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Once the newness and excitement or anxiety of virtual learning wears off, many parents find themselves looking for ways to make their child’s homeschool day fun. So many parents go into homeschooling with the mindset of checking off boxes and powering through workbooks page after page. Homeschooling is so much more than opening up a boxed curriculum and trudging through the material.
In the numerous responses to those inevitable Facebook group questions about how to start homeschooling your child, one key aspect of home education is overlooked: Homeschool does not have to mirror public school at home. Whether your curriculum is based on your child’s school or you are creating a schedule from scratch, virtual learning should be fun and enjoyable for both parents and kids! Check out these ideas to make your homeschool day fun so you can make the switch from homeschooling to funschooling!
Fun homeschooling activities you can do without a curriculum
The beauty of homeschooling is that you have the flexibility in your homeschool schedule to occasionally veer off the beaten path and chase rabbit trails.
NPR reporter Brakkton Booker suggests we should all be taking advantage of things that weren’t free before the pandemic and are now accessible to everyone virtually: Broadway shows, symphony broadcasts, and museum tours are some of the activities that could enhance a mundane virtual learning curriculum.
Here are a few ways to make your virtual learning day fun and keep spirits high.
1. Let your child choose what they want to learn about.
Kids are very in tune with the world around them. Simply observe their interests or have them tell you what they want to learn about, and then create focused homeschool unit studies or add on to their school’s existing curriculum. Over the summer, my youngest was obsessed with water-gun fights with his older siblings. I put together a fun homeschool unit study about Lonnie Johnson, the NASA scientist who invented the SuperSoaker. It was a total hit!
2. Incorporate cooking into your homeschool week.
“Food is always a good motivator,” mom of four Laura Canada Oneill told Mom.com. “Whether it is with my son or when teaching a science lab, I’ve used food in experiments. Baking can be a good time to see science in action and use math skills to double a recipe.”
3. Make learning a hands-on experience.
One of our best experiences as a family was visiting Montezuma Castle in Arizona after reading about it in my sons’ elementary history book. You don’t have to travel 2,000 miles for a homeschool lesson. There are plenty of opportunities to learn about history right in your own backyard and community.
Make fun virtual learning connections to current events
Another benefit of homeschooling is that it doesn’t take much to find source materialto begin your homeschool program. Current events are a great resource for finding fun homeschool activities. Look no further than this past year’s news stories, and there are numerous jumping-off points to consider.
4. Find homeschool fun in outer space.
One of our favorite topics that makes a fun homeschool day is learning about the International Space Station or following along with NASA initiatives at home. We recently spent a week learning about the Mission to Mars in a fun, hands-on unit study I created for my youngest.
5. Delve deeper into new science and history news.
2020 has been chock-full of history-making moments. While the majority of the news has been somber, there are some scientific topics that would be worthwhile to incorporate into your homeschool. I’m looking at you, murder hornets and human-sized bats (golden-capped flying fox).
Ideas to incorporate homeschool fun on Fridays
Homeschooling moms know that it’s often a good idea to break free from the homeschooling schedule. Building some fun into the week is a great practice. Julie Bogart is author of The Brave Learner and creator of the award-winning Brave Writer program. “Enchanted education and living are all about small surprises of happy—scattered, littered, peppered throughout garden-variety days,” she wrote.
One way to create an enchanted education is to have a designated day where you put the books and workbooks away and take a break from homeschooling. Make time for fostering family connections. Some of these “Fun Friday” ideas should help to get you to think outside the box and find ways to make your child’s homeschool day fun.
6. Gameschooling is our Friday go-to.
In recent years, we’ve started making Fridays our gameschooling day where we play games; often educational, sometimes not. This gives us the end-of-the-week break we need, even though we do often homeschool on weekends.
Oneill seconds the games-on-Friday idea. “I have found that games and other hands-on activities help to make learning more fun. Boggle or Scrabble can be used for spelling. There are games specific to math, too,” she told us.
7. Have a Friday scavenger hunt.
Tomika Bryant believes that homeschool should be a fun experience for all. “Incorporate songs and dancing into the lesson plan. A scavenger hunt in the house or the yard is a great learning adventure. Give a clue to find an item. The item can be to answer a question related to a lesson, and if they get it right, they move to the next clue,” she told Mom.com.
