Schooling at Home? Here's a crash course.

There are many reasons you may need to temporarily school your children at home. You may have an extended emergency situation, due to natural disaster or community quarantine.  Sometimes schools are able to assist with materials and assignments, but what do you do if you're on your own?

You don't have to choose between letting your child play video games all day and fighting to make them do worksheets.  Learning can be fun!

Seasoned homeschoolers offer this advice:

1. DO NOT try to recreate the school atmosphere at home.  There is no need for a designated school room, a student desk, and certainly no need for endless seatwork.

2. DO NOT think your child needs to put in as many hours for home school as he would in a regular classroom.  Teaching a single child (or even three) takes far less time than it does to meet the individual needs of twenty or thirty children.

3. Enjoy the freedom to make your own schedule, and meet the needs of your own family.  Not every subject needs to taught 5 days a week, and many homeschoolers thrive on a 4-day schedule.  Unstructured "down time" is essential to children developing their own interests, creativity, and initiative.

You may have multiple children to work with, at different levels  That can be challenging, but doable.  The trick is to plan ahead so that one child's high-parent-involvement activity does not coincide with another's.  In other words, try to schedule your students' work so that one is doing something independently while you are working one-on-one with another.  It is often helpful to work with the neediest child first, and then get her started with something she can do independently before working with the next one.  Some group things, like a parent reading to the children, or making a batch of cookies, can be done all together.  Very little ones can play nearby in a secure and supervised area.

A variety of activities is recommended, in short segments. 

A planning template

Here is a typical planning template, and a sample filled out.  The sample is for an imaginary Mom who has a 2nd grade son and a preK daughter, but the principle of staggering the schedule is the same for older kids and multiple children, too.

The main thing is to plan ahead.  But "best laid plans" may often go awry, so keep a sense of humor and don't worry if only a fraction of your plans are accomplished.  The important thing is that you are together and interacting with each other.  Learning will happen!

A sample plan, filled out.  Color coding
makes it easy to see who does what.

If you don't already have a packet of materials from your child's school, there are still plenty of activities that can keep brains going. Here are a few home- and classroom-tested ideas to get you started, that require little or no advance preparation.

Language Arts

• Reading  If there are books at home, students can read aloud to adults, siblings or pets.  They can record themselves reading stories.  To help them process what they are reading, it may be helpful to ask questions about what the characters might be feeling, or what they might do next.  Older students can read and follow recipes or directions for crafts and other projects.  No access to a library?  Try online sources like these.
• Writing  Students can write stories, comic strips, or diaries.  They can start a blog.  They can write a letter to Grandma, directions for an activity, or ideas for an upcoming vacation.  They can copy poems and illustrate them.  They can write a play and act it out live, with puppets or with toys.  You might want to video the performance for later enjoyment.  Enchantedlearning.com has a wealth of reading and writing resources as well.
• Spelling/handwriting Have a family spelling bee; play a rhyming game; practice writing letters/words with fingers in a pan of baking soda, sand or flour, with fingerpaint, or in shaving cream smeared on a table top; form letters with play dough; write words outside with sidewalk chalk; spell words with magnetic letters on a cookie sheet.
• Literature  Reading picture books, short stories, poetry, and even classic children's novels aloud to your children can increase their vocabulary and attention span.  Tired of your old books?  Try some old classics like Anne of Green Gables from free ebook sites.   Listening to audiobooks is something the whole family can enjoy.  Librivox is a free resource for audiobooks that will play on your phone or laptop.

Math

• Number sense/Arithmetic  Many board games involve counting as the students move their markers around the board.  That counts as math for the younger set.
  
  Does your child need to work on addition or multiplication facts? Play a card game together: using a normal deck of cards, discard the face cards and deal out 5 number cards per player.  Choose a target number, such as "12," and play a Go-Fish style game where you form sets of cards that add up to the target number. Player with most sets of 12 when you run out of cards wins. Older students can make up more elaborate sets, using multiple operations, such as with cards 5, 8, and Ace: 5+8-1 = 12.
  
  If you have a foam number puzzle, let your little ones use the numbers and some washable paint to stamp each number, 0-10 or 0-20 (or further), onto a separate piece of paper and place them in order to make a giant number line.  Make a game out of it by having them roll dice or spin a spinner to add or subtract numbers, facing the higher end of the number line as they walk forward to "add" and backward to "subtract.".  Or make a smaller number line for Lego people or other small toys to "walk" back and forth on.
  
  Students can understand and practice place value by gluing dry beans onto popsicle sticks or strips of cardboard.  Have them make count out ten beans for each stick.  If you have enough beans, make 20-50 sticks so you can assemble some 100-bean squares: glue ten sticks, with ten beans per stick, onto a square of cardboard.  Then use the squares, sticks and beans to model 3-digit numbers: for example, show your child how to write "146" to represent one hundred-bean square, plus 4 ten-bean sticks, plus six loose beans.  Try different combinations of squares, sticks and beans.  Then see if she can make the correct model when you write the three digit number.  (To model addition or subtraction with regrouping, you simply build the given numbers and substitute ten sticks for a hundred-bean square, or vice versa, as needed.)
  
