Tips & Tricks: Field Trip Fun

We have found an amazing homeschool group in our area that does field trips at least 1-2 times a month and weekly play dates. Thanks to our group we’ve gone to the zoo, Sea Center Texas and strawberry picking so far. I am even scheduling a new field trip to the local equestrian center so all the kiddos can learn first hand how a barn operates and the care that goes into having horses.

If you’re in a homeschool group, a good way to save money is buddy up with people who have memberships to where y’all are going. When we went to the zoo another mom got us in for free with her membership. Field trips don’t just have to be going to a place to learn about what they do. Homeschooling on the road can a mini field trip itself. Finishing up our first week of homeschooling this year we were actually at the beach. After completing school for the day our daughter got to go down to the shore for fishing, ocean views and sand castle building.

Some fun field trip ideas are:

Zoo
Beach
Recycling center
Post office
Dairy farm
Chicken hatchery
Crocodile encounter
Fire department
Equestrian center

I’m joining in with Timberdoodle’s Learning on the Go Blog Hop so be sure to check out what others do for more ideas. If y’all have any great ideas for places to go hit up the comment section.

Comments

Review: Geoboards

A fun way to help kids get great hand-eye coordination isn’t with Geoboards . I love that with these there are 4 boards included so you can use it with multiple students. The rubber bands are different colors and 2 different sizes. The pictures are fun, colorful and you get a bunch of them. My daughter really likes these. For some reason she thinks it’s so funny when the bands pop her. At first I just let her place the bands anywhere to get the idea of how to put them on. Then we started places them just on the white lines in the picture. She always wants to do more than one so I let her do as many pictures as she wants. I do wish there was a blanket picture so she could design her own things.

Tips & Tricks: Grading

When grading first thing you need to do is check your state laws on homeschool. Some states require you to keep record of your curriculum and and grading while some don’t. I do not have to keep any records or grading. Since I use Timberdoodle they have an awesome online scheduler that I use. It has all the curriculum that we use and in the check boxes I put the grades. At the end of each year I keep the scheduler pages so I have records. Below is how I grade things. I also do not show our daughter the grades or tell her them. I don’t want her to worry about getting a bad grade. When she’s in middle school and high school grades that’s when I’ll start letting her know about grade. My grading system: Pre-K - 2 Grade: she will not see the grade E: excellent; no extra work needed; 100-90% S: satisfactory; give a little extra work; 89-80% N: needs improvement; give a lot of extra work; 79-0% 3 - 5 Grade: she will only see letter grade if she wants to know her grade A: 100-90%

Tips & Tricks: Class Schedule

How do you make a class schedule? When do you do which subjects? How long do you do a class? Does each day look the same? It is easy to make a homeschool schedule since you can school however you like. Since we use Timberdoodle we have access to their online schedule which over the years has been updated to be an outstanding way to schedule our subjects. If you do not use Timberdoodle I would suggest using Excel. If you know a website that allows you to create a schedule (for free) then let me know in the comments. The first thing I do make our schedule is make a list of all of our items and mark which ones I think will be challenging and which will be easy. Core subjects would be harder than things like STEM and thinking skills. Then I use that list to make another list on what day we will do each item. Making sure that not one day will be to hard or to easy. I like it to be pretty even as well as each day having about the same number of items. Some subjects we do everyday those are E

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