Learning At Home

We are living in a strange time. Parents are stuck at home thrown in a role they never trained or prepared for. From a mom who homeschooled for 19 years I can say schooling at home with someone else agenda does not sound easy. I imagine some kids just move forward and do the work. This blog is for the parents whose children are not finding it easy to move school work to home. Right now our children's and our own mental health is more important than finishing school work. Stressed people are more likely to get sick. Teachers know how to teach a classroom full of students. They don't necessarily know how to teach 25 - 30 children remotely, while being overseen by another adult. Importing our school system into our home life is tricky and I can only imagine overwhelming. My kids have grown and moved on so as I write this I'm pulling ideas from deep memories. Use these ideas as a spring board to get your own creative juices flowing.

Being confined to home doesn't have to look dreary.

If your child or children have tons of work sheets to fill out and you have a child battling you on this ask yourself:

what are they trying to learn? Can they learn this a different way?

Instead of filling out worksheets for spelling write words in the mud or sand or chalk on the driveway or toss a ball back and forth while you spell words. Is it math they have to do? Bounce a ball while reciting them. Don't forget to play along. Have your kids ask you a word or math problem for to you to answer. Get older siblings to help the younger ones. This will solidify the information for the older kids and sometimes the younger kids will be more willing to listen to a kid than a parent.

Ask yourself what would happen if they don't fill out the work sheets? If your answer is they absolutely must fill out the worksheets then make a game of it:

Play a board game or a game of concentration and each time someone lands on "Go"or gets a matching pair, fill in a question.

Use coloured pens or pencils to fill in the worksheets.

Build a fort and do the worksheets in the fort.

If you decide it's best not to fill in the worksheets find other ways to teach them what they need to learn.

Learning Games

1) Read Little House on the Prairie books: reenact what it was like to live the way they did, eat by candle light, play with buttons and a string etc.

2) Using a blind fold try to navigate from one end of a room to the other. Using a blind fold try to sort socks

(pick socks with different patterns)

3) Orienteering on a small scale. Look up Orienteering and make a little orienteering game for the kids. Don't have a compass? Make one! Once you are done with one orienteering adventure let them make up one for you or their siblings.

4) Measure things. Get out a ruler or measuring tape and measure things. Find the width of a chair and see if you can find other things around the house with that width. Look at a plate. Measure the diameter, the radius. Do you have a sewing flexible measuring tape? Try out Pi. Measure the circumference and see if Pi really works. Don't wait until they are ready. I often found the child who wasn't learning geometry loved these games. Measure a room and all the furniture and draw to scale the room on graph paper. Don't have graph paper? Make your own graph paper. Learn how to make a straight line. Peggy Kaye has a whole bunch of books on games for math, reading and writing. check out her books.

5) Weigh things. Use the kitchen scale or the bathroom scale. Hold a box or a dog (hopefully a small dog) while standing on a bathroom scale and show them how to subtract your weight from the total. Play the game how old will I be? How old will I be when the baby is 5, when the baby is 10, etc.

6) Check out the meters on your house. Look at the numbers and see if you can predict or better yet lower them day to day. Go onto the website for the utility to understand the numbers. Use graph paper to keep track.

7) Make a rain gauge and a chart to keep track of the rain fall and the weather

8) Make a pin wheel and a chart to keep track of the wind direction

9) Float things. Use foil and or raid the recycle bin. Let each child make a boat and

see how many pebbles or toys they can put in the boat before it sinks. Notice which designs hold more.

10) Clean out the toy closet. They may whine but when they find that long lost toy and get excited to see it, let them play. The cleaning was just a vehicle to get them interested in something.

11) Gather sticks and put them in bundles to visually show how borrowing works in a subtraction problem or use pebbles and piles.

12) Look up science experiments. Look up scientific method and make a science book to keep track of all your the science experiments and their progress.

13) Go to Pinterest and look up homeschooling to get a ton of ideas

14) Check out the Enchanted Learning website. They used to be free but may cost a little. They have a ton of creative learning ideas

15) Look up Lap booking. Some people love lap booking. It can be a really fun way to hold onto and learn information.

16) Spend one day speaking in an accent, or singing. This is more of an idea for the mom. When my kids didn't want to do something I would start talking them to them in an accent. A British or Irish accent is a good start but if you can't do that talk like a baby or in pig latin. It will lighten the mood.

17) Practice manners. Have tea or a formal dinner and use very proper table manners. Dress up for the occasion. The next day eat your dinner under the table. Maybe watch a show on manners. Depending on the ages of your children there are some great reality shows on BBC. The 1900's house, The 1940's house, Manor House, Regency House Party. My favourite is a PBS show Called The Frontier House. People from our time time travel back in time to see if a modern person can handle living in the past.

18) Count money back. (Make sure the money is clean or make your own money out of colourful paper). Get the kids to set up a store. You buy items and they have to count the change back. Counting money back is a dying skill that really needs to be revived.

19) Are you and your kids watching more television than normal? Turn it into a learning experience. For the younger kids talk about commercials? What are they trying to tell us? Do some commercials seem like they are meant for girls and others for boys? What are the differences? Who is the "they" behind the message? What are "they" gaining from presenting us with these messages? Opening a discussion about advertising will help your little ones navigate the path of consumerism more consciously. If your kids are in high school look up Edward Bernays. He is the mastermind behind women smoking and breakfast being the "most important meal of the day". Truly a fascinating character that will make you question what you think it true.

Help your children become discerning citizens and not blind consumers. Take it further and talk about censored books and blacklisted movies and the "red scare". Point out that having different opinions are important; even when those opinions can elicit uncomfortable emotions. Watch the news on different channels and notice what stories are the same and how many different angles are being presented. Point out that communism is about controlling the narrative so having a media that allows for different opinions is key to a democracy. Notice what messages are told across the board with the same wording. Look into who is delivering those messages and what they could gain from controlling the narrative and squashing any opposing viewpoints and conversations of discovery. Yeah - it got deep, but our kids, now more than ever, are bombarded with advertising and a media that is controlled more and more by fewer people. If they realise someone is trying to shape their opinions they will more likely be able to differentiate between their knowing and what is being sold to them.

20) Taste testing! This sort of goes along with #19. Don't let "them" tell you what is the best ice cream figure it out for yourself. Buy several brands of the same flavour and set up a blind taste test, with real blindfolds so the appearance doesn't sway the opinion. Calculate how much each ice cream costs per serving. Does the cost reflect the quality? Take it one step farther and let the ice cream melt. What does it look like melted? We found most vanilla ice creams ended up looking like thickish milk, but some stayed lumpy. Compare ingredients. Can you pronounce the ingredients? You can even make your own ice cream! If ice cream isn't your thing, taste test cereal or apples, you get the idea. Even though my kids are older and have kids of their own, the learning games continue. One Thanksgiving we took the blood pressure of everyone before and after a glass of red wine to see if what "they" say about lowering blood pressure is true. By making learning fun you foster life long learners and awake consumers.

Find activities you like. They can tell if you are having fun. Let your imagination fly and make memories you will all look back on fondly.