What are Your Ideas for Making this School Year Exciting?

So, What are Your Ideas for Making this School Year Exciting

and Different?

Here are some of my ideas:

Start a Nature Journal

Once a week go outside and study something in nature (We take Fridays for our nature study.) Give your kids a notebook with some blank pages, you may want to print out some free nature or animal pages also, and take one day a week to just go outside and see whats happening in your own backyard.

One year we studied spiders, and it was the best year of nature study we ever had! Spiders are everywhere and it didin't take the kids long to find 5 different types of spiders in our backyard. We watched them and even caught a few and learned so much through our own observation. We journaled everything in our notebook. Three years later my kids still love to get their spider notebooks out and read them to me or dad. That years is definitely remembered as our "Spider Year."

Use the internet to teach a subject

Something as simple as using the internet to teach or reinforce a subject can break up the monotony and bring new life to your classroom.

If you usually teach math or grammar from a textbook, why not take a semester and let your kids learn these subjects using an online program. If they like it then you might consider sticking with the program all year.

Using the internet to help teach your older students also frees up teacher time to work one on one with younger students.

Some other ideas are:

• switch up your subject order periodically
• Let your older students teach a subject to younger students one day a week
• Take a break from your regular studies and try a unit study for a few weeks
• Instead of having older students read silently, try reading a classic aloud to the entire family. This is a great opportunity to talk about elements of a story (setting, plot, characters) and have family discussion about the story...include dad too!
• If you've never notebooked a subject before...why not start now? Pick one subject and start a notebook for it.
• If you have used notebooking before, try taking a subject like math and notebooking it for a month. You will surprised of all the notebooking ideas you and your kids can up with for math.

Please Post your ideas in the comments section. I will include your ideas in my upcoming newsletter.