3 Top Tips to Help You Take Homeschool Outside
After being cooped up inside during a cold winter, you might be looking forward to spending as much time as possible outside once the weather improves. You are willing to do pretty much anything out of doors, including homeschool outside!
The catch is that there is still schoolwork left to do in your homeschool! The good news is that having schoolwork to do does not have to keep you indoors! Here are some ways to take your studies outside, adapt your homeschool schedule to allow for outside time, and plan your schoolwork based on outdoor time.
Tips To Help You Take Homeschool Outside:
1. Pack It Up
This is one of the easiest ways to take homeschool outside. When the weather gets nice, just pack up what you can and head on outdoors. It can be as simple as heading out to the backyard picnic table (or the front porch, or the back patio … you get the idea). You can also hop in the car and make your way to a local park or lakeside.
Just grab those school books and go! A lap desk might be helpful for your kids if you’re heading to a place that doesn’t have tables or desks available. In addition to your normal textbooks, you can plan outdoor learning activities. Here are a few ideas:
- Do some outdoor gardening with these 25 Creative Ways to Learn Math in the Garden.
- If you have young children in your homeschool, try an ABC Nature Walk Outside.
2. Plan Outdoor Units
When the warmer weather finally rolls around, it is a perfect time to include studies you can do outside with your homeschool class.
This might include things like:
Gardening
You can do so much with a unit study on gardening. Not only does it give you the chance to homeschool outside, but you can grow all sorts of things — from flowers to your own fresh greens — while teaching your kids about botany, ecology, responsibility, and the natural world.
Bird Units
Birds are some of the easiest creatures to study in nature as, no matter where you live, there are a variety of birds native to the habitat. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Nature Studies
You might not have the time or space to do your own gardening, but that doesn’t mean you can’t homeschool outside with nature studies!
Field Trips
And of course, a terrific way to take your homeschool outside is with a variety of outdoor field trips!
3. Lighten the Load
Another thing you might want to do is “cram” in your homeschool during the winter months. What this means is that you push through some of the more intensive subjects, the nuts and bolts, through the cold winter months.
This lightens your kids’ homework load when the weather grows warmer, and means you can enjoy more free time outside when the weather is nice. It is good, of course, to maintain a balance between work (including schoolwork) and “fun” times. This is why some homeschool families choose a year-round school schedule.
Of course, you want to do what works best for your family, kids, and homeschool. It doesn’t hurt to try different things, though, to find out what works and what doesn’t.
All the best as you find ways to take your homeschool outside this year!
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Featured Photo by Mikhail Nilov
Whenever warm weather starts coming our way, I list everything we can do outside. We recently took the kids to the trout nursery. We love to go to the creek to find tadpoles, frogs, and crayfish- that’s a science lesson in itself! We also head to the parkway often and have family fitness days, where we bring all sorts of equipment with us- hula hoops, soccer balls, footballs, jump ropes, etc. We can do anything we want there, as long as we’re moving. My 5-year-old was so funny the last time we were there because he found a toy gun that someone left there, and he spent the entire time running from tree to tree hiding from us because he was a “spy.” We also go to a beautiful park in the city that has a giant tree that the kids can sit in to read. We affectionately call it “our tree.”
I have been planning field trips for our co-op group to go on. There is a great community pool about an hour from us that has a winter dome they put up. I called and found out that we can have the entire pool for our group for the same price as they charge during regular pool hours ($2.25 each). So now once a month we all go swimming. I get the bigger kids and go to the deep end and we practice different strokes and floating techniques. We have gone to National Parks and local museums, school groups are free or have a very minimal charge. There is a Cowboy Symposium in October that celebrates the American cowboy, school groups are free and the SW Dairy Association provides free milk for all students. I would suggest that if there is not a co-op group in your area, consider getting together with fellow home-schoolers and getting a group organized. So far every place I have contacted that allows public school group in for reduced price or free, will allow home-school groups in for the same cost. We meet in the park when it is warm enough and might do leaf rubbings in the summer or discuss the skeletal structure with bones we have found from a mountain lion kill (also leads to a discussion of food chain and predators and outdoor safety in the woods). We are planning on going to a local trout pond this summer and the kids will get to catch their own fish and will also do a cooking lesson with the fish. The ideas are as endless as the warm days!