Key Homeschool Strategy: Make Learning Fun!

Key Homeschool Strategy: Make Learning Fun!

Posted by ginac on May 18th, 2009

First, I want to start by noting that the overall strategy of our homeschool ‘curriculum’ is to make learning fun. We can teach some pretty advanced concepts to our young learner if we engage his natural curiosity through play. Our philosophy is that if a student has trouble learning a concept, it is because the teacher hasn’t figured out a way to present it clearly to that student. Over time, we have discovered a few ‘tools’ that always work for us.

Key Strategies

Illustrate key concepts using silly cartoons– For example, we developed our own method for teaching decimal manipulations using silly cartoon characters. Don’t worry if you are not an artist, the sillier looking, the better. The key here is humor.
Kid-created comic strips are a fun art/language arts project that also enhances learning of advanced topics because the little author has to understand the salient points. The key here is creative license.
Let your child make some decisions about what to learn today — maybe that great ‘Rick Steve’s Europe’ episode inspired your homeschooler to learn more about Italian coastal cities. The key here is empowerment.
Finally, our favorite strategy for making learning fun:

Use toys in your lessons! For example, we used toy cars in a recent lesson to illustrate how to visually present data. In this example, we started our lesson on visual data presentation by helping our homeschooler build a literal bar graph of cars, organized by color. We ‘recorded’ our data in a table that we then used to ‘draw’ the graph. Finally, we delved into generating a graph using spreadsheet software. The key here is ‘hands-on’ learning.