Ideas For Taking the Classroom Outdoors

Outdoor Class (Photo: Conservation Commission)

by Harvey McEwan

Many children learn better with the help of practical exercises and experiments. Through tangible demonstration and participation, concepts become clearer and theories finally make sense.

Kids love experimenting indoors, but taking the classroom outdoors is an even better way of ensuring they enjoy the learning process. Weather permitting, head outdoors to the school yard or playground to teach subjects such as science and art.

Creativity

In a way, teaching art within the classroom is putting children in a box, making them rely on the materials available. Outdoors, this box is much bigger (though a safe environment cannot be limitless). Encourage creativity by teaching art outdoors.

Children could be making collages out of leaves, sticks and rocks, or designing jewellery. Let them collect their own materials both in the school yard, and by asking them to bring some along from their own gardens or parks they've visited with friends and family.

Energy and Sustainability

Our current dependence on unsustainable natural resources to feed our growing energy demands needs to be combated. While governments are gradually beginning to invest in sustainable power production, awareness among citizens is still low. For the industry to develop faster, society needs to put pressure on its elected rulers.

If children are equipped with this knowledge and awareness at a young age, they will take care of teaching their parents and their own children, and so it is passed on from generation to generation in an unforced way, and becomes intrinsic to general social awareness.

Science education is one of the best ways of fostering awareness with a hands-on approach. By performing experiments, building tools and devices, and playing science-related games, children learn to appreciate the world, how it works, and how to look after it.

And where better to learn than in the great outdoors where there is unlimited space, fresh air, and tangible substances that form the world as we know it. Outdoor lab ideas that focus on sustainable energy include building a solar cooker. This is an activity made for middle and high school students. Ask the school cook to donate some food for cooking in the sunshine.

Another idea is to speak to the school principal about turning the school playground into a temporary power station. Let the children create energy on the swings, see-saws and merry-go-rounds.

You could also gather outdoors to produce fruit batteries. One of the most common fruits for the challenge is the lemon. The teacher will need to bring some elements from the classroom.

Visit websites such as PlanetSEED for detailed instructions on taking your classroom outdoors to learn science.

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Homeschool Record Keeping Strategies

Three ring binder (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Armond K Joseph

Although there are a variety of different methods for keeping track of your homeschool experiences, most homeschool parents can be classified as either tubbies, cubbies, or binder queens.

While those descriptions might make you laugh, they're really pretty accurate! Which one do you think you are?

Tubbies are people who have a giant rubber-made tub, and everything in their entire homeschool goes in there.

Tubbies put all of their homeschool records into the tub for all of their children for all twelve years of school. This is a perfectly acceptable method of record keeping. If you have a box and fill it up, you can recreate a lot of your homeschool work when it comes time to make records and transcripts.

Then there are homeschoolers who are cubbies. They have cubbies with drawers, and each drawer is used for one child for one year. This record keeping has the advantage of knowing things like whose test is whose, and is a good way to keep things straight amongst multiple children.

The third kind of homeschool parent is the binder system parent, which is the method I used. Treating the binder system as a hobby, like scrap booking, may make it a little bit easier to wrap your mind around it. It's the same strategy, where each section is labeled and you put things where they belong.

The joy of a binder is that you will know what you are missing.

When you throw things in a tub or a cubby, you know what you throw in there. But when you throw things in the binder and each section is labeled, you will eventually realize if you have nothing in one subject - say, Math. The joy of the binder is that it will tell you what you don't have.

There is a fourth kind of record keeping, and it is (sadly) for people who don't have a clue. These are people who have no idea that any records are going to be required, or who don't have any idea that they're going to need to make a transcript.

This record keeping strategy does not work; people using this strategy have done crazy things like forget that they did four years of Latin. This strategy leads to no college scholarship money, and sometimes even no college admissions.

But there's hope! Move up the food chain! If you have been a tubby, move up to become a cubby. If you've been a cubby, try your best to become a binder queen. Each year try to get better and better at your record-keeping, so that by the time you are ready to make a transcript with your senior or junior, you'll be perfectly able to do that and not be nearly as stressed! What are you waiting for?!

Realize more about homeschooling. Have a look at their website, where you can get enough details on home school programs that may helps you to understand more about your children's education and learning.

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