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How do you put the HOME in homeschool?


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I have a case of being stuck inside and feeling like Feb. 

How do you keep the HOME in homeschool? Instead of just moving along in the books and workbooks? 

I need some ideas and encouragment to take advantage of being home. 

Edited by lulalu
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It helps if you are not workbook/textbook dependent.  There are as many interesting ways to learn as there are people out there learning.

kids can

  • put together e-magazines with science/history articles, literature reviews, poems they composed, etc to email out to family and friends
  • create travel brochures about places they are reading 
  • do hand crafts (sewing, knitting, crocheting, painting, modeling, etc)
  • create a scene, act it out, record
  • create a menu from a different culture, plan/cook
  • play Little City (create a store-price, advertise, shop at each other's stores, bargain/trade)
  • snuggle together with hot chocolate and read aloud
  • spend a morning building puzzles and listening to audiobooks/lives of composers & their music, etc

Just be creative and learning can happen. 🙂

 

Edited by 8FillTheHeart
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We do weekly poetry teas in April; some people do them year-round.

Work that doesn't require writing happens on the couch, not at a table. When I read aloud, the cat will join us. If a blanket fort suits you, go for it.

Silliness sells. Today our Spanish lesson is going to be making pretend soup out of real, whole vegetables and fruits and offering it to one another. (No quiero sopa de ajo y mango, gracias.)

We add personal touches on our wall timeline, like when family members were born.

Edited by whitehawk
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3 hours ago, lulalu said:

I have a case of being stuck inside and feeling like Feb. 

How do you keep the HOME in homeschool? Instead of just moving along in the books and workbooks? 

I need some ideas and encouragment to take advantage of being home. 

Limited outside activities during the day with other homeschoolers: no co-ops, no homeschool sports/dance/4-H, et al, that are done during the day with other hsers. We did those things, but we did them with "regular" classes that were scheduled in the afternoons/early evenings because most of the members were in school all day.

Monthly park day, not weekly (because we hsed in California where the weather is park-safe year round). And park days only on Friday, which was our clean-the-whole-house-and-do-the-laundry day. See below about Wednesday and Thursday.

We went to the library every Wednesday, and did a field trip every Thursday. Yes, we were not *home*, but we were doing those things on our time, with just us. I only did field trips with my support group if they were on Thursdays. Library and field trip got us out of the house; doing them with just us kept it home-y. 🙂

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My kids do lots of arts and crafts and pretend play. Lately my 7yo has been making ancient scrolls (soak white paper in cold coffee then dry) with spells for immortality a la the Epic of Gilgamesh. They build temples and castles out of boxes and have parades or battles with historical paper dolls. Sometimes we line up chairs to be a space ship and we explore the solar system taking turns being the pilot, captain, and navigator.  I think I'll take out the ink pads and do thumbprint character stories with them today. 

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This is the opposite of what you are asking, but my cure for feeling stuck inside was to take the HOME out of homeschooling.  We coffee shop school and library school.  We go on field trips.  Dd was doing experiments taking time lapse photos of frozen bubbles (with bubble solution) outside in the cold.  We go out in the snow.  School still gets done but it's easier to buckle down when we don't have cabin fever. 

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break out the educational supplements:
- educational computer games
- watch educational videos
- play educational card/board games
- read educational kids magazines
- science kits -- maybe a monthly "comes in the mail" kit -- Tinker's Crate, Magic School Bus kit, etc.
- critical thinking / logic puzzles
- box of art supplies for solo experimentation

"mix-it-up" ideas:
- set the regular schedule aside once a week and do those longer projects for art, history, science, etc. that you never get around to
- write each school subject on an index card and put them all in a box; each day a child draws an index card out of the box, and that's the school subject that gets dropped for the day; set the card aside, and the next day draw from the remaining cards, until each subject has been dropped for the day, then put all the cards back in the box and repeat
- every so often, drop the regular LA programs and just read books/magazines of choice for the day 
- every so often, drop the "spine" math program and switch to math manipulatives and go-along booklet

past threads with ideas:
"Wacky Wednesdays: need goofy activities"
"Fun and educational month activities by mail"
"Help for kids bored with school"

ETA:
And, I totally agree with Jean in Newcastle and Ellie above: having some weekly outing as our special break to look forward to -- field trip, homeschool group activity, nature hike, or other special outing was HUGE help here.

We also took a lot of mini-breaks with physical activity throughout each day to clear our heads at regular intervals -- go out and bounce on the trampoline or scooter to the end of the block and back, jump rope, bounce around the house on the big bouncy ball, put on an upbeat song and dance like crazy around the living room, etc.

Also, like 8FillTheHeart said above: do things in a different way and just let your creative side out. Sometimes for us it was as simple as having a pajama day all day, or "school in bed" day, or we would do school in a fort (blanket over a table) to help keep things "fresh".

Edited by Lori D.
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We love read alouds and art here. I have a day that we all sit with hot drinks, usually under blankets with their art supplies for whatever they are working on, and I read aloud and we discuss. Right now our book is SWB's The Story of Science. I don't have another regular read going, so I will rotate Bible and a chapter aloud vs. to themselves of SWB's The History of the Renaissance World sometimes. We just finished a biography of Euclid, and I haven't picked our next full read aloud yet. Both are in an outside art class, so dd 15 works on her sketchbook stuff from that class because she has less time at home to finish her stuff with her part time job. DD14 is my artist and always has something going of her own. If dd15 doesn't have something she will do a paint by number or adult coloring books sometimes. Dd4 gets in on it too and watercolors or cuts an enormous amount of paper scraps while we read. She's a messy artist. We do art history, some parts of history and science, and occasionally lit this way and always have. When they were little it was Story of the World and library books time with their coloring sheets and SOTW AG projects to work on. 

Edited by 2_girls_mommy
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When things are really going well and outside stuff isn't usurping too much of our time, we start each morning around the table for journal, writing, some learning games and wake up stuff. We did that at the beginning of the year, and I loved it. But outside therapies, test prep and other things have taken that over for this semester. 

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9 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

It helps if you are not workbook/textbook dependent.  There are as many interesting ways to learn as there are people out there learning.

kids can

  • put together e-magazines with science/history articles, literature reviews, poems they composed, etc to email out to family and friends
  • create travel brochures about places they are reading 
  • do hand crafts (sewing, knitting, crocheting, painting, modeling, etc)
  • create a scene, act it out, record
  • create a menu from a different culture, plan/cook
  • play Little City (create a store-price, advertise, shop at each other's stores, bargain/trade)
  • snuggle together with hot chocolate and read aloud
  • spend a morning building puzzles and listening to audiobooks/lives of composers & their music, etc

Just be creative and learning can happen. 🙂

 

Is there a site or something with templates for the e-mags you mentioned?

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