Homeschooling Activities for Cheap!
One of my biggest fears when we began homeschooling was obviously the cost. Many people talk about how expensive homeschooling can be, and it is true, it can be pricey, but I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be!
After spending a TON of money on homeschool curriculum, I learned that there are cheaper and easier ways to get a lot of our schooling done. Since I have mostly little ones, there was little to no reason for me to be spending a fortune on curriculum that I honestly did not need.
my kindergartener needed literature, phonics, and math curriculum, but honestly for a lot of that and for everything else, I worked from scratch and ended up with something better than a lot of curriculums I had purchased for her for the year.
For our 2 and 4 year old, I didn’t use any curriculum at all.
Some of you may know that my kindergartner has ADHD and level 1 Autism. My 4 year old has level 1 Autism as well. My 2 year old is behind verbally at this moment in time. I have to get creative sometimes with their education. While my kids have some difficulties, they are mostly minor problems in our case, but I do have to take extra care to make sure they are in step with where they should be developmentally. This means that I have to get creative in the way I educate them.
Recently I took a whole day to work on review with my kindergartener, while also working on some new skills for my boys. This day I brought out some paper plates, markers, clothes pins, crayons, and blocks and got to work.
For my daughter, I put her math facts on the paper plates and she went around the house collecting items to match her fact, then she would shout the answer to the problem. Using small toys, she sat each one carefully on her plate and worked out her Plates were sat around our school room in a path formation, and if she wanted to make it to the finish line (or plate in this case) she would have to work hard to solve her problems in this hands on way.
Needless to say, she loved it. It was perfect for my busy daughter with a ton of energy! She was running from the playroom to the school room collecting the right number of items and then having me check her work to see if she could go in to the next plate. This has became a staple in our house now for review days!
For my 4 year old, I made plates with numbers and he would collect the right number of toys to put on each plate. My sweet boy is very literal and logical, so he did the numbers in order instead of following the path I sent for him. That ended up working really well for him because he got to test his knowledge of what number comes next during this exercise.
I also made an alphabet game for him with a paper plate and clothes pins. our 4 year old has a difficult time with his fine motor skills as well, so I thought pinching clothes pins to open them would be a great way to work his little hand and finger muscles. In this game, the paper plate would have capitalized letters along the rim, and the clothes pin would have the lower cased letters on the opening end. He would have to match the “baby letters” to the “daddy letters” by finding the matching pair and then pinching the clothes pin to clip them together. He loved this! And even though it was difficult for him to do, he did not mind because it was so much fun! We also did a variant of this game with his name, which he loved just as much.
For our 2 year old, it was a little harder to find something he enjoyed as much, since he cannot talk to us. I was able to find something that was a hit for him that he plays almost every week. I took his blocks, four paper plates, and some crayons and made him a fun color matching game. I colored the center of each plate with either a red, blue, yellow, or green crayon to match the colors of his blocks. I sat the papers and the block box in front of him, and told him to match the colors. Man, this was a hit! He sat for at least and hour matching all of his blocks the plate with the corresponding color. This game was a major hit and he loved being cheered on by his brother and sister!
While these are not our only homeschooling tools, I felt like this is a good example of how we can homeschool our kids for cheap (or free if you have all of the materials already)! I hope this tip gives you some ideas on how to help your child learn. If you have any homeschooling tips and tricks, I would love for you to share them with me down in the comments!
Love,
Katie
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