If you are educating your kids from home, you may find that you spend a lot of time sitting at a table teaching them. This can get boring for both you and the child after a while and it is good for the kids to get out in the fresh air to do some work.
What are the best subjects to study if you want to utilize your outdoor space for homeschooling?
Make the most of your space for Physical Education
This may be the obvious choice, but your kids will love getting outside to learn PE. How much running around you are able to do out there will depend on the size of your garden, but it doesn’t all have to be about running and football.
Swingball is a great outdoor sport and parents can join in with this fun game too. This will give you both some exercise. The ball remains tied to a post throughout the game so you will not be worried about lost balls or balls being hit over the fence into the neighbor’s yard either.
Aerobics, yoga, and hula hooping are also great outside sports that you don’t need to have a massive amount of room for two. Try adding fun fitness tools like custom hula hoops made to last to make the most of this.
Dance
Dance is a great way to de-stress and keep fit at the same time. It teaches kids about rhythm and timing as well as teaching them about different cultures and traditional dances from around the world.
Have fun and dress in traditional clothing while you do it and the kids will have lessons in geography, culture, dance and can even learn foreign language skills at the same time. There are a lot of YouTube videos to choose from, so you do not need to be an expert in dance yourself.
Make sure that you have a solid platform to dance on to avoid injury. Garden decking is fantastic for this purpose and it will even give the kids a stage to perform on too. This is a great way to take your entertaining space up a step.
Cooking
Cooking with kids in the great outdoors is a lot of fun. Kids will really enjoy learning about recipes on fires and barbeques. Some gas barbeques make the experience similar to cooking on a hob and you will be teaching the kids a skill for life.
Even if you need to go back inside the house to use the oven, you can still teach kids to prepare and mix food outdoors. This has the added bonus of limiting the amount of mess they make and preparing food outside can make it easier to clear up afterward too.
Nature
Even city gardens will have an abundance of wildlife that your kids can observe and learn about. Create a bird feeder to encourage the birds to come into the garden and see how many species they can pick out.
You can carry out a similar exercise with insects and plants too. This will really bring nature to life and many kids find it easier to learn if they are being interactive rather than learning from a book. Take it one step further and allow them to grow their own plants, or create an herb garden or vegetable patch and encourage their love of gardening.
To make the most of your time out in nature try keeping a nature journal with your kids. This gives them space to take notes about the weather, stars, and garden. A nature journal is one of my favorite lessons for outside.
Art
Art is a fantastic outdoor activity and there are a lot of ways to be artistic. Whether you let them draw with chalk on the paving slabs, sit them at the outdoor dining table to color in or paint, or let them get creative with clay.
There are many options that involve allowing their creative side to run free in the great outdoors. They could even have a go at drawing and painting the nature they can see all around them and you can incorporate both of these learning activities together.
Try building a mud kitchen in your backyard to encourage your kids to get really creative and a bit messy too.
Building
The great outdoors is a wonderful place to learn how to build. Whether they are designing and creating their own treehouse or helping you to erect a garden shed, there is a lot of building work that can be done outside.
This will teach kids skills in woodwork and metalwork that they may even go on to use in their careers once their school days are over. Kids who prefer the practical elements of learning will love these projects.
However, you can also use the experience to teach them about more technical things such as how math might work in practice. Get your kids some fun attachments for turning sticks into forts with stick-lets to let them have some freedom to create and then give them a protractor and tape measure to check out the angles and sizes.
There are many ways of homeschooling your kids in the great outdoors, and making them have lots of fresh air will help them to learn and concentrate too. There is no need to be cooped up at a desk if you don’t want them to be and they will learn a lot from the experience.
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