Hands On Experiences For Home School Children

Hands on Experiences for Home School Children

By Joseph Parish

As a home school parent, it lies within our realm of responsibility to make learning enjoyable, interesting and effective. When setting up an effective home school learning activity, we should continually seek out various methods that we can creatively reinforce the learning modules with the actual events studied that day. This is a far simpler task than you may suspect.

When home schooling my grandson, I required in addition to his various academic programs something I refer to as survival training. For example, when we studied plants during his science lessons, we also did some research on some useful herbs and medicinal plants. We felt this would benefit him in his survival training. As a result, he ended up learning additional information on the extremely useful Aloe Vera plant. He quickly learned how to use it for various emergency treatments concerning burns, etc. He became quite skilled in its use. We did this with several different plants and herbs.

Another situation was in cooking. As he learned the principles of good nutrition he was gently led into the kitchen for some practical work. Here once again we combined his academic studies with some useful hands on work. I showed him how to make interesting and tasty meals from cans of food that was stored in our emergency food supplies. This worked out really well and gave him the confidence needed to safely cook in the kitchen.

Field trips present excellent opportunities to not only learn, but to visualize new skills. As an example, we took a field trip to Basto, New Jersey. The student saw how the people lived a hundred years in the past. This developed new ideas and potential skills should they be needed in an emergency when all our modern facilities are no longer functioning. As you can see in this situation, we blended our history lessons with a field trip and with our survival training. All neatly package together.

Math skills can greatly be increased with map reading and compass work while combining school work and survival training into one. Activities such as these instill a sense of responsibility and importance in a Child's small mind. He or she quickly learns that although they are small, they can also do something important and valuable for the family. They learn that there are more significant items for learning than just their books. They get the actual hands on that is lacking in many of the public schools these days.

This same technique can be successfully transformed into many of the subjects and disciplines that the homeschooled child requires to be successful both academically and as a member of our society. Just do a little brainstorming and proper planning and coordinating between their activities and in my case survival skills.

Be sure not to go overboard with your extra work. Make sure that the student receives the proper proportion of textbook training and practice in addition to the various survival skills training.

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