⭐️10 ways to make HOMESCHOOLING FUN!!! (For both YOU + the Kids!)

If you are feeling like your homeschool has gotten a little bit monotonous, I mean, dare I say a little bit boring? I know that is just like that is a four letter word to homeschoolers. But if you feel like that's where you're at and you are just looking for some ideas and inspiration to breathe a little bit of life and fun back into your homeschool, then stay tuned, because I have 10 things that you can do this year to make your homeschooling more fun. OK, first up is one that's probably going to be a little bit obvious to you. But it's field trips. The thing about field trips is they can feel very overwhelming to plan, depending on how many kids you have and how far away you live from different things that would be exciting. Or if you've got a lot of little kids that can be a little hard to manage, like trips to the museum and all of that kind of stuff. If you go on Pinterest and you type in virtual field trips, you're going to get tons of lists. I'll share a few of my favorites down below in the description box that you can click on to go check out. But I bet you didn't know that there are tons of places you can go virtually online with your kids like a field trip. So if it's too cold to go out, if it's too rainy, if it's too hot, whatever your family situation is kind of precludes you from loading everybody up and going out on field trips. Financially, maybe it's a strain. Virtual field trips are a great option and you can go to some really fun, exotic places, visit some cool animals, see things that even if you did have the time, you probably wouldn't be able to actually go and see these things with your kids in real life. So even though you're not actually leaving the house and going anywhere, it can definitely kind of satiate that desire for something new and different in your everyday day to day. All right. Number two is finding ways that you can make the actual things that your kids are learning or needing to learn more fun. That's where something like Night Zookeeper comes in. They are sponsoring today's video, and I am so excited to share with you guys about them. I secretly have been eyeing them online for quite a while. So when they reached out about partnering with me on a video, I was thrilled to jump on the chance to try this. And let me tell you, it did not disappoint. I'll be honest, I have never really used anything like this before. It's for six to 12 year olds, and it really helps them to improve their writing skills. And it is a full English language arts curriculum. But you can also use it as a supplement to what you're already doing, which is how we use it. And I think really, honestly, it is fantastic for struggling writers, hesitant writers, writers who maybe are a little bit insecure, lack the confidence. This is fantastic. My boys specifically, there's something about the graphics, the story they really like that really resonates with them. You're partnering with the zookeeper, the guy, you know, he's the night zookeeper and you're protecting the animals from the bad guys that are trying to come in. It's a whole thing. And kids freaking love it. OK, they love it. The graphics are great. The stories are great. It definitely goes far above and beyond any kind of like rote, boring type of textbook. It's really engaging. And I do have a link for you guys to use down below in the description box. That'll get you 50 percent off the annual membership. And you can also do a seven day free trial if you want to just try it out. Anytime I find a educational, you know, essentially like curriculum that my kids are asking to do, I'm I'm all in. OK, I'm all in. So it's a great way to breathe some new life into your child's writing curriculum, learning to write, learning to write stories. I love that you get feedback from tutors. So it's not just you helping your child. I love how the program kind of like directs them and corrects them without being too harsh. It's very it's not just like you got it wrong. It'll be like, well, don't forget to do this. Don't forget to add your punctuation. Don't especially give kids who forget punctuation. That was like my favorite part was that it's like, wait, you forgot punctuation. Thank you. Somebody else nagging them about punctuation. But it does it in such a fun way that the kids do not mind. And that kind of brings me to number three, which is to play more games. Game schooling is a thing. Y'all, it's a whole thing. Again, if you go to like Pinterest or something and search game schooling, you're going to find tons of ideas. I have a whole board on my Amazon shop, like a whole little section within my Amazon shop of our favorite games for game schooling. This is a fantastic. I'm telling you, some days it's like we're all just burnout. And I'll say, OK, we're going to do game schooling today. So that's where we pull out games from our game schooling collection and we play things that are educational. And I find that a lot of times it helps. It almost acts like cement, right? Taking those ideas that my kids have been kind of floating out around here, something they're learning and kind of brings them all together because it is very hands on practical usage of the things that they're learning. You as a mom can get burnout and feeling like you need more fun, too. So I always find that playing games with my kids, not only is it a great way to bond with your kids, to have fun, a little bit of that competitiveness and stuff. But when it's something educational, it obviously makes it even better. Right, because we're learning and we're playing. And what could be better than that? OK, number four is watch more documentaries and educational show type things. So I found this website, you guys, and I was so excited to share this with you. It's called Curiosity Streams, and it's basically a purely documentary site where you can stream documentaries about anything and everything. OK, anything and everything. It's got some of my favorites. There's like stuff from Jack Hanna and like people. You first of all, I love Jack Hanna. I watched him so much when I was a kid. But people you would recognize, they've