Taking your homeschool routine into the great outdoors is a fun way to mix up your routine. It breaks up the day, and it gives you and your child an educational experience with a breath of fresh air. It doesn’t just have to be recess, though. There are various activities you can do with your first-grader to bring homeschool outside.
1. Take Your First Grade Homeschool Work Outside
One thing you can do that is simple and fun is take some of your homeschool books outside and do some worksheets or read on a blanket in the backyard. If you have a picnic table, gazebo, or porch swing, these are also great places to set up a make-shift classroom. Reading books is one of the easiest lessons to make portable. Still, you could also take handwriting worksheets or whichever worksheets you don’t need a companion video or whiteboard explanation for outside.
If you feel elaborate, you could set up a laptop outside, and your students could watch their educational videos outside like an outdoor theater. Some examples of virtual video schools include DIY.org and Abeka Academy. You could also set up a device and have your student take a live class outside in the backyard through Outschool.
Portable, Mini Handwriting Book for Girls
This book is filled with unicorns and is the perfect size for taking on trips or outdoors to practice handwriting.
2. Do A Scavenger Hunt
You could always have a scavenger hunt if you want to bring nature into your homeschool routine instead of just setting up a make-shift outdoor classroom. Scavenger hunts can be formal with a printable scavenger hunt page where your first-grade homeschooler goes and finds everything on the list. You could also have a more relaxed scavenger hunt where you look for your top five most extraordinary things outside in your backyard.
Another example of a scavenger hunt is to make it scientific. If you are learning to identify different types of clouds or trees for your homeschool lessons, you could take a walk with your kids and see how many kids you can spot.
3. Explore a National Park or Local Outdoor Attraction
Speaking of walking, exploring a national or local park makes for a fun field trip. You could spot various monuments that are part of our nation’s history at the parks or even have the opportunity to attend a fun children’s program. Many national parks have kids programs at their welcome centers or other buildings.
4. Have a History Related Field Trip
Like the National Park tours, which could serve as either a historical or scientific field trip, you could take an extended field trip to a battlefield or another historical monument if you live near one.
5. Set Up A Field Lab
If you don’t feel like traveling, you could always get a national geographic kids microscope and set up a field lab in your backyard. The homeschool field lab works best with a picnic table or a hard surface to set up the slides, microscope, and other supplies. Your child can go around the yard and find cool items like leaves, grass blades, wings from bugs that have died, or other natural treasures. Then, you can set them up on slides and see what they look like on a microscopic level. It is the perfect outdoor science experiment.
6. Bust Open Some Geodes
National Geographic doesn’t just have microscopes for kids. They have a wide variety of other supplies too. One enjoyable thing you can do with your kiddos who love rocks is getting the National Geographic Geodes kit. It is a great science experiment kit with around ten geodes you can break open with a hammer. It also comes with a few stands to easily display the geodes in your homeschool classroom.
7. Start a Nature Journal
Journaling is relaxing. It is a great way to practice mindfulness and collect your memories in one consistent place. It is also an excellent way for kids to practice handwriting, sentence structure, and proper grammar.
M&D Co. has some entertaining journals for kids that work perfectly as nature journals. They have lined notebooks that your kids can use washi tape to tape in their natural treasures. Your homeschooler can also write with fun gell pens within the journals to capture stories about their day or describe the scenes around them.
5 Minute a Day Journal for Upper Elementary Age Kids
The 5-minute-a-day journal is a very simple way to encourage journaling if your child doesn’t like to write for very long. Each page has enough lines to write for five minutes a day. The front cover is a beautiful teal, and in Unicorn script it says, Dream, Inspire, Live.
3 Minute a Day Journal for Early Elementary Age Kids
The 3 minute a day journal is another great introduction to summer journaling. This journal is for kids who want to spend 3 or more minutes a day journaling to practice writing, sentence structure and grammar. The crisp lined pages are also great for using washi tape to attach things into the journal that you find outside.
8. DIY.org Nature Photo Walk
Do you have a DIY.org subscription? If not, you should get one for your child. They have really fun live and asynchronous classes for a modest price. One of the challenges on DIY.org is a nature photo walk, among other nature experiences. On your next hike, you could have your child bring along a camera and take awesome pictures of what they see instead of collecting them. This is a fun way to preserve the memories, especially if you are in a place where you cannot take nature home with you.
How to Bring Your Homeschool Routine Outdoors
There are a variety of ways that you can bring your homeschool routine to the outdoors. These include nature walks, field trips to historical sights and national parks, and simply going out into your backyard. You can also make it more elaborate by getting a national geographic kids microscope and setting up a fun field lab outside for the afternoon. The national geographic line is full of fun science experiments, but don’t stop there. If you like virtual experiences and live classes for your homeschooler, check out DIY.org. There are lots of fun outdoor challenges to participate in on the site to help you bring homeschool outside.
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