BJU Press Blog

Harvest Themed Homeschool Activities

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harvest themed homeschool activities
What’s not to love about fall? Cooler weather, colorful leaves, apples, and pumpkins are the perfect inspiration for harvest-themed homeschool activities you can enjoy with your family. It’s an ideal season for both indoor and outdoor creativity, so here are just a few ideas to jumpstart your fall plans.

Crafts

Pumpkin Carving

Probably the easiest one to start with is pumpkin carving—a classic harvest tradition. What’s great about it is you can carve just about anything you want into your pumpkins: family initials, leaf shapes, animals, words, etc. If you don’t relish the thought of taking out the insides of pumpkins, you could simply use craft paint to create all sorts of fun designs and pictures on the outside instead of carving them. (Tip: I’ve tried the pumpkins made of foam; they are just as fun to carve and a lot less messy!)

Acorns

Last year, our daughters came up with their own fall craft. We have oak trees behind our house that drop loads of acorns on the ground. Our girls decided to collect acorns and paint them, and in a couple of weeks we had a bowl full of colorful acorns. The girls had fun experimenting with colors and designs. They painted stripes, polka dots, and swirls on the acorns; they painted faces on some of them and made others that looked like bees and ladybugs. It was an easy, cheap activity that provided hours of amusement!

Preserving Leaves

Another popular fall craft is preserving leaves, and this is a simple one to do with younger children. There are several methods, but perhaps the best one for preserving leaves the longest is by using glycerin. You can find it at health food and craft stores or online. Mix a solution of one part glycerin to two parts water in a shallow pan. Place the leaves in the solution and place a heavy pan or dish on top to completely submerge them. Then all you have to do is wait two or three days; by then the leaves should be supple and soft. If they’re still dry, leave them in the solution for another two to three days. When they are pliable, remove them from the pan and gently pat them dry.

Outdoor Homeschool Activities

Nature Walks

A great way to take advantage of cooler fall weather is to take a nature walk with your children. Engage them by asking questions about the different things you see. For example, “Why do the leaves change color and fall?” or “How do we know that fall will continue to come every year?”

Nature Scavenger Hunt

Another enjoyable outdoor activity is a nature scavenger hunt. My husband and I have made a list of several items for our daughters to look for in the woods, including yellow flowers, mushrooms, butterflies, pine cones, moss, a red leaf, a unique rock, and any animal that lives in the woods. The goal is to find as many of these things as possible, and it’s fun to search for them as a family.

Hopefully these are some homeschool activities you can use to create your own special fall family memories!

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Jennifer is a pastor’s wife and mom of two young girls and loves homeschooling them. During her own twelve years of being homeschooled, Jennifer developed a passion for reading and writing. She earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and relishes writing during her free time.

Tips and Tricks for a Successful Homeschool

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tips and tricks for successful homeschooling
One of the most common questions homeschool families have is, how do you stay organized? Homeschooling involves so much, and you can’t store all of it in a bin at the end of the day. Finding a method of staying organized can be key in reducing stresses you don’t need. But figuring out how to get yourself organized can be a lot like choosing a curriculum and homeschooling style. What works for one family may not work for you. We’d like to offer both experienced and new homeschool families a collection of tips, tricks, and techniques to help you be successful and stay organized in your homeschool.

Tips and Tricks for Your Homeschool Room

If you have the room to spare for a dedicated homeschool room, organization can be a lot easier. Your curriculum and supplies always have a room to go to.

  • Fill it with shelves. There’s no such thing as too much shelf space.
  • Always return supplies to the room. While you and your children should be able to take your work elsewhere if you need to, it will be better for your sanity if you make the expectation that all curriculum and supplies that leave the room return to it. Some parents put baskets out in common areas where items collect, and each basket belongs to a different room. At the end of the day, the baskets return to the rooms they belong to. The next morning, you and your children unpack them and return the baskets to the common areas. As they say, “a place for everything and everything in its place.”
  • Give your children separate workspaces. If they habitually distract each other, help them to minimize their distractions. You can separating their workspaces, give them desks at different walls, or by put screens or barriers between them.

Tips and Tricks for Workstations

If you have the space and prefer your children to spread out to do their work, workstations might be a good alternative. Their workstations are their desk area where they always do their work. The workstation can be in their bedrooms, a corner in the living room, an office space, or any open space where a desk will fit.

  • Make sure each child’s station is equipped with the appropriate supplies and has space for all curriculum, binders, notebooks, and devices.
  • Set up a central area. This area serves as both a resupply station and a place where they can find you if they need help.
  • Watch out for increases and decreases in productivity with workstations. It may seem counterintuitive, but at times, children can be more focused and productive when they’re working around others. Isolation isn’t always good for a child’s productivity. Studies in psychology explore social facilitation, which is the phenomenon of a person being more productive in the presence of others.

