later! 🤦🤦🤦
• Mochi Waffles – In order to make Mochiko Chicken, I bought two boxes of Koda Farms Mochiko Sweet Rice Flour and didn’t realize there are so many other tasty recipes using this ingredient. Trader Joe’s had an amazing ube mochi waffle/pancake mix that flew off the shelves and is yet to be restocked. Rather than waiting for the product to maybe return, I found a mochi waffle recipe that worked! I tweaked it by subbing almond extract and adding frozen blueberries for pops of color and flavor!
• Butter Mochi – This iconic Hawaiian treat also uses mochiko flour. If you have a family of four like mine, I recommend halving the recipe as this recipe uses an entire box and makes 24 2″ slices which is quite a lot!

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What a fun week we had exploring Hawaii and I know there’s even a lot more things we could have done like visit the Dole Plantation or watch a luau. Don’t forget to “stamp” your kids’ passport. I drew a sea turtle and wrote “Hawaii” underneath for our passports. Mahalo for joining us! We will see you at our next destination!