Incorporating Hands-On into Homeschool

Kris is the sweet-tea-drinking, classically eclectic, slightly Charlotte Mason, homeschooling mom to her three Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

First of all, I want to thank Kimberly for allowing me the opportunity to do a guest post on her blog.  I always enjoy reading all the great ideas that Kimberly shares, so it’s an honor to be asked to share some of my ideas.  Today, I’m going to be offering you some tips for incorporating more hands-on activities into your homeschool.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that most homeschooling parents make with hands-on activities is trying to do too much.  We often feel that we have to have a major hands-on project for every subject, every day, which quickly becomes overwhelming, so we just toss the idea of hands-on learning out altogether.  However, there are many painless ways to get more hands-on activities into your homeschool day.  Here are a few suggestions:

1.  Aim for one good project a week.  I’d rather do one really good project than a bunch of mediocre ones.  For me, history and science are the easiest subjects into which to incorporate projects.  When I’m planning my week, I first plan out our reading – maybe a chapter or two from our history or science text (Story of the World and the Christian Kids Explore series) and any supplemental reading we’ll be doing.  Then, I check to see if our books have any suggestions for fun, relevant hands-on activities that will enhance our learning.

Note:  That’s important to me – enhancing our learning.  Sometimes it’s fun to do a craft project just for the sake of doing a craft project, but my main goal, in planning hands-on learning is to enhance the kids’ knowledge and retention, not simply to be able to say we did a project.

If the books don’t have any suggestions, I go to a handy, generic list full of great ideas to see what I might be able to include.

2.  Play games. A fun way to make traditional learning more fun is to play games.  We recently made a giant board game to practice reading skills, but you could easily adapt this concept for a variety of facts and skills just by changing the cards.  Check out these ideas for using an assortment of generic games for learning math skills, vocabulary or spelling words, history or science facts and much more.

3.  Adapt ideas. Sometimes the books we’re using will have suggestions for pencil and paper activities.  I’ll often try to figure out ways to make the suggested activities more fun and hands-on.  For example, when we were studying the layers of the earth, our science text included a work sheet to color and fill-in-the-blank lines for the different layers.  Instead of doing that, we made a simple model of the earth’s layers with construction paper for the younger kids and my older daughter and I made a paper mache earth model.

If we’re going to be studying a given area for any length of time, we’ll often make a salt dough map, rather than just labeling a map worksheet.  It’s more fun and the visual really helps kids make more sense of the geographical features (such as why “Lower Egypt” was in the northern part of Africa, while “Upper Egypt” was farther south).

4.  Search the library and the Internet. If I’m having trouble coming up with ideas on my own, I’ll often hit Google or our library’s online card catalog.  I usually use the subject or time period that we’re studying plus the words “activities” or “crafts.”  There are often entire books of activity suggestions.  We’ll pick out one or two we like and go from there.

Those are some of the tips that haven proven key for us incorporating more hands-on activities in our homeschool.  I hope they give you some ideas that you can use!