Misc Homeschool Tips

Had a few things on my mind that have come up in conversations lately. Just little tips that help with homeschooling...figured I'd share. ;)

Mark your place. More than a year ago, I read this blog post that truly impacted the way we homeschool around here. Such a simple idea, and yet it made a big impact. Yup, just use colored tabs in workbooks and such...green is the page to start on...red is the page to stop on. Brilliantly simple.

Using this, I'm able to set out the boys' work for the week. At the start of each week, I put the green tab where they should start and the red tab where I want them to be at the end of the week. I use the blue tab to mark how far I recommend they get on that particular day (and, thus, move the blue tabs daily). Using this system is a way for me to empower the boys to decide for themselves how much work they want/need to accomplish each day...a means of beginning the teaching of time management. (I hope, btw, to do away with the blue tabs before too long.)

(Incidentally, I use these tabs for the morning schoolwork we do...the subjects where each boy is in his own different book. This system means that they can just get started on their own in the mornings, without having to wait for me to tell them what's on their list. Things that we do altogether don't get this treatment.)

Use RISK. I don't know about you, but I've never been a big fan of the game RISK. Games like that and Monopoly just aren't my favorites. They take stinkin' forever to finish. ;) My boys, on the other hand, seem to like these games best sometimes. Fortunately, they're able to play altogether now so that I don't have to. ;) 

Anyhow, I did recently find an excellent use for the game RISK. I thought it was rather genius, myself. ;) We were studying about "three pointless wars" (aka King William's War (War of the Grand Alliance), Queen Anne's War (War of Spanish Succession), and King George's War (War of Jenkins' Ear/War of Austrian Succession)). The boys were having a hard time grasping which countries were fighting where. This was when I had an "aha!" moment and dragged out the RISK board. I set up some representative little armies all over that board and used it to act out those various wars. The little army pieces and the world map are perfect for teaching stuff like this. Totally going to be using it more for history! (And, not to worry, the boys don't play our "normal" version anyhow...they tend to play the Transformers RISK game that their uncle bought them instead, lol.) 

Magnify. Though I'm usually more of a "big picture" sort of person, myself, sometimes it's excellent to get down to the details and really look at things. Enter Private Eye. I've had this in my hands since summer but finally broke it out yesterday. The idea is to use a jeweler's loupe to observe things up close and then draw analogies between what you see and other things you know. It ties in nicely to language arts as well, as you can talk about what an analogy is and use the observations to write poems and the like. 

For our first time out, I tied it in to our art for the day and set each boy up with a clipboard. The paper they were to fill out had three spots. They were to find something, draw what they saw through their loupe, and then answer the question below it. (I had three different questions...what does it look like? what does it remind you of?...list 7 adjectives that describe what you see...and, why do you think it's like that?) Easy peasy. ;) Being as it was unseasonably warm still and a gorgeous day, we decided to take our observations to the neighborhood park and set out on our walk...

Of course, it took Noah only moments to switch from observing to trying to burn through things. ;) He is a boy, after all. At that point, I had to stop and have a little lesson with all three about the proper way to use a loupe to burn leaves (no, not holding it over your leg, please!). Noah gave his brothers a lesson on focal points and proceeded to burn an "N" into his leaf. That's what big brothers are for, right? 

And then we walked home. ;) 

So. Do you have any homeschooling tips? Things that go beyond normal subject matter and such? I'd love to hear them!

Comments

[Jan]

Great ideas, Amanda! My boys are grown now and I did not homeschool them, but one of the tricks I used at homework time was to set a timer for my son who had trouble concentrating on a task. I would figure out about how much time I thought it should take him to do something and set the timer. The ticking reminded him that he was supposed to be working at a task and he was just competitive enough to want to beat the clock. It worked great for chores as well.