Cindy’s Other Blog

When you decide to homeschool your child, you are committing to taking charge of your child’s education. There are many amazing benefits to homeschooling, but the responsibility and time commitment is significant as well. You probably need to spend a good amount of time planning lessons and units. A great way to end a unit is with a project. Projects help children sum up, review and implement everything they have learned.

Projects are not only an important part of any homeschooling curriculum, but they can also be lots of fun. Most people have fond memories of some of the projects they did during their school years. Homeschooling parents are always on the look out for wayt to implement and test the knowledge they have taught their children and projects are a great way to get this done. A good plan is to have a multi-week unit set up for a given subject, and at the end of the unit assign a week-long project that will put to use and implement what your child has learned.

Let’s look at one example of how to set and implement a project. If you’ve been working on a biology unit, a good project idea is to create an ecosystem in an aquarium. The goal is to create an environment that can be self-sufficient in the sealed aquarium. While learning about nature’s different cycles, encourage your child to consider the most effective way to create an ecosystem. After your child has hatched a plan and spent some time laying out the details in terms of materials, methods and so on, go to the store to buy the required project materials.

Projects like this have proven effective because they allow children to not only make use of the knowledge they have acquired but to also use their creative and organizational skills. Parents find it easier to capture their children’s attention with hands on activities such as unit end projects. Projects also help children recall facts and ideas from the unit and instil them in the memory more permanently.

You can also engage other family members on such projects. The ecosystem, for example, could be placed in a prominent location in your home where other family members will have a chance to observe it and provide your child with feedback on his/her hard work. Parents of children in public schools know how exciting it is when a child comes home with a project they just completed at school. Homeschooling parents enjoy the benefit of having ’school’ at ‘home’ and therefore watching their child’s excitement throughout all stages of a project.

Projects like the aquarium project can be an indispensable part of your child`s homeschooling education. Projects allow the child to not only make use of the knowledge they have acquired but to also use and improve their creative and organizational skills. Parents find it much easier to engage their children while working on projects. Projects will also help your child remember and sum all they have learned in a unit and come to realize that the knowledge they have obtained can serve a practical and useful purpose.