Fun Home School Projects

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When you decide to homeschool your child, you are committing to taking charge of your child’s education. There are many amazing benefits to homeschooling, but the responsibility and time commitment is significant as well. You probably need to spend a good amount of time planning lessons and units. A great way to end a unit is with a project. Projects help children sum up, review and implement everything they have learned.

Here’s an example of how to organize a project with your child. Let’s assume you’ve just finished a biology unit, a great week long project might be to create an ecosystem in an aquarium. The goal will be to create an environment that can be self-sufficient in the sealed aquarium. While learning about the different cycles of nature, encourage your child to think of the most efficient way to create the ecosystem. Your child can think of ways that nature is efficient and try to mimic these characteristics to create a sustainable and efficient environment.

Teach your child to spend a good amount of time planning before taking any further steps. Planning is often the part of the project children like to skip over or hurry along so they could get to the fun part. But teach your child the popular saying: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.“ Reinforcing the need to plan for a project will help your child establish this good habit for all future endeavours.

After your child is done detailing the plan, it’s time to gather the supplies. You child should have a list of supplies needed to put together the ecosystem. You can offer your child some assistance in setting up the aquarium but allow your child to do as much of the work on their own as possible. It much more useful for a child’s self-esteem to end up with a mediocre project they created all on their own, than to end up with a tidy and well done project that they know required someone else’s skills to pull off.

Once the aquarium is set up, have your child track progress everyday. This will help build observation and recording skills. You child can learn how to use different types of charts and graphs to keep track of the project results. It’s important to teach your child that projects require step by step work and for your child to eventually internalize these organizational steps.

Homeschooling families are not limited by the practicalities necessary in public schools. Project ideas can be as diverse and far reaching as your imagination. For each unit, encourage your child to brainstorm a list of long term project ideas based on what they have learned. Allowing your children to come up with their own project ideas will not only trigger their creativity, it will also make them feel like they have a say in their education. This will make them more enthusiastic and excited about their learning and make for a more successful homeschooling experience.