How I teach using hands on learning

I love hands-on learning. We used it all the time in our homeschool and I thought it could be helpful to give everyone an idea of how to add it in to your different subject areas, and some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years of our hands-on homeschool. As part of my continuing Homeschool How To series, as a great way to help other homeschoolers level-up their homeschool.

Future Ticia 2024, I’m updating and refining this, so it’s a bit more useful for everyone.

(I’m updating and adding in affiliate links here)

Things to keep in mind when starting hands-on learning

My kids are big fans of doing rather than seeing.  Their favorite and most remembered lessons are hands-on.

A couple of quick things to remember:

1. Not every style will appeal to all kids.  My boys love reenactments much more than my daughter does.
2. Your house will get messy.  Be willing to have a mess, but leave time to clean it up (I need to remember that last part on the cleaning).
3. It doesn’t need to be long and involved.  Sometimes spur of the moment is the most remembered.
4. Give your kids input into the planning.  If they request something try to plan it in.

What is hands-on learning?

Hands-on learning can mean different things to different people.  For some, it’s adding in a craft or a cut-and-paste activity.  For another family, it’s throwing out the textbook and building a giant model of the Trojan Horse in their family room.

And they’d both be right.

Hands-on learning engages your kids, it’s trying the paint style of a famous artist, it’s going on a field trip to see the animals you just studied.  It’s creating a model of a ship.  Most of all, it’s engaging your kids with the learning so they remember it.

In this series, I’m going to give you some ideas on how to get started in subject areas, places online you can find more ideas and things you might buy to engage your kids.

Supplies to get started with hands-on learning

Some of these supplies will be subject-specific, but others will be useful in pretty much every subject area (in some cases rather than list it all out I’m going to link to a post where I have an extensive list):

• art supplies– I ordered things on this list through high school
• LEGO– I linked to my LEGO history post because I’ve got all the supplies listed there
• play dough
• base 10 blocks
• magnet letters and numbers
• shaving cream
• beach ball
• magnifying glass
• Eye Droppers 12-pk

I hope you all enjoy this series on how to teach using hands-on learning

Here’s the plan for the series:

• Hands-on Learning Language Arts
• Hands-on Learning  Math
• Hands-on Learning Science
• Hands-on Learning History
• Hands-on Learning Fine Arts

That’s five days of posts on the topic.  That should give you a pretty good idea of how to get started in your homeschool or classroom.

Originally posted January 12, 2014