Make it Fun!

Have you had those homeschool days when you just don't want to sit at the table anymore and work on worksheets? Or have your child sit in front of the computer to click on the matching letters? You know you don't have to, right? Have you ever brought your work outside? Just a change of scenery sometimes can help the work seem not so much like...work. Even I can relate! I'm sitting here in my bed with my tablet in the early morning, listening to the rain while thinking about the time in the early morning with my tablet at the beach. I got up before the kids, sat on the balcony overlooking the ocean on a beautiful summer morning, and began to write a blog about thankfulness. There was so much more inspiration and feelings of life and being ready for anything, just that change of daily scene.  The same feelings can happen in and outside of your own house! Don't just work on a sheet full of numbers on a paper ruler...get up and measure things around the house, or go outside with a tape measure to find the perimeter of your actual house! Don't just study the rainforest from books and videos online...make one! Drape green streamers around your living room and hang them from the ceiling. Put animals around the room, turn down the lights for a canopy affect and find some background sounds online. Let them lie there describing what they see, hear, and feel.  One day last week, it was such a nice day that I decided to move our lessons outside...again. :) With my preschooler, we were practicing recognizing lower case letters. So instead of having him draw a line on paper to match the upper case to lower case, I drew the capitals in chalk in the driveway. I got a water gun and a white board. I drew a lower case letter on the whiteboard and he had to find the upper case letter and squirt it with the water gun! He thougt it was fun to try to find them faster and faster as we went on and enjoyed the activity until the last letter. Then we did it over again later with me giving him a word and he had to squirt the letter that it started with before I counted to five. His little dimpled cheeks smile and giggles made my day!

Then, while he rode his bike and played in the yard, I wrote two-digit numbers on the concrete for my 1st grader. We've been practicing "10 more and 10 less". With him, I called out, "Find the number 10 less than...", and he had to find it and shoot it with the water gun. He had to figure out how to look for the correct ones place, then in his head move the tens place up or down (since there may have been numbers with the same ones). Shooting things with water guns is just fun...and it practices hand-eye coordination and aiming. :)

The next day, I saw that my friend had used Easter eggs as a tool for letter recognition with our preschoolers. They had to work together, or alone, to match the correct lower case letter to the upper case (you can tell our class is in review mode for the year)! What a fun activity. It was hands-on, easy to do over and over again, and they had to learn to cooperate with others. So much better than a worksheet!  So, either change your daily scene, or be inventive with materials that you use to teach a concept, and go ahead and make it fun!  *Apr 2017