  Have students go with you to the grocery store and keep track of what is being spent.  At home, they can use a store circular or catalog to plan a shopping list within a given budget.  Let students follow a recipe to bake cookies from scratch.  Older students can test their understanding of fractions by doubling or halving a recipe.
  
  Measuring anything can be fun, too.  Have the kids guess how many units inches/feet/meters/centimeters, pounds/ounces/kilos/grams, quarts/cups/ounces/liters/mililiters (or whatever) something will measure, and then measure it. All the toys, or everything in the kitchen, or Dad's shoes. Or make the unit something silly, like the length of a coathanger or a doll's shoe.  How many doll-shoes long is your child's shoe?
  
  A clothes hanger, ruler or dowel, some wire or string, tape and paper cups could also become a balance scale.  You can find multiple YouTube tutorials for making one out of whatever you have.  How many paper clips will equal the mass of a grape?
• Geometry  Students of all ages can play with tangrams, making pictures out of different shapes.  Challenge older students to redesign a room in the house by measuring and drawing redesign a scale floorplan on graph paper and rearranging scaled cutouts of the furniture.
• Pre-algebra  Older students can make a number line using negative and positive integers, -10 to 10, and play a game as described above. For negative numbers, players must face the opposite direction, because positive and negatives are opposites.  So, if a player is on 5 and must subtract negative three, he first turns to face the negative (opposite) side of the number line, and then walks three steps backward to subtract, ending at positive 8.
  
  Use dry beans and plastic Easter eggs to help your child model and solve equations with variables.  For example, the equation 2x + 4 = 10, uses 20 beans and 2 eggs.  Each egg hides 3 beans.  Divide a piece of paper in half. On one half of the paper, place the two eggs-with-beans and four loose beans; on the other half, the remaining ten loose beans.  Challenge your student to figure out how many beans are in each egg, if each egg contains the same number of beans, and both sides of the paper have equal beans.  Show him how it can be proven by eliminating four loose beans on each side, and dividing the remaining 6 loose beans into two groups (of three beans) to match the two mystery eggs.  You can even read the equation, "Two 'eggs' plus four equals ten."  (The solution, then, is 'eggs' = three.) Make a game of it, having your student make up and model an equation, which you have to solve, and then switch.  

Science is all about observation and investigation.  Develop your child'd curiosity by using every day things as a starting point.

• Biology  Have students go outside and look for signs of spring.  They can record the daily changes in plants, observing the budding of leaves on a tree branch, or flowers blooming, and drawing what they see each day.  A dry, uncooked popcorn kernel, pinto or lima bean can be sprouted in a jar and measured each day.  Students can research plant growth and development in books or online.
  
  Do you know the parts of a flower, and how fruit is formed? Have your child study a flower from your yard and draw its parts.  Use books or online resources like this one to label the parts.
  
  Got eggs?  Have students investigate how eggs form in a birds body. Google "How does a chicken make an egg?" for several fascinating resources. Older students might learn how a fertile egg differs from an infertile egg, and how a chick develops in a fertile egg.
• Chemistry  Boil a purple cabbage.  The resulting colored water will change color in the presence of starch!  Drop it on bread, potatoes, sugar, salt, flour, cheese, cookies, meat-- which foods indicate starch?  Have students predict and test other foods.
  
  For older students: What happens when baking soda is mixed with vinegar?  Why?  What about lemon juice? Orange juice?  Buttermilk?  How is baking soda different from baking powder?  Why?  What is the purpose of baking soda or baking powder in a cookie or cake?  Why is baking soda + cream of tartar a substitute for baking powder?  Find a cookie recipe, such as peanut butter cookies, that uses baking soda.  What is the acid in the recipe that reacts with the baking soda?  Bake the cookies. Eat them.
• Physics  What makes objects float or sink?  Fill a sink or tub with water and challenge your children to predict, and then test, which of their (waterproof) toys will sink or float.  Can they make a paper boat that will float?  Can they take two identically-sized pieces of aluminum foil, and by changing their shape, make one sink and one float?  Try various designs of aluminum foil boats-- which shapes will hold the most pennies before sinking?  Why?
  
  Got Match Box cars or Hot Wheels?  How does the height of the car when it is released affect how far it travels down the track?
• Astronomy  Watch a sunrise and a sunset.  Why are they on opposite sides?  Chart the phases of the moon.  Stay up late and look at the night sky.  Use binoculars or a telescope.  Download a star chart app.  What constellations can you identify?  How do you tell a planet from a star?  What is the difference?  Which is closer?
• Geology  Start a rock collection.  How are the rocks different? What kinds are they? How did they form? What minerals can you identify in the rocks? Look at local land forms-- identify any lakes, mountains, streams, plateaus, plains.  For older students: What effects do the land features have on life in the area (water availability, mineral and other natural resources, what plants can grow, weather patterns). How does this affect people who might live in the area now, or how they lived in the past?