sort of like curated all of these different documentaries in one place. So you're not having to filter through all the things on Netflix or Amazon and try to find good ones. They've got all the documentaries for you in one place. You can sort them if you're looking for things about animals or history. They have like a new tab on there called Crash Course, so you can click on that and go like psychology, biology, history of science, that kind of thing and do a crash course. Next up, go outside. Just go outside. Sometimes, especially as homeschoolers, we put expectations on ourselves that like everything we do has to be educational or we think like, well, everyone else is doing like nature study. So I've got together notebooks and watercolors and, you know, things so my kids can like smush the leaves and trace them. And we make it into a big thing. Sometimes it doesn't need to be that at all, at all. Just go outside. Get some fresh air. Get your kids some fresh air. Just listen and watch and discuss what you see, what you hear, what you smell, that sort of thing. It doesn't have to be this big planned out nature study experience and stuff. I mean, those are great and they are really fun. I believe me. They are very fun. But sometimes you see to throw your kids in the park, go to or don't throw them in the park, throw them in the car and take them to the park and walk around the trails or something and just see what you find. Right. So we if we do everything with so much intention, we leave no space in life for serendipity, for something random to happen. Right. For something, something completely out of the blue to come up, some topic or whatever. If we're trying to preplan every moment, you just don't leave any room for whimsy. Just trust me, OK? It's one of the things that has sparked the most interesting conversations and stuff with my kids is when I just see what happens. I know that's hard for some people, but sometimes it's fun to fly by the seat of your pants. All right. Next up is get in the kitchen and cook together. There's so many different things your kids can learn from cooking. It's so beneficial, not only for you, because then as your kids grow, they know how to cook and you can enlist kids to help make dinner. But then when they grow up and they move out, they're not one of those people who doesn't know how to do anything but put ramen into the microwave or cup of noodles into the microwave. They know how to actually make a meal and make a meal for themselves. You'd be surprised by how much turning on some music that everybody likes. I have a Pandora station. I think I've shared it before. I will share it down below in the description box. I call it my sunshine station. It is my feel good dance around in the kitchen with the kids kind of music like the song Walking on Sunshine is in there. Just songs that make us all feel happy. I love a lot of like oldies music and stuff. So I turn on my sunshine playlist. We might make some homemade bread. We might make some cupcakes. Heck, we just might make something from a box, too, OK? It doesn't have to get crazy, OK? You're still measuring. You're still doing things. You're still learning and having fun together and making memories. Those are the things that your kids are going to remember. Those are the things that they're going to hold on to. And those things matter. They might not be checking off boxes for curriculum, but they matter. And your kids are learning, even if they're not learning what you might be thinking in terms of like book skills. Right. They're engaging with you and their siblings. They're becoming more emotionally intelligent. We don't give that enough weight. Spending time with our kids, helping talk them through feelings and emotions and stuff, helping to make them more emotionally intelligent so they can deal with their own emotions and not ruin the lives of people around them because they don't know how to deal with their own emotions when they grow up. Right. That matters, too. We don't give that enough credit. OK, next up is add in fun elements like tea time. We like to do poetry, tea time, random sort of parties or celebrations for different milestones. It doesn't, again, have to be big. When I hear stuff like that, I can get very, very overwhelmed because I'm like, I already have enough to do. I can't add another. Look, I have eight kids to make birthday cakes for and birthday parties. And then you've got Jesus's birthday in December and I can't do another party or celebration in between. It doesn't have to be overwhelming. But maybe when you finish a read aloud book, maybe you do some kind of like little celebration, little book party. You don't have to go nutso with themed cupcakes and all that kind of stuff, though you totally can if you're into that. But even enlist the kids help in this to say like, let's have a party for finishing Mr. Popper's penguins. What should we do? You know, maybe some penguin crafts or something like that, or just go check out some books about penguins at the library and come back and read them together. Just finding little ways to include fun things. I think that's part of what at least I know. OK, let's just let's just caveat for one second. As someone who went to both public school and was homeschooled, I loved being homeschooled. But there was one thing that I always missed, and that was the fun random days at school where they rolled in the TV on that cart. You know what I'm talking about? You got so excited when the TV came rolling in on that cart and they popped that VHS in there and you watched, I don't know, reading Rainbow or something. OK, it was so fun just to do something different. Also, when you had like fun dress up days or celebration days at school, it just broke up the monotony. So even as homeschoolers, I think because we don't typically have as monotonous of days as kids do when they're in public school on the day to day, we think we don't need to do those kind of things. And you don't have to, but it can definitely help inject a little bit of fun into your homeschool to include some of those random celebrations and fun days. There are absolutely elements and things from public