Tips and Tricks for Wherever the Books Fall

Many homeschool families find that, either because of the space available or just because of personal preference, it works best to just homeschool wherever the books happen to fall. They may be at your dining room or kitchen table, the coffee table, or in all separate directions. And the location can even change from day-to-day.

  • Mobile storage units are your friend. If your homeschool space changes every other day, setting up a storage unit that you can roll around will help you stay organized. A rolling book cart can transport all your curriculum, while a rolling set of storage drawers can store supplies.
  • Set up a central area for resource storage. Even if your children prefer to go their own way, your books and supplies still need a home when they’re not in use. This home could be some bookshelves in the living room or a repurposed hutch in the dining room.

Tips and Tricks for the Books

One of the biggest parts of your homeschool is your curriculum—your textbooks and resources. How can you make your day-to-day with them a bit easier?

  • Label the spines of spiral-bound books. If you use printed teacher editions or resources that use a spiral binding, your life will be much easier if you can aesthetically “label” their bindings. We’ve used simple luggage tags for office copies, but you can also use colored ribbons, keychains, or even paint to make your teacher editions and spiral notebooks stand out on your shelves. If you associate colors with subjects—like green for science, red for math, purple for English, etc.—it’ll be much easier to know which book is which without taking it off the shelf to see the cover.
  • Pull out activity pages and worktext pages yourself. BJU Press activity books and worktexts in Grades 3 and under aren’t designed to be used with the pages still in the books. They use a hinge binding so the pages can be easily removed from the book. Children who are still mastering handwriting skills need to write on flat surfaces rather than on books with spines that cause part of the page to curve. Also, if you take out the pages you need instead of giving the books to your children to use, the remaining pages will stay together much better.

Tips and Tricks for Keeping Resources

Often it is wise to keep as much as possible in your homeschool journey. Whether you’re saving for memories or preparing for another child, those resources can be invaluable. But sometimes the space just won’t allow you to keep an abundance of resources. How do you decide what to keep and what to discard?

  • Check for updates. If the resources you’re using this year are about to be updated, it’s possible that the worktexts and other consumable materials may not be available when you’re ready to use them again. If you reach out to the BJU Press Homeschool Facebook page, we’re always willing to let you know what updates are coming and what that may mean for the resources you currently have.
  • Build a homeschool portfolio. Some states require you to create a homeschool portfolio, but a portfolio is also a convenient and simple way to store homeschool memories. And you can do it throughout the year so it’s not a big project at the end of the year. Most portfolios are either in a three-ring binder or an accordion folder. For state use, your portfolio should include standardized test scores, sample assignments (graded) from each subject, graded tests, graded essays and their associated rubrics, and project pages, notes, and their associated rubrics.

No matter what happens during your homeschool journey, one thing that you should always remember is that the cleanliness of your home has nothing to do with your success as a homeschool parent. Some days you’ll need to prioritize learning over making sure your toddler managed to put all her toys away. And some days you’ll just need to be a parent instead of a teacher. You’re still an amazing parent—even if no one has swept the floor and toddler toys are on almost every visible surface—because you’re homeschooling.

When Homeschooling Gets Hard

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don't quit when homeschooling gets hard
Some days, I’m not sure that I can do this homeschooling thing. Some days, I want to quit.

Homeschooling is really, really hard. It might not look hard when you are browsing curriculum catalogs or listening to a veteran homeschool mom on a podcast. But just about any homeschool mom has had the moment—the moment when the task of homeschooling is so overwhelming that she wants to quit entirely. I’ve had that moment. I’ve had many (hundreds?) of those moments. But before you give up homeschooling, consider the following.

Take time to remember why you are homeschooling in the first place.

There are a lot of different reasons why families choose to homeschool their children. Some of you may be homeschooling right now in order to give your children stability in this uncertain time. Some of you may be homeschooling because of health reasons. Or some of you might be homeschooling because of dissatisfaction with the government school systems. Your choice to homeschool was a brave one, and more than likely, it’s still the best choice you could have made.

When I am feeling discouraged about homeschooling, I often think back to why my husband and I decided to start homeschooling four years ago. We had some great schooling options at the time, but my husband and I chose homeschooling because we felt that homeschooling would give us the best opportunity to instill in our children a biblical worldview. We still feel that way. So whenever I feel like giving up, I encourage myself with the fact that the big thing I am doing—instilling in my children a biblical worldview—is really, really worth doing.

Take time to remember the end goal of homeschooling.

I think homeschooling is a lot like exercising. The individual workouts can be brutal. How many of us really want to do those last two minutes on the treadmill? I know I definitely don’t. My whole body screams in protest. But I run those last two minutes because I know that in the end, the hard work will be worth it. My body will grow stronger.

