Home Learning is every teacher’s dream! We have the opportunity to show the learner how to apply their knowledge to their everyday environment. Once the environment is incorporated into the learning on a continuous basis, students will start to practice this type of thinking even when the assignment is long gone.

1. Use Maker in Your Curriculum– make the most of home learning by asking students to create with household recyclables and trash. ‘Making’ may seem like craft time, but there is research to prove that the process of creating helps the brain synthesize information.  Psychology Today notes the importance of this-

Physical acts are a way of working out our thoughts. Psychologists are now recognizing something that artists have intuitively always known, that we think with our hands as much as our brains.

Here are a few Maker activities that can align with your curriculum.

2. Create a Comic Book about a history assignment. History can be hard to place all the actors, settings and main events. What better way to remember than to draw them all out and put them in order in a comic book?

3. Play Word Games using only the words on a household object- got a bottle of shampoo? Have students write the title of the object on their paper and challenge them to use the letters to create as many new words as possible. Working on a word family? Tell them to highlight these words in their list of created words and give themselves double points for every word family word.

4. Math is Everywhere– 

• Find all the items that are squares in the house, then use them to build a castle!
• Use the labels from packages to calculate the number of calories in the entire cupboard.  
• Create a survey on any topic and ask family members to answer- noodles, bread, or dumplings, which is better?  
• Decide which room in the house has less right angles- justify.
• Where did all the time go- write out a daily schedule, then notate how long each activity took.  
• Who’s the tallest in their family? Who’s the shortest? Measure everyone’s heights, then convert their heights to another unit. Add up their heights and draw a new family super hero who towers over others.  
• How many Cheerios are in a box, measure 1 oz. and then estimate.   How many apples would it take to fill up your entire fridge, find the volume of your fridge and the “volume” of an apple, then estimate.

5. Write a Mystery– A home can have adventures in it waiting to happen. Mom is in the kitchen, Dad is in the living room, kids are in the bedroom…… there’s a crash by the front door. Who Done It? Investigate the whereabouts of all parties and give a mystery analysis Clue style.

6. Draw a New Reality– Students draw a picture of a room in their house, then imagine it in another landscape.  Add a desert to the middle of the kitchen or a rainforest, perhaps outer space would look good in the bedroom closet.  Imagine and draw.

7. Book Spine Poetry– use the books around your house to create poetry. Stack the books flat with the spines aligned. How can you rearrange the books to create a poem?

8. Sketchnote! This is a powerful visual notetaking process that engages the brain. Sketchnoting is different from just drawing a picture about the book at the end of the story. Sketchnoting asks the artist to constantly add to their drawing to show progression of learning. Read a few pages of a book, then draw a few pictures to show the concepts learned, repeat.  Here’s a quick video to show you this learning process. 

9. Create Art using inspiration from packaging. Students find elements of art in packaging around their house that they’ve studied, then use those elements to create their own art.

10. Create a Playlist for a character in a book. What songs best represent this character and why? Go old school and write it all down on paper.

Bonus– multiply by friendly numbers! Ask students to work with numbers they know. They write down their parent’s phone number, then multiply each number by the next= 134-678-9101 is 1x3=3x4=12x6=72 etc. Find out which is larger, the sum of their parent’s phone number or their friend’s. Then multiply those sums for some serious practice.

One of the most important things to remember is, Home Learning is not going to look the same as learning done in class.  We can work on the same standards and objectives, but the learning should take advantage of the environment. I’m not saying that all learning can be done this way, but certainly many lessons can.  The advantage of home learning is that the learning will be more authentic to the real world and will help students to connect their learning to everyday situations. Essentially, home learning makes it easier for teachers to connect learning outcomes with life, which is our real goal in education.

I would love to hear the ideas you come up with for connecting curriculum to unplugged learning at home. Tweet me @1hightechteach

“Think With Your Hands”. Psychology Today, 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/connect-creativity/201408/think-your-hands.

Images.App.Goo.Gl, 2020, https://images.app.goo.gl/LYQR1BYzVz3GrjZv8.

“Image: Mini Sketchnotes Tutorial – Sketchnote Love”. Images.App.Goo.Gl, 2020, https://images.app.goo.gl/HkqqVuQsJmLCwXLV7.