Magic and Mayhem

Moms and kids alike can get burned out on traditional “school at home” stuff.  Not only is it sometimes boring, but it’s also not even the most effective way to learn.  We learn best in ways that incorporate all different kinds of learning– doing, touching, hypothesizing, hearing, seeing, trying, talking, singing….

Traditional schooling teaches short term memorization.  Kids learn it long enough to spit it back out and learn the next thing.  Worse yet, they don’t enjoy it or see the value in it.

Here are five ways to help your kids learn in ways that give them enjoyment and ownership of their education.  You don’t have to chuck the curriculum and go all-or-nothing into funschooling, but if you start to incorporate this sort of thing into your homeschool you will find that you actually need less and less of that other stuff.  Lo and behold, the kids will learn all sorts of things (even ones not planned for week x of that grade level!) and will like it!

1.  Commit to weekly visits to the library.  Bring a giant bag or even a laundry basket and let the kids help pick out lots of books each week.  Give them a certain number to keep it under if you like, but be flexible.  Of all the things to argue about, reading too many books shouldn’t be one of them.  :)  While you’re there, look through the nonfiction children’s section and get a pile of great books on subjects likely to catch your kids’ interest and ones that relate to things you’ve done or learned lately.

When you get home, set aside an area to have the library books out and put the nonfiction books out where the kids will see them.  Read together throughout the week and pick from everybody’s selections, including yours.  If books are boring, put them back.  If the text is too long, skip it and look at the pictures together.  The key is to captivate the kids with the subject matter.

If you can, go to other towns’ libraries too.  If you go to a nearby town for groceries or a dentist appointment, stop at their library and check out some of their books.  Most library systems incorporate lots of towns and kids love to explore new libraries.

2.  Join Netflix.  Or Blockbuster Online or a similar service.  Even if you get a cheap membership and only 1 DVD at a time (which I think is about $8 a month), it gives you access to so many fabulous DVDs.  We have a membership with 3 at a time and I think it’s around $18 a month.  We generally get one fun one for the kids, one grown up one and one educational one.  The educational ones are generally fun too.  Some make great bedtime videos and we snuggle up to watch African animals or some such.  Some, like Magic School Bus episodes, are entertaining and educational.

A few of our favorite DVDs have included Rough Science (a BBC series that stranded some fun scientists in remote locations and gave them scientific challenges to make things from odd supplies) and IMAX movies about women explorers, caves, coral reefs and more.  Right now we have DVDs about sign language, tigers and math in our queue, to name just a few.

3.  Volunteer together for historic, natural and educational groups.  Our family gets so much out of the time we spend volunteering for historic sites and organizations especially.  This week we dressed up in period clothes for History Fest and taught people about games, music and life in Mankato in the early 1900’s.  Not only did the kids really learn about that time, but they learned about all the other times represented at History Fest during the two days there.  They feel like they know what it was like to live back then and when we talk about who was president or what the issues were, they relate to it because they feel connected to the time.

Through our work at the Jeffers Petroglyphs, our kids relate to Dakota history in our part of the world and Native American history in general.  They have scraped buffalo hides, made their own atlatls and arrowheads, taught visiting children the moccasin game and shaped pots with a visiting Ojibwe potter.

When we found out that an archeological dig was taking place at a nearby lake area and the public was invited to take part, we joined in a real archeological dig and learned firsthand what is really involved.  The kids used a screen to sift for artifacts, helped clean them and learned all about the process involved and why it is often done.
All of this is free, it gives the kids a feeling of purpose and service, it’s fun and it makes learning so fascinating!  What book could compare?

4.  Play games.  There is almost nothing that you can learn in a book that you cannot also learn by playing.  Parts of speech?  Mad libs.  Addition?  Shut the box.   I dare you to find a period of history that does not have at least a couple of fun classroom games online.

We played Gold Rush games last year that used maps, bad luck cards and other bits.  I learned more about the Gold Rush than I ever had in school, and the kids can still tell you about the disasters likely to strike during the trip, the routes you could take and the challenges miners faced.

5.  Use art.  Most kids love art.  If yours do, too, use that to painlessly help them learn.  When Victoria was having trouble memorizing her multiplication facts I gave her index cards and pretty stickers and helped her make fact family cards.  We use lapbooking to learn about subjects from Ethiopia to horses to nutrition to carp.  I have even given my kids pages of math problems and a stack of markers to answer in pretty patterns.  :)  For many kids, the ability to make something cool or pretty turns it into something fun.

Now I have to go spend some time with my kids and less time yapping about this.  More later!