Best Homeschool Tips & Tricks
Ready to dive into your new year or your first year of homeschool?! Here are a few of my favorite tips and tricks that have made homeschooling smoother at my house!
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I hope you’ll find my tips & tricks helpful. Feel free to share your favorite tip or trick in the comments below!
Magic Mondays
My kids have been a bit resistant to writing. Well, resistant to writing involved in school work at least. My oldest loves to write stories and such.
So, last year we implemented something called Magic Mondays. I got each of my kids a composition book that has a blank top have and lines on the bottom path.
Every Monday they would choose something they did from the previous week to write about and then draw a picture.
They definitely started the year writing only a few words or one sentence most of the time. As the year went on I started pushing them to write a certain number of sentences.
At the end of the year they could look back on lots of fun memories from the year and see how their writing improved!
Coloring Pages (for read alouds)
We love read alouds…but I didn’t love my kids constantly getting distracted or messing with each other while I was trying to read.
It ended up being a simple fix…coloring sheets! It was a simply activity that would occupy thier hands while allowing them to still focus on the story. (This may not work if your kids are intense about their coloring.)
Bonus points if you print out coloring pages that go along with what you’re reading about!
What’s Up with that jar?
One day I realized how many questions my kids ask me, usually in the car, that I don’t have an answer to. It hit me that we usually don’t get around to ever answering those questions.
Therefore, the “What’s Up with that Wednesday” jar was born. You could do yours on any day but we liked the illiteration.
I cut strips of paper and my kids can write a question they have and each week we pull one and look up the answer to it.
It’s a great sneaky way to get your kids to write more too!
Fancy WET Erase Markers
I like to make daily to-do lists on white boards for each of my kids.
I have a set of dry erase markers so each subject is a different color which really helped when they were younger. (We may actually move to a digital system this year for my oldest.)
The problem is…if my kids slide their arm across something written in regular dry erase it will come right off. Grab a set of wet erase markers and that problem will go away!
They dry quickly and won’t come off unless you cross it out with a regular dry-erase marker or use some white board spray.
It’s also great for writing out sentences or math problems to be solved.
Don’t Over-Do It!!
Don’t over do it…especially in the younger grades. Kids should still be learning a lot through play and experience. You don’t need to do social studies and science every day with young kids.
Anything you teach them now will be re-taught at a later age when they can go deeper and truly understand. At my house we do unit studies, usually with topics my kids have chosen. That means we’re doing a little science or a little social studies, but not both.
We also spend a lot of time in our garden which is great for learning about animals, ecosystems, and more.
