Once the newness and excitement or anxiety of virtual learning wears off, many parents find themselves looking for ways to make their child’s homeschool day fun. So many parents go into homeschooling with the mindset of checking off boxes and powering through workbooks page after page. Homeschooling is so much more than opening up a boxed curriculum and trudging through the material.
In the numerous responses to those inevitable Facebook group questions about how to start homeschooling your child, one key aspect of home education is overlooked: Homeschool does not have to mirror public school at home. Whether your curriculum is based on your child’s school or you are creating a schedule from scratch, virtual learning should be fun and enjoyable for both parents and kids! Check out these ideas to make your homeschool day fun so you can make the switch from homeschooling to funschooling!
Fun homeschooling activities you can do without a curriculum
Ideas to incorporate homeschool fun on Fridays
Homeschooling moms know that it’s often a good idea to break free from the homeschooling schedule. Building some fun into the week is a great practice. Julie Bogart is author of The Brave Learner and creator of the award-winning Brave Writer program. “Enchanted education and living are all about small surprises of happy—scattered, littered, peppered throughout garden-variety days,” she wrote.
One way to create an enchanted education is to have a designated day where you put the books and workbooks away and take a break from homeschooling. Make time for fostering family connections. Some of these “Fun Friday” ideas should help to get you to think outside the box and find ways to make your child’s homeschool day fun.
6. Gameschooling is our Friday go-to.
In recent years, we’ve started making Fridays our gameschooling day where we play games; often educational, sometimes not. This gives us the end-of-the-week break we need, even though we do often homeschool on weekends.
Oneill seconds the games-on-Friday idea. “I have found that games and other hands-on activities help to make learning more fun. Boggle or Scrabble can be used for spelling. There are games specific to math, too,” she told us.
7. Have a Friday scavenger hunt.
Tomika Bryant believes that homeschool should be a fun experience for all. “Incorporate songs and dancing into the lesson plan. A scavenger hunt in the house or the yard is a great learning adventure. Give a clue to find an item. The item can be to answer a question related to a lesson, and if they get it right, they move to the next clue,” she told Mom.com.
