"stealth" afterschooling?

[PhotoGal]

Hi all,

 

The kids are going to school in the fall and I would love to hear your ideas about ways to keep their learning going at home as well. However, they are very reluctant to give up any of their free time for anything that looks like school. What are some ways to weave learning into our everyday life?

 

Here are a few that have worked for me in the past:

 

- I just start watching a documentary or Ted Talk when they are in the room - they usually come over and start watching.

- Listening to different types of music in the car or around the house

- Cooking (some fractions, measuring)

- Read alouds (we would do this anyway - even if we weren't homeschooling)

 

 

[Tanaqui]

We did the afterschooling route - just keeping up with subjects they had trouble with - for a few years prior to homeschooling. Adding that in to the homework load was insane - it left us with, like, no free time! I'd establish how much time they're realistically going to have after school most days before planning out the extracurricular enrichment.

[PhotoGal]

That's a good point. I think our older one really will have quite a bit of homework and I don't know if we will be able to squeeze much more in. I was hoping to keep up with languages, but that might be tough because it is time consuming.

[tm919]

Audio books are great in the car, if you spend a lot of time driving. You might already have some of the likely suspects (like Story of the World, History of the US).  

[regentrude]

When my kids were in school, we supplemented their education by lots of books (independent reading, read alouds, audiobooks in the car), piano lessons, nature hikes every weekend, science centers, state parks, live theatre and concert performances, museums. It was important to me that this feel like life, not like more school. My biggest complaint about elementary school in this country is the ridiculously long school day that left little time for outdoor play - so we made the latter a priority during the school week.

[lilajoy]

We only formally after-school (workbooks, planned curricula, etc.) on weekends and over the summer. On school days, everyone's just too tired and there isn't enough time, so as everyone else has said, we focus on enriching activities that are just part of life. Many of the toys and games the kids have are educational, like board games that reinforce math and history-based toys (Playmobil Roman ship, Jamestown settlers figurines, etc.).

 

And of course, there are lots of read-alouds, which includes non-fiction -- history and science. This evening, for example, my daughter and I read two books from the Let's Read and Find Out series, one about the life cycle of frogs and one about the importance of sleep for humans and animals. So although it wasn't a formal science lesson, it was definitely science enrichment.

 

[justasque]

I found that building on the classroom themes via read-alouds, activities, and field trips was a way to enrich without overwhelming.  So if the theme was Penguins, we'd go to the zoo, read library books about penguins, Antarctica, oceans, birds, arctic habitats, and so on.  We'd get library videos, find penguin-related fiction (perhaps as audio books for the car), and so on.  I tried to make the connections as widely as possible, across as many subjects as possible - asking myself, is there a science connection (the nature stuff re Penguins), is there a history connection (arctic exploration), is there a literature connection (picture books, chapter books, read-alouds, audio books, and a selection of library books to read to oneself), and so on.  Different topics can lend themselves better to some subject than others - architecture, for example, could have any number of math connections, but that's harder to do with penguins.

Anyway, the idea is to keep it fun rather than to do formal seatwork.  

[kentuckymom]

I consider myself a kind of "after-unschooler" (I know, real unschoolers would probably beat me for that term :)). Aside from Barton tutoring for my dyslexic (that we finished a couple months ago - woot!) I do no formal academics with my kids outside of homework (my preschooler doesn't have homework, but that's my plan when she starts school). However, we listen to a lot of books in the car, I read aloud a lot, and we visit museums and go on a lot of hikes. We also watch the occasional documentary together and DS watches a lot of science and engineering videos on his own. And, yes, I make sure he has time to  run around and play outside frequently because recess time is so scarce. 

 

If your kids are way behind in a core subject or you feel the school is doing a terrible job go ahead and try to squeeze in some formal instruction, but otherwise leave the formal instruction to the school and continue all the informal learning I'm sure you were already doing as a homeschooler.

[kiwik]

We are doing formal stuff of about 15 mins 5 times a week. Last night we spent 15 minutes going over the two page spread on ancient Greece in our very basic book, found stickers for it on our What on Earth sticker timeline, put the appropriate sticker from our text in our notebook and each child dictated one sentence. Then ds8 ordered the pile of books on the subject we will read over the next couple of weeks. Other than this we do a little bit of Process Skills in Problem Solving and WWE with alterations to allow for the fact they write at school.

[displace]

Audiobooks in the car (esp SOTW), dreambox math computer game, science experiments at home, brainpop/brainpop jr, salsa Spanish. Pick books for read alouds that are non fiction as well as older grade fiction.

Eta - music lessons