“Awe mom… do we have to do this again?”

Heads up: education can get boring if you don’t get a little creative with it. We would do our selves a favor and serve our children well by making it fun and enticing. I could quote you all kinds of statistics and give you links to a thesis or two based entirely on what works best for children but instead I’m just going to recommend that you ask your kiddo if learning might be more tolerable if it were fun.

What do you think they will say?

Yes? Hmmm, that’s exactly what I thought.

My kiddos feel the same way and so I began searching for ways to get creative with our lesson plans. Over the last school year I discovered many different things that brought me mommy praise and I figured I’d share them with you but there is a catch: I want you to share some ideas with me. Deal?

So here is what we are going to do:

Every month we will post on a different subject that engages our children and breaks the monotony of average lessons. I will post my ideas on each subject and then you will either post on your blog some creative ideas that go along with the subject that week and link to it in the comments or you can just post the ideas in the comments. Your choice. Here are some topics you have to look forward to:

• Basic Creative Ideas
• Lapbooking/Notebooking
• Mini-offices
• Learning Centers
• Workboxes
• Unit Studies
• Games
• Recycled & Repurposed
• File Folder Learning

Ready? Let’s go!

Theme Days

My basic ideas for adding some spunk to the everyday are really just “fun” in nature. Something to make the kids proactive and use their imagination. We like to have a theme day once a week. The theme might be the White House or backwards day. On theme days they get points for every time they do something that focuses on the theme. For example, if they dress backwards, start from the bottom of a worksheet and go up, or eat desert first (I know, bad mom then they get a point. For each point they earn that is one less math problem they have to do. We use Teaching Textbooks and Saxon so doing away with 15 problems over the next week isn’t a big deal to me but it is to them!

Animated Reading

Another fun activity they like to do is what I call animated reading. They have to read to me while acting out the scene. It’s kind of like charades on steroids. As you can imagine it gets really interesting during certain chapters of great books like Island of the Blue Dolphins and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Once we were doing animated reading and the phone rang so I answered in the  middle of a very animated Magic Schoolbus rendition of digging up dinosaur bones. My grandmother became quite excited when she thought we had found real dinosaur bones in the back yard. After I explained she said, “Oh, so they don’t call you Ms. Frizzle then either?” Uh, no grandma they don’t!

Snuggle Days

On some winter days I call for a snuggle day. Snuggle days consist of lounging around in our pjs with hot cocoa and warm blankets. We read to each other and watch subject related movies from Netflix. Then we tell campfire stories. So what if our campfire is really a candle?

Role Reversal Days

Our favorite creative idea is role reversal day. They get to teach me what they’ve learned over the last month or so and I sit intently and listen. They think that this is so fun because they are pretending to be the teacher but what they don’t know is that it is really just another way to test what they have learned. I also love saying things like, “Awe, mom! Do we have to do this again?” Then watch as their little wheels spin to come up with fun ways to teach me!

So what are some of your ideas?

Married to her best friend and “main squeeze”, Amy Bayliss is a 4th year home/co-schooling mom to three boys. She enjoys writing about the eclectic teachings that bring a glimmer of curiosity to the eyes of her sons. In addition to being the co-owner of Heart of the Matter, she writes for Internet Cafe Devotions. Be sure to visit her blog, AmyBayliss.com and her family’s homeschool blog: Integrity Academy.