Whether you’re home-schooling your kids because of the Covid-19 pandemic or simply because you’ve decided that it’s the best route for you and your children, you may have noticed that it comes with its challenges. While technology has made online and home-based learning so much more accessible, reliable and effective over the past few years, it’s still a part of your life that needs navigating and constant adjusting. When kids are cooped up in the same environment all the time, it’s common for them to feel trapped and bored and this can make it hard to motivate them to learn during school hours. Keeping things fun in your home class is an important part of creating an effective and stimulating environment for your little students.
In This Article
Use Interactive Activities
Reading through lesson material and answering questions day after day is mundane and boring, and certainly won’t help your kids to gain the most they could from their school hours. All children are different, but a large portion of younger learners do well with interactive type activities – getting their hands involved will help them to understand better, retain the information and have more fun! For science class, you could introduce fun activities like density experiments for kids. For math, you could try and incorporate real-life scenarios to make the equations feel more relevant and helpful to their daily lives. For history class, you could dress up as historical figures to give your kids a laugh. The options are endless!
Get Out of the House
Sometimes we need to break away from the classroom, whether that’s at your typical school or a home-schooling environment. Kids need variety in their day and incorporating that into their learning is very helpful. Once or twice a month, plan a fun, educational trip (like a field trip) to a museum, aquarium, historical site, or anywhere else you think they might be able to learn something new. To make it more fun and exciting, you could invite some of their friends along – if you know other parents who home-school their kids, this could be a joint activity.
Incorporate Technology
You may think that avoiding devices and the internet is the best way to keep your kids focused on their school work, but you could be missing out on a seriously beneficial addition to your environment. Many home-school curriculums use online platforms with interactive lessons, video classes and other useful tools that will help your kids to learn better and more effectively. Be sure to keep a watchful eye that they’re not switching tabs over to something else in the meantime, but allow your little ones to take full advantage of the information found online. This will also teach them to manoeuvre technology too – an important skill in the modern age!
Watch Movies
TV time during school hours might sound crazy, but spending some time watching a movie with relevant content, or even a documentary for older kids and teens from your favorite streaming services can be a super fun and stimulating addition to your classroom. You can double this up as a bit of family bonding time, and quiz them after the film to make sure they paid attention to the important stuff.
Play Games
Younger children function best when they’re up and moving. Some brain-stimulating, run-around type games are a great way to kick off your school day. This will get their blood flowing, get them excited for the school day and also kickstart their brains first thing in the morning. You can try some obstacle course type games, Simon says, throwing and catching a ball, jumping rope or any other types of active games and activities that you and your kiddos enjoy playing together.
Fun Friday
Friday is the most exciting day of the week, right? Lee’s keep it that way. Making Friday your dedicated day of fun learning is a great way to keep your kids motivated and excited, with something fun to look forward to. Friday can be a day planned for arts and crafts, cooking or baking, field trips, movies, dress-up days or whatever other fun learning activities you might have up your sleeve.
Conclusion
Stimulating and educating your kids all year round is hard work and a tough job for any parent. Finding the best way to do it is extremely personal to you and your kids, so be sure to communicate well with one another about what works and what doesn’t. This way, you know that you’ll be giving them the best chance at getting what they need each day.