Social Studies

• Cultures  What traditions are important to your family?  Do you always have a particular dessert at birthdays, for example, or sing a particular song?  Investigate your family history.  From what places did your ancestors come?  What were some of the foods they might have eaten, languages they spoke, traditions they observed?  Do you continue any of these?  What are some of the cultures represented by the ancestors of other friends and family members?  When reading a book, watching a movie, even celebrating a holiday, students can learn about different ways people live and how traditions can be important to a larger group of people.
• History  If students have been reading anything (fiction or non-fiction) that has a specific time period setting, be it Little House, The Titanic or The Red Badge of Courage, they can investigate how people lived in that time period, what they ate, what they wore, how they got around.  They can make a time line to illustrate what was happening before, after, and during the events they are reading about.  Check out the link below for duckster.com for some great information and activities.
• Geography  If you have a globe or world map, children can use it to find the places they read about or  hear about on the news.  If you have both a globe and a map, they can compare the relative sizes of the countries.  See if they can explain which representation is more accurate. Using a globe or map, discuss how nearness to water, mountains, and the equator might affect weather patterns and/or lifestyles of the people who live in a certain place.
  
  Have students make a map of their neighborhood from memory, and compare it to the same area as shown on Google Maps.
  
  Older students can research and plan an imaginary trip to a place they would like to visit. (For more of a challenge, give them an imaginary budget!)  Here is a free website with fun interactive geography games.

Art

• Painting/drawing  Finger paint, watercolor, crayons, pastels, pencils, markers-- whatever they have-- let them create! There are drawing tutorial sites for kids here. Older students can investigate how to use perspective, shading, texture, proportion, and other techniques with YouTube channels such as Circle Line Art School.
• Sculpture  Play dough (homemade or store bought), modeling clay, Sculpey clay, play sand, cookie dough, mud, snow-- there are many things a child can use to create 3D figures.  Children can also design and build fun things out of boxes, paper, cans, foil, string, wire, tape, cotton balls, whatever is available.  Here is my favorite free-to-print papercraft site.  Mobiles and origami, sock dolls, puppets, and homemade paper dolls are other things to try.
• Art History Museums and libraries are the obvious places to look to investigate artists and art forms over the millennia, but online tools can be fun, too.  Students can investigate art from a certain location (Egypt, Texas, Congo, Australia), a time period (Middle Ages, prehistory, 1960's), or a theme (war, motherhood, landscapes, religion, science fiction, cowboys).  They might want to make a scrapbook of images, cover their walls in prints, write a report, make a time line, or record their own video lecture.  You can "visit" many museums through online virtual tours, and some even have pdfs of their collections  to print out and color.

Music

• Singing  Younger kids may enjoy learning folk songs, nursery rhyme songs, or any of the songs here.  And anyone can try their hand at writing new lyrics to a familiar tune-- funny words or serious, words that explain the latest science lesson or help them remember states and capitals.  Then stage a family sing-along challenge!
• Instrumental music  Make skakers out of cans or plastic tubs filled with rice/beans, tambourines out of pie plates or paper plates, drums out of coffee cans or oatmeal containers. Crank up some music and use the homemade instruments to keep the rhythm.  Fill several water glasses with different amounts of water and tap the glasses with a spoon to play a tune. Try out any instruments you have in the house-- toy piano, keyboard, recorder, harmonica, flute. Can you play a tune?  Older kids can try video tutorials such as YouCanPlayIt to learn new songs.
• Music appreciation Learning about musicians and music forms throughout history can be fascinating!  Students can investigate music from a certain location (Italy, New Orleans, Congo, American West), a time period (Middle Ages, 1920's, Renaissance), styles (jazz, blues, rock, Baroque) or a theme (movies, love, cowboys).  They might want to make a scrapbook of composers, cover their walls in sheet music, write a report, make a time line, or record their own music performance.

Physical Education

• Fitness  Ride bikes, jump rope, jump on a trampoline, play hopscotch, climb trees, climb on monkey bars, swing, dance, kick a soccer ball, run, walk, hike, swim.
• Fine/Gross Motor Skills  Shoot hoops, shoot marbles, play jacks, throw bean bags, play ring toss or horseshoes, build a fort.
• Teamwork/Rules  Play freeze tag, tug of war, board games, outdoor games with balls, indoor games with balloons, play tennis or badminton.

Click here for a huge list of free online resources covering prek-high school.
Duckster.com is a free, multi-subject educational site for kids.

Enchantedlearning.com has a boat-load of printables and other online resources.  Some of its site is useful even without a membership, but for full-time elementary homeschoolers, the additional resources are well worth the $20 membership fee.  It is offering free temporary access for students whose schools are closed due to the COVID-19 virus.

Educating your own children, or even helping them keep up with learning after you get home from work, may not be something you went to school for, but after all, you are the expert on your children, and one of their greatest advocates.  You may be more than ready to send them back to their classrooms when school resumes, but in the meantime, you can do this.   And have fun doing it!