Within each family children can be so different. They each have different learning styles, interests, and attention spans. How can you engage your entire family at the same time? Over the years I have learned some strategies for learning as a family that have made a huge impact in how we homeschool. If you’d like to learn how to plan and implement hands-on family-schooling check out the post below.
What is Family Schooling?
Family schooling is simply learning together as a family. We like to practice morning time, an hour during our day when we gather around the dining room table to learn subjects together. Morning Time is my favorite part of our homeschool day because we build relationships, make memories, and learn together.
When planning our year I like to determine which subjects will work well for family schooling. We schedule those subjects using a loop schedule during morning time.
Our morning time loop schedule looks something like this.
How to Plan Hands-on Activities
How do busy homeschool moms find time to plan and prepare hands on projects for a wide variety of ages? Some programs like Story of the World and Sassafras Science are brimming with hands-on activities, crafts, games, recipes, and suggested literature to help round out the lessons.
If you are using a curriculum that doesn’t provide suggestions for hands-on activities and literature, consider looking for some of the following types of activities that can be added to your lesson.
- Literature
- Hands-on Activities
- Lapbooks
- Fine Arts
- Games
- Food
How To Choose Hands-On Resources
Pinterest has thousands of great ideas. But, sometimes there isn’t time to sort through all the options. I have a few favorite resources for tracking down fun activities and literature.
book lists by topic
- Half a Hundred Acre Wood {organized by Classical Conversations Cycles}
- Our Journey Westward
- Give Your Child the World book {geography books by country}
hands-on activities by topic
- Our Pinterest Boards
- Hands-on History books: Colonial Kids, Classical Kids, More than Moccasins, Days of Knights and Damsels
- Hands-on Geography books: Cantering the Country, Galloping the Globe
lapbooking
art projects by topic
- You Are an Artist {check out their YouTube channel for free sample lessons}
- Geography Through Art book
games by subject
cookbooks
3 Simple tips for Family Schooling
Family schooling provides wonderful opportunities for learning through fun hands-on activities. Here are three simple tips to provide open ended learning experiences that will be accessible to a broad range of ages and abilities.
1. Consider choosing activities appropriate for the mid-range age in the group.
2. Adapt activities to be easier or more challenging for your youngest and oldest learners. Older learners might enjoy adding extra activities such as notebooking, lapbooking, and worksheets for more challenge.
3. Try to find projects that appeal to the various senses. Hands-on activities provide multi-sensorial learning opportunities and in our family that equals retention and engagement. Some multi-sensorial activity examples for learning about plant cells might include reading a book, building a plant cell using jello & fruit, looking at plant cells under a microscope, and drawing a plant cell.
I wish you and your family a rich and joyful group learning experience! Please comment below to share your favorite hands-on learning resources and tips for teaching multiple ages. Be sure to followus on