Healthy Activities
& Fun Ways To Learn

I know you've heard this before: "Mom, I'm bored!" I would also bet that there have been many times you needed to keep your children busy with something while you were close at hand working on something else. Here is a list of educational activities for individual or multiple children.

Activities for Several Children to do Together

• Drill flash cards with each other
• Build dioramas
• Make map games or work with maps
• Toss the globe
• Spin the globe and let the child's finger land blindly on a place. Have them find out a bit about it and write a report
• Act out a story
• Make up a story/song/poem and tape recording it
• Stories/books on tape
• Put on a puppet show
• Play with educational toys
• Board games

Brain Quest -- Know the States

How well do you know the states? Well, you're about to learn all about American geography and culture in a really fun way! With questions designed by grade level, children from 3rd grade - 7th grade can all play this game together on a level playing field. Players move around the map game board and answer questions about cities, states, lakes, rivers, oceans, national parks, crops, industries, and more. When they answer a question correctly, they'll earn that state's flag. The first player to collect 6 state flags, wins the game. It's an exciting and educational trivia game that makes learning USA geography lots of fun! Comes with 440 Questions, Game Board, State Flag Tokens, Score Cards, 4 Pawns, Die, and Game Instructions. For 2 or More Players, Ages 8 and Up. More...

Fun Ways To Learn Math Facts

• Play Multiplication Football: Have children toss a football back and forth with someone who already knows their multiplication tables. Whoever is holding the football should call out a math multiplication problem before tossing the football. For example, call out "12 times 12" before tossing. The catcher has to answer correctly -- 144! -- before the football comes back to his hands.
• Have children make their own flash cards.
• Have drills with flash cards.
• Do daily problems from a book of just general math tricks and fun. A good one is Self-Working Number Magic: 101 Foolproof Tricks (Dover Books on Mathematical and Word Recreations).
• Visit our math page for more math ideas and math acronyms.

Self-Working Number Magic

Activities for Individual Children

• Read a certain amount per day from the encyclopedia
• Worksheets
• Read, then write a book report
• Print pages from websites for children to make their own books
• Make lap books from topics of their own interest. (The older children can also help the younger ones with this.)
• Build dioramas. (Collect shoe boxes.) Portray historic events, geographic place, social vista, office building, apartment building or town!
• Brain Quest decks
• Independent reading
• Computer games/computer typing (set time limit)
• Educational videos
• Independent art projects (things like Draw Write Now, etc.)
• Listen to educational tapes such as Lyrical Life Sciences, History Alive, math facts, great books on tape, etc.
• Workbooks
• Younger children might enjoy some of the Lauri products, such as the Primer Pak...and/or lacing/tracing, locking letters, puzzles, etc
• Notebooking!
• Leaf tracings
• Sit outside in a safe place and blow bubbles
• Play-Doh or clay
• Let older kids do a unit study on their own that they pick out. There are TONS of unit studies out there that cover just about every subject imaginable---different classics and other books, insects, holidays, presidents, hymns, outer space, states of the union, the Revolutionary War, seashore life, dogs, lighthouses, and on and on and on.
• LeapPad
• Paper dolls
• Pretend tea party with dolls and stuffed animals
• Make a collage
• Cut out pictures from magazines and make a seasonal "display" on poster board
• Play with blocks
• Usborne Learning Palette®
• Play with educational toys

In the Art Supply/Activity Closet:

• Children-safe scissors
• Nontoxic glue
• Magazines for cutting
• Construction paper
• Plenty of writing paper
• 3-ring hole punch
• Folders
• Crayons
• Nontoxic markers
• Stickers
• Notebook for each child
• Puzzles
• Games
• Drill Cards
• Worksheets
• Hand-held tape recorder with cassettes tapes
• Teaching CD-ROMs
• Felt

Keep plenty of books on hand for the children to read and you need to remind them to actually be reading them! Fun picture books or good quality chapter books (such as biographies of inventors or famous Americans and simplified versions of the classics).

Homeschoolopoly

What happens when you take a favorite family game and give it a homeschool twist?

How About a Treasure Chest?

"Guess what I did today!"

Each Ascendo Treasure Chest arrives filled with age-appropriate wonder and fun. And you don't have to leave out the children that have already grown a bit. Give them the Treasure Chest matched to their age (up to 4 years), and they receive the perfect mix of gifts carefully selected to meet their growing needs.

Ascendo Treasure Chests

Nature Activities

• Sketching
• Bird watching
• Insect identification
• Leaf rubbings
• Raking leaves (be careful with tools)
• Make a homeschool garden
• Make a butterfly garden
• Hobbies that include nature, such as nature photography or sketching
• Taking a walk with mom and dad
• Geocaching
• Make your own obstacle course
• Make your own running track
• Make a nature path through your back yard
• Set up a bird-feeding station in your yard

Make your own dollhouse!
See the dollhouse we made with odds and ends, and an old shelf!

Keep up with our dollhouse adventures: "The Year of the Doll House" at A Mother's Journal

~Thoughts To Ponder~

"Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds."
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield 1694-1773

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

"There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away
Nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry
This traverse may the poorest take without oppress of toll
How frugal is the chariot that bears the human soul!"
~Emily Dickinson

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