It’s that way with homeschooling too. Individual days can get really discouraging. Like the day not too long ago when one of my children cried her way through her science test. Or the day when we spent way too long struggling through a math page. Days like those can make us feel like failures. They can make us feel completely inadequate for the task of homeschooling. They can make us want to quit. But we endure those rough homeschooling moments because homeschooling is worth it. Our children are getting the best education that we can give them.

Take time to count the homeschooling wins.

Even in the rough days, there are some bright spots. We just tend to focus so much on the bad moments that we overlook the good ones. For example, on the day my child cried through her science test, that same child took the initiative to do an extra, unassigned math page to be “extra prepared” for an upcoming test. That was definitely a big win. And that day when we spent a very long time struggling through math? There was a big win on that day too—my reluctant reader really got into her reading lesson that day and didn’t want to stop.

There may be a lot of homeschool wins in your home that you have been overlooking. Take the time to count them up. Homeschooling is probably going a lot better than you think!

Take time when considering if you need to make adjustments to your homeschool.

This step is last for a reason. Some homeschoolers, when going through a time of discouragement, will try to make dramatic changes in their homeschool. They will buy an entirely new curriculum if they feel like their current choice isn’t working. That “fix” doesn’t usually end up really fixing the problem, and it can cause a lot of instability in your homeschool.

Small adjustments to your homeschool can often make a big difference. For example, I have one child who is very easily distracted by others. So a few weeks ago, I started having her do her school in a separate (but adjacent) room from my other two children. She can focus better, and her schoolwork has improved. Another adjustment we made this year was with our routine. My children prefer to do their favorite subjects first and leave the hard ones for late in the day. This year, my husband and I encouraged them to tackle the hard courses first thing in the day while their minds are the freshest. That simple change in routine has helped them do better in those challenging subjects and has helped us finish our homeschool day earlier. It was definitely a win-win!

A word of encouragement…

If you are homeschooling for the very first time this year, take heart. It does get better! The first year of homeschooling is extra challenging because both you and your children are learning how to make homeschooling work for your family. If you are feeling really discouraged and need some help navigating these first few months, please consider reaching out to your local Homeworks consultant. Chances are, she’s had some of the very same challenges, and she stands ready to help you.

Finally, I want to share one of my favorite verses that helps me when I am feeling discouraged about homeschooling or a myriad of other things.

1 Thessalonians 5:24: Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.

The Lord will be faithful to you, and He will help you with this very important and very wonderful task of homeschooling your children.

21st Century Skills and 21st Century Homeschooling (Part 3)

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creating a 21st century homeschooling experience
The Actual 21st Century Homeschooling Part

Homeschool families have known for years that the traditional model for teaching children used in most public schools—reading, lecture, homework, repeat—simply doesn’t work for all children. This model produces students who are good at following directions and taking tests, but not at thinking for themselves. That’s why educators push teaching 21st century skills—the learning skills, the literacy skills, and the life skills. These skills, practically applied to the teaching process, produce a very different model for learning. It’s more than a departure from reading, lecture, and homework. It’s a restructuring of the entire system to make teaching these skills possible. And in your homeschool, you have every advantage in producing a learning environment that supports teaching any skill you want. In fact, you’re likely already well on your way to 21st century homeschooling.

Schools are often locked into one structure or system by the expectations they have to meet. You can forget those expectations and focus on teaching your children how to be better servants. You’re not chasing after grades or test results. You’re preparing your children for the rest of their lives in the 21st century. So how do you do that?

By giving them opportunities to practice the skills.

Practicing and Applying the Learning Skills

The learning skills are the skills that are most strongly supported by your homeschool curriculum. With that support, they’ll often be the easiest to practice. But just because plenty of opportunities to practice a skill exist doesn’t mean the skill itself is easy. Some things may come naturally, but others will take time and effort. Your children need to use the opportunities they have to develop the skills appropriately. Does that mean you have to make sure your children are doing every activity you come across? Does it mean requiring them to answer every essay question?

No, but it is important to make sure that your children do as well as they can on the activities they do work on. The process of developing the learning skills and encouraging good learners is just as much about developing perseverance, determination, and confidence as it is about the work itself.

Practicing and Applying the Literacy Skills

Because of the expense and unease often connected with using skills related to technology, you may hesitate to offer your children opportunities to use them. As you prepare your children for using and applying these skills, focus on preparing them to be wise about technology. They should know the dangers of using technology as well as the benefits of using technology properly. Most importantly, your children need to see you demonstrating in your own life the same wisdom and expectations with technology that you set up for them.

