Real Estate Innovation

Spice up your Home School Routine with Fun Projects

When you decide to homeschool your child, you are committing to taking charge of your child’s education. There are many amazing benefits to homeschooling, but the responsibility and time commitment is significant as well. You probably need to spend a good amount of time planning lessons and units. A great way to end a unit is with a project. Projects help children sum up, review and implement everything they have learned.

Here’s an example of how to organize a project with your child. Let’s assume you’ve just finished a biology unit, a great week long project might be to create an ecosystem in an aquarium. The goal will be to create an environment that can be self-sufficient in the sealed aquarium. While learning about the different cycles of nature, encourage your child to think of the most efficient way to create the ecosystem. Your child can think of ways that nature is efficient and try to mimic these characteristics to create a sustainable and efficient environment.

Do your best to allow your child to do most of the setting up on their own. Many parents are tempted to help their kids so that the project can look more tidy and organized, but it’s more effective to allow kids to learn from their mistakes. Once your child is done setting up, have them come up with a way to track progress on a daily basis. This will be an opportunity for your child to learn all about graphs and charts.

After your child is done detailing the plan, it’s time to gather the supplies. You child should have a list of supplies needed to put together the ecosystem. You can offer your child some assistance in setting up the aquarium but allow your child to do as much of the work on their own as possible. It much more useful for a child’s self-esteem to end up with a mediocre project they created all on their own, than to end up with a tidy and well done project that they know required someone else’s skills to pull off.

You can also engage other family members on such projects. The ecosystem, for example, could be placed in a prominent location in your home where other family members will have a chance to observe it and provide your child with feedback on his/her hard work. Parents of children in public schools know how exciting it is when a child comes home with a project they just completed at school. Homeschooling parents enjoy the benefit of having ’school’ at ‘home’ and therefore watching their child’s excitement throughout all stages of a project.

Homeschooling families are not limited by the practicalities necessary in public schools. Project ideas can be as diverse and far reaching as your imagination. For each unit, encourage your child to brainstorm a list of long term project ideas based on what they have learned. Allowing your children to come up with their own project ideas will not only trigger their creativity, it will also make them feel like they have a say in their education. This will make them more enthusiastic and excited about their learning and make for a more successful homeschooling experience.