Some homeschooling parents fret about how to obtain a physical education credit for their kids. For us, the goal has always been to live an active lifestyle. I do not think that you have to be enrolled in a formal P.E. class to fulfill the goal of being healthy, fit, and active. We also want them to love being outdoors.
Basketball at the park with cousins!
English and Writing Resources
I was looking through The Old Schoolhouse magazine online the other day and found an article that I would like to save for future reference as my kids are working on their writing skills. The article,”7 Tips for Taking Your Research Paper from Snooze-Worthy to Spectacular”, was written by Janice Campbell.
For ideas on how to integrate creative writing into the other subjects being studied such as science, social studies, and math, the article “Makings of a Great Writer” has some excellent and fun ideas.
Character Development
This article (particularly page 63) reminds me of what my end goal should be in parenting and teaching my children: to know, love, and serve God, and to be equipped to love and serve other people. When it gets tough or monotonous, refreshing my mind with this truth keeps me going!
I am always on the lookout for fun hands-on science projects for my daughter. After seeing a Facebook ad, I was interested to check out what Tinker Crate had to offer. They create science kits that are delivered to you through a monthly subscription program. I chose to just receive a one time box. They are sent at random, so you don’t know exactly what will be coming each month. That was part of the fun and excitement in ordering this way. They also address the kit to the child, and my daughter loved knowing that it was “her” mail. We enjoyed the first kit, so I did end up getting a second one. She created a drawing bot and set off a rocket! She had hours of fun with each kit. The kits also came with other experiment ideas, how to tweak your project to produce other results, and detailed instructions that were easy for her to follow on her own. The only negative was that the rocket was small and didn’t fly very high. But, we now know how to create one on our own on a larger scale, so I am sure we will be doing this in the near future. She learned some important science concepts in a fun way, so I would say it was a worthy investment. A major plus for me was that everything came included in the box, so I didn’t have to hunt or shop for supplies to complete the projects. These boxes are around $15-20 a box, so it will be a once in a while deal for us. Of course, if you sign up for a whole year, it reduces the monthly price considerably.
My husband brought home a new game for us this evening for family game night. He was introduced to it at a party last night and really enjoyed it. So, he picked one up for us to try. We like to play Scrabble, and this is in that realm with a fun, fast-paced twist! Everyone gets a certain amount of tiles (varies with number of people playing) that they leave turned over until ready to start. The rest of the tiles are put in the middle as a draw pile. Once you start, everyone quickly turns over their tiles and starts to form words in the similar Scrabble fashion. They have to be built off of each other. The goal is to get all of your tiles formed into an acrostic. If you use all of your letters, you say “peel”, and everyone has to draw one tile. Then they add that to their other words. You can reform words to make the letter fit. It becomes fast-paced as players keep using all their letters and making everyone draw until the pile is empty. The first one to use all of the drawn letters is the winner. There are some other aspects to the game like trading in letters that you can’t use, but this is the main gist of it. You have to check the winner’s final “board” to make sure they accurately connected words and letters. During one round, I thought I had won but had failed to finish off one word that I had tried to rearrange. So, I automatically lost. It was something different and new, and we all enjoyed it. And, I love games that help us practice spelling in a fun way! At $15, Bananagrams was a worthy investment.
What kinds of games does your family like to play?