When you do give your kids opportunities to use technology skills, be present, be available, and start small. I remember in college, my freshman English classes required us to format our papers in specific ways. It wasn’t until I was teaching the same course several years later that I realized it wasn’t about making sure papers were pretty and legible. This requirement gave students a reason and an opportunity to learn about their word processors so they could match formatting requirements in future classes. It was a small start, but it helped.

Practicing and Applying the Life Skills

The life skills are so named because they come from life. These skills teach children how to be successful in their own lives. You can help your children practice and apply these skills by involving them in your life. Teaching life skills includes showing your children how to cook, clean, and do their taxes, but it also lets them see how you make decisions and interact with other people. As your children grow and learn, you can involve them more and more in your day-to-day life and work. Eventually, there will come a point when they will be able to take responsibility for their education and will be ready to make choices that will impact their futures. If they have been living your life with you, they will likely be more prepared to make wise and fruitful decisions for themselves.

With these 21st century skills, homeschooling families are often already ahead. There’s no place like home for teaching your children and preparing them to serve Christ, their families, their communities, and their employers.

Creative Thinking: Connecting the Dots

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boy reading in hammock for creative thinking
My best friend has always insisted that she is not creative. It’s true that she doesn’t gravitate toward crafty projects. But scrapbooking and making art are not the only ways to be creative. Creative thinking is being able to use what you already know to solve a problem you’ve never seen before. And my friend does that all the time as a doctor in the emergency room. Medical doctors need a strong knowledge base. But they also have to be able to connect that knowledge to the patient sitting in front of them.

Is creative thinking an innate skill, or can you teach it to your children? God, the most creative thinker, made us in His image. Therefore, we all have the potential to think creatively. You can help your children learn to connect prior knowledge to new problems. Here are some ways to instill creative thinking.

Add variety to the learning environment.

You have probably designated a place in your home for learning. The benefit to learning and testing in the same place is that it aids memory and recall. However, varying the environment strengthens the ability to apply knowledge in a new context. Homeschooling allows more opportunity for changing the learning environment than traditional classrooms can. Using a variety of teaching methods also promotes creative thinking. Use analogies in your teaching to connect new concepts back to what your kids already know. The variety of environments and methods promotes a variety of mental connections.

Ask open-ended questions.

Before teaching new content, ask questions like, “Since you know seven times five, how would you solve seven times six? What would you try first?” Notice the hint about what prior knowledge will be helpful to apply. The hint gives your children confidence, when faced with a new question. Asking what they would try first, implies that they may need more than one try to solve the problem. Even outside of school, you can entertain open-ended questions that begin with “What if.” Ask your children to think about what they would do in different scenarios, realistic or imaginary. What if we are on a field trip and you can’t find me? What if you could have any superpower you wanted? Let them imagine scenarios they have not encountered by thinking creatively.

Have them explain in their own words.

Ask your children to describe what they have learned recently to Grandma. You can also ask them to teach a younger sibling what they have learned. They will have to know it well enough to use their own words and make it simple. Even an above average student will benefit from study groups. Explaining content to others helps move that knowledge from short-term to long-term memory. The better they remember information, the more likely they will be able to connect that knowledge to new areas.

Encourage collaboration.

Your children may be able to collaborate on some problems at home. If not, be sure to include interactions with other children in your schedule. Giving kids projects to work on together can increase their confidence when they don’t have all the answers. Connecting with people who think differently broadens the scope of their thinking. Working in groups gives kids confidence to think creatively on their own. At the park recently, I saw a group of Boy Scouts tying knots together. The next time one of them needs a knot, what will he do? He will remember that collaboration and connect the dots from what he learned then to the new problem he faces.

Practice.

After teaching in a way that promotes creative thinking, be sure to practice. Thinking creatively is not limited to science and math. Any subject will do. Like any skill, getting better at creative thinking comes with more practice. Inevitably, your children will be unsuccessful. They may not be able to connect to prior knowledge at first. Some kids will be frustrated when solutions are not easy to find. The word “yet” is valuable. When your child says, “My idea isn’t working,” you can add, “yet.” When she says, “I can’t do this,” again you add, “yet.” Talk to your children about times when you had to try again and again. Remind them that a solution that doesn’t work is useful. You know what won’t work, and now you can try other possibilities. Thomas Edison is credited with saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Kids and adults can learn to think creatively with intent and practice. If you’re hoping to teach your children to think creatively, what would you try first?

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Valerie is a wife and a mother to a very busy toddler. In her free time she enjoys reading all kinds of books. She earned a B.S. in Biology from Bob Jones University, minoring in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Ohio State University. Valerie has 15 years of experience working in research laboratories and has coauthored 8 original research articles. She has also taught several classes and laboratories at the high school and college levels. She currently works as a Data Analyst and a freelance writer.