Unconventional Inspiration for Your Home School

One of my favorite things about home education is that I can use unconventional methods of teaching since my kids tend to respond to that. So I look for inspiration all over the place. Today I found my inspiration in the Christian Book Distributors catalog in the educational toys. I found dolls, action figures, puppets, costumes, a set of nesting/stacking blocks, magnetic play sets, and board games. All of these different means of teaching got me thinking about the variety of ways that I can reach my children while playing to their strengths. I have been thinking about how the toys could work to help my children learn important concepts. These ideas are great ways to work with kinesthetic and visual learners.

Improve Reading Comprehension: Dolls, action figures, and puppets can help with reading comprehension. Have your child retell stories using these props. You can use that as an assessment tool, too, because you’ll clearly see what your child understood about the story. Your children can also use costumes to act out scenes from books.

Reinforce Mathematics, Motor, and Language Skills: Stacking/nesting blocks teach your child about volume and ordering items from smallest to largest and vice versa. Also the conversations that you have describing the blocks and what you are doing with them will develop language skills. If your blocks have pictures on them, you can create stories or retell stories (particularly if your bloacks are related to a certain story such as Christmas). Stacking and nesting requires a fair amount of motor skills. The list goes on!

Reinforce Science Concepts, Language, and Motor Skills: Magnets are so much fun for children to play with. They learn about what magnets will and won’t “stick” to. Children can tell stories with magnetic play sets. Magnetic words can be used to build sentences, write poems, and learn vocabulary. The other great thing about these play sets is that they can be reused and no worksheets are required.

Build Memory Skills: Board games are fun, but they also have a repetitive nature to them, so they help you to memorize information without boring your child. It is also a great way to spend time with your child.

This unconventional inspiration has helped me to think outside of the box and meet my children’s educational needs better.

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