It’s been more than 2 months since schools have been closed due to COVID – 19. While many schools have now introduced their online learning platforms, homeschooling still remains a challenge in many households.
1. Make Belief is the Doorway to Fun
How many kids lookout for their Hogwarts letter when they turn 11? How many girls wait for an invitation from the princess academy or the Space academy? The answer is every child ever! Make homeschooling fun for your children by bringing their favorite fantasy to life.
Your child will definitely appreciate the effort, here is what you can do:
- Dress up: Put on a robe and a pointy hat and channel your inner McGonagall to bring magic to your living room! Make robes for your children as well. Playing dress-up while studying? Soon your kids will be actually forward to it! Alternatively, you can dress up as the characters in your child’s favorite fantasy.
- Use Themed Stationery: Pick up some notebooks, pencils, and other stationery items of the theme you have chosen. Writing with quills and using magic wand erasers is infinitely more fun than regular boring stationery.
2. Educational Games Make Learning Fun!
Most parents get frustrated because they can’t get their kids to do the assigned work. Kids would rather play than do their reading assignments, writing exercises, and mathematical tasks. Instead of forcing your kids to do their homework and making it seem like a chore, add a little excitement through educational games.
Educational games not only make the activity fun, but they also enhance your child’s memory, creative thinking, and strategic problem-solving skills. Here are some examples for inspiration:
- Make reading fun through songs, interactive stories, and pop-culture reading assignments. Ask your kids to read Harry Potter, Naruto, or Star Wars instead of classic literature to build an appetite for reading.
- Help your kids learn new words through crossword puzzles, connect the dots, and color inside the line exercises.
- Use baking or Legos to teach your kids mathematics.
3. Teaching through Creative Arts
Creative arts are an essential element of a teacher’s toolkit; extensive research has been conducted on the subject, and it found that creative arts are directly related to critical thinking. What is more, creative arts stimulate brain growth and help your child become more attuned to their emotional self. It enhances empathy and deep understanding which is not only useful in the classroom, but in life.
Therefore, feel free to add music, dance, theater, painting, sketching, and any other form of arts that your child is interested in. Some examples are:
- Encourage children to express themselves through painting, writing stories, or telling stories. These activities enhance listening skills, memory, vocabulary, and sequencing.
- Involve children in character studies of characters in their books to increase understanding of emotion and critical thinking.
- Encourage children to make things with their hands. Give them molding clay, magnetic sand, or any other medium to make things. This increases their motor skills, which can help them write easily.
4. Make Science Exciting through DIY Experiments
You may think that you don’t have a science lab at home, but you are wrong! You don’t need fancy equipment and store-bought chemicals for scientific experimentation. You can use everyday household objects to make exciting biology, physics, and chemistry experiments to hook your child to science!
Here are some examples to get you started:
- Turn your pickle into a battery! We have all done the potatoes as battery experiment, mix it up, and use pickles instead!
- Make Yeast Air Balloons teach children the process of fermentation.
- Mixing vinegar and baking soda to clean a penny or an oven to show how acids and metals behave when they come into contact with each other. Your children learn a valuable lesson, and you get a free cleaning service!
Experiments not only build interest in science, but they also stay in your child’s memory far longer than a definition in a book. Use online resources to look up other science experiments you can do with your kids to make learning fun.
5. Incorporate Websites and Mobile Applications
Put those screens to good use by accessing valuable online teaching resources. There are several websites and mobile applications that are doing God’s work by continually developing interesting educational content for school-going children of every age.
These websites have games, interactive exercises, podcasts, audiobooks, digital books, and more that can help your child learn while also having fun.
Some of the most credible learning sites and applications are:
- TED-Ed: It a unique site that lets parents and teachers build lessons around TED Talks and YouTube videos.
- Exploratorium: Trouble finding free activities, printables, and games? The San Francisco’s Science Center has got you covered.
- Duolingo: it is a mobile application that offers a wide array of games and activities in multiple languages.
- XtraMath: A website and a mobile app developed to make math easy and understandable.