Make Homeschooling Fun

It is vitally important that you make homeschooling fun for your kids, if it’s not, your family’s educational journey will be a hard one, filled with resentment and frustrations.

Always remember that you are mum ( or dad), educational facilitator, not teacher, there is no requirement at all for you to teach your kids.

If you’re not teacher, how do they learn? They learn from everything around them. The places they go, the books they read, the videos they watch and the people they meet.

I overheard a conversation a few days ago, another child said “But your mum doesn’t know everything.” Bemused at how education could happen without teachers. I wish I’d primed them to reply “No, but Google does.”

With homeschooling there is no need for classroom style learning. Here are some ways to make homeschooling fun.

• Bin the schedules, do it when it suits everyone.
• Get outside and go places, more fun and more learning comes from real life experience than from books even if it’s just the local shops, there’s maths to do and signs to read.
• Let them learn about the things they love, be it puppies, bugs, Pokemon or cars.
• Don’t force books they hate on them, instead find material they want to read. You don’t want to turn your new reader off books for life.
• Cook together, you’ll be at home a lot and need food. There can be a lot of nutrition, science, maths and reading in cooking.
• Play traditional games, there are loads of board games and card games that bring on maths, general knowledge and literacy tremendously.
• Play computer games and don’t dismiss screens as bad. Studies show quite the opposite. You can learn many things from computer games ( for instance try Minecraft homeschool)
• Study music at home with Youtube or your own collection. Learning about music involves all genres, not just classical. Many kids learn better with music in the background.
• Give them a pile of craft and art material, wood, fabrics, wool, anything, then let them go crazy.
• Get some fun exercise into your day to bust the after-lunch slump. Walk, ride bikes, roller-skate, go to the playground, anything physical gets the feel-good hormones pumping.
• Use toys as subjects. Lego can illustrate maths and figures can star in video making projects.
• Take fun courses or try new activities. Pottery, diving, climbing, canyoning, kayaking, think outside the box with these things. They all count as school and let them meet new people while having more fun than staying in.
• Brighten up a dull documentary by adding home made popcorn and snugly blankets. If it’s too dull they’ll fall asleep, so avoid dull. There are always better ways.
• Incorporate gardening into your homeschooling. Give them a plot each and let them grow whatever they like, studying the biological processes. Learn from their failures and celebrate their successes.
• Likewise, let them have pets and learn how to care for them. Building a pet home, nutrition and medical needs could be part of this.
• Lots and lots of field trips, AKA days out are our favourite way to learn. We just returned from a 1 month field trip in the Himalayas, but we’re kinda different.

So off you go make homeschooling fun for your whole family. This lifestyle is a wonderful one and we’ve been enjoying it immensely for the last 5 years plus. Since I first broke my elder child free of the school straightjacket around his 7th birthday. I’ve written that sometimes homeschooling sucks, and it does, you will have bad days, but salvage them with a vigorous roller skating session and make everyone smile again. Have fun and enjoy your kids’ childhoods just as much as they will.