Do your children ever get bored during their homeschool day? Do you feel like you need to liven up their school days with activities that keep their attention?
Here are 20 ideas from our education advisors to bring more fun into your homeschool classroom.
Preschool and Kindergarten
Edible Counting: Use cereal, raisins, or chocolate chips to teach your child how to count. Have him count aloud each time he takes a bite. Continue to add more treats as he learns to count higher. Counting will be fun—and yummy—as he eats his way through the numbers.
Walk the Line: Take a roll of paper towels and spread it on the floor, leaving the paper towels all connected. Then write alphabet letters or numbers in order on each square. Let your child walk on the line to learn the order, then split the paper towels up and let her put them in order.
Play with Magnets: Ask your child to place specific magnetic alphabet letters or numbers on the refrigerator to aid recognition.
Connect-the-dots: Use dot-to-dot pictures to help children count as they connect the dots.
Tell Me a Story: Have your child tell you a story that you can write down. Then ask him to draw pictures to illustrate the story.
Grades 1–3
Hands-on Math Skills: Let children practice addition and subtraction skills while playing. They can count Legos as they build or subtract candy from a bowl during snack time. Their limitless imaginations can provide hours of addition and subtraction fun.
Tower of Words: Use magnetic words or word cards to create fun poetry and silly sentences that help increase your child’s ability to construct sentences on her own.
Creating Classmates: Let your child bring a doll or two to reading class. Then ask her to read to this new “classmate.”
Visualize It: As you read a story aloud, have your child draw a picture of what is happening in the story.
Finding the Order: Ask your children to do a simple task, such as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with step-by-step directions. Then take pictures of them doing each step and print the pictures. Ask your children to paste the photos in order and write directions that go with each step. This shows your child how a process is needed to accomplish a task.
Grade 4–6
Coupon Counting: Let your children clip a coupon and figure out how much money they would save if the coupon were used. Couponing teaches math skills and how to budget money at the same time. You can even let them use a coupon at the grocery store to buy a snack or special treat.
Storyboard Fun: Ask your child to choose a favorite topic that he enjoys. Then give him a stack of 3×5″ cards to use for creating storyboards or word clusters. In no time, he will learn to brainstorm and organize thoughts for his writing.
Be a Reporter: Let your child create her own newspaper. She can interview family members or friends for stories. After writing the stories, she can glue pictures next to each article.
Nature Scrapbook: Help your child scrapbook the natural habitat in your area. Include leaves, twigs, flowers, nuts, seeds, and bird feathers found on nature walks. After pasting each piece on a page of a notebook, let your child research and write about what he finds.
Dress Up Fun: Pick a day of the week and have children dress up like a person from history. That day’s lesson can be focused on a specific time period and how people lived during that era.
Grades 7–9
Time for the News: Record your children pretending to be anchors for the evening news. They can find stories their history or science books for the newscast. Make it even more fun by showing the newscast to the entire family!
Baking with Math: Let your children choose a recipe from a cookbook. Then tell them to double or half the recipe. They have to figure out how to adjust the recipe to the correct measurements. You can also give them 1 or 2 measuring cups (½ and ¼ work well) and tell them to measure everything with those cups to improve their understanding of fractions.
Taste of Culture: Choose a foreign country to study and let students make a dish from that country. As they share the dish with the family, they can share facts about the country. This helps them learn the culture of the country through the food.
Build a Diorama: As part of a book report assignment, ask your student to create a diorama of his favorite scene in the book. Use shoeboxes, cereal boxes, play dough, and other small pieces to create the scene.
The Play’s the Thing: Help children stage a play, based on a book they’ve read, for family members and friends.
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