school that it's fun to bring into our homeschool and make them our own. All right. Next up is to get hands on. I say this is someone who is very resistant to lots of arts and crafts and things like that, even with certain lessons that my kids are doing when it's like, OK, now at the end of this lesson, cut out all this and blah, blah, blah. I'm always like, do we have to do that? Is that required? I'm not big on the arts and crafts stuff. It tends to be messy. It takes a long time. I got a lot to do. I got other kids to homeschool. I get a little bit about that stuff. But mixing in things that are more hands on, you'll find everyone will get bored, including you if you are just sitting and reading and doing workbooks all day long. We have loved adding in things like our metal science experiments, the Kiwi crates, their different crates that they have. There's a number of these kind of subscription boxes, and they're great to just have on hand so that when you've got that day where it's like everybody's kind of bored, what do we do? You can bring out something like that and you've got everything you need to do the project, everything you need to do the science experiment. It's all there. It's fun. It's different. Or like in my case, sometimes those become like dad things, right? Where I'm like, OK, mom has X, Y, Z, I need to do, but I need the kids to be doing something educational, whatever. Hey, dad, why don't you come do a metal science experiment with the kids? And they're like, OK, great. And then they have fun. They light things on fire and blow things up and not really. But you know what I mean? They have fun with chemicals. And I get to check off some other things on my to do list that have to get done. Adding in things like that, hands on things can be a great way to inject a little more fun. OK, next, let your kid choose. Let your child choose something that they're really interested in to learn more about. Now, maybe that's your natural way of homeschooling, especially if you like lean towards more unschooled. You're like, duh, that's what we do every day. But for the rest of the people, sometimes it's not right. We because you've got so many kids, you've got something going on. It's like we've got to do these things. And we forget sometimes to like lean into our kids natural interest. What sparks their imagination? Because those are the things that they're really going to learn and they're really going to remember when they have some kind of investment in it. So asking them or just taking note of something that you see them having some interest in and being like, hey, bud, would you like to learn more about that? Yes, sure. Great. OK, let's go find some documentaries. Let's go to the library and find some books. Let's get online and search for some other things. Maybe there is some kind of like field trip you could do in relation to that or something along those lines, you know, but kind of trying to take some time to carve out what are your kids interested in learning a little more about, even if it's not educational necessarily? Does that make sense? Even if it's something that you think like, well, what do you want to know more about that for or what? Even if it doesn't interest you. I hate to say this, but your feelings don't matter. They do and they don't. You know, if it's something that you're like, oh, no, you know, we're not going to learn more about OnlyFans. But if they want to learn more about animation, right. And you're like, well, I mean, you're eight. You're not going to be an animator tomorrow. Do some digging, see what you can find and help to foster your child's interest. That will make homeschooling more fun for them, which in turn will make it more fun for you, because that's less you're dragging people along and more. You're just kind of being the bumper and guiding. OK, and the last thing is to think outside the box. I do think, again, we get very stuck in thinking that, OK, we have to do our reading, we have to do our writing, we have to do our mathematics, we must do history and then we must do science and we must do. And we get very like stuck in this mentality of this is what school and this is what's not school. I think that there are so many benefits, again, to homeschooling. It frees up so much time to learn about so many different things. We've talked about this before in terms of like life skills that your kids need to learn before they move out of your house. Thinking outside the box to start working on some of those. It doesn't sound exciting, but there are ways to kind of incorporate that. And remember that education and learning really for kids is happening all day, every day. That's just the way that their little brains work. They're little sponges. They are soaking everything up, just thinking outside the box about what you view as typical educational things and perhaps kind of change the way you're viewing certain things that maybe your kids are interested in or that they want to do and see if you can figure out what's educational in that that you can kind of like lean on or push on instead of saying, well, I don't think that's educational and just brushing it off and going back to like strictly workbook, bookwork kind of stuff. Hopefully you understand what I'm trying to say there. But just thinking outside the box to all the different types of things that can be educational and including those in our homeschool to keeps it fun and exciting for our kids and for us. I hope you guys enjoyed today's video. I hope that you found something in here that you can implement into your homeschool to keep it fun and exciting in this coming school year. Remember that one of the biggest benefits of homeschooling is all of the options, all the things that we can choose to put in or take out to make our days simpler and give us more time just for rest, just depending on where you are in life and where your kids are in their educational journey, there's so much flexibility in homeschool. And that is what I love about it so much. So everything that I mentioned is linked down below in the description box. That is it for me today, y'all. And I will see you again very soon. Bye.