Whether you’re new to homeschooling this school year or a homeschool veteran, burnout is real, and it’s normal to find yourself feeling overwhelmed, scattered, or lost at some point in your homeschool journey. Even if you’re feeling great about where you’re at, it’s good to check in and set goals for the new year. Here are a few tips for making a fresh start in 2022:

1. Revisit Your Organization System

Now is also a great time to check in on your own record-keeping and curriculum organization. Review your state’s homeschool laws, and ensure that you’re meeting all deadlines and requirements for attendance tracking, curriculum, and correspondence. Catch up on anything you need to print and save, and consider the best method for organizing everything. Get your huge stack of paperwork organized into binders or scanned and organized on your computer! Perhaps you have a lot of student work you want to save – consider making a portfolio for each school year with those assignments in it! Tired of printing everything? Our reports can be downloaded and saved to your computer. You can also consider reaching out to members of your homeschooling community for ideas on what works best for them.

2. Refresh Your Workspace(s)

Whether you homeschool on-the-go, or you’re usually working on school at home, it’s good to have a dedicated workspace set up for your child.  Encourage note-taking by having pencils, pens, paper, and notebooks available in a designated space close by for your child to grab. If you have the wall space, consider hanging up some of your child’s best work or any notes, anchor charts, or pictures that will reinforce their learning. Consider offering your child the option to customize some of their workspace so that they feel excited to use it each day! If you’re typically homeschooling on the go, consider creating a go-bag or basket with all of the materials your child needs to be set up for success – laptop, charger, headphones, etc. That way, they can grab it and go as you head to the library, a family member’s house, or wherever your travels might take you! 

3. Revamp Your Schedule

Our schedules are always changing. What worked for you in September might not work for you in January. Look back over your schedule, and consider the following questions:

• What’s working about this schedule right now?
• When do I notice my child is most attentive or ready to learn?
• When do I notice my child getting restless or frustrated? 
• Is my child frequently finishing their work super early? Or are they working longer than anticipated each day?
• Do I need to schedule any additional breaks for this school year?

If your child does better with more structure, consider using a visual calendar to display each day and letting your child help update the calendar so they know what to expect. The beauty of homeschooling is that it’s flexible. If you think it’s better for your child to work shorter days and extend your school year by a month – you can do that! There is no such thing as “normal” when it comes to learning, so find what works for you and your family. 

4. Do a Pulse Check With Your Child

Whether your child is 6 or 16, they certainly have valuable input to offer about their experience so far this school year. Have your child do a reflection activity, or have a conversation with them about how their school year is going.

Consider asking the following questions:

• What is your favorite subject or topic you’ve learned about this year? What do you like about it?
• What is something that has been challenging for you this school year? Is there any help you need to overcome this challenge?
• What would you like to do more of during the school day?
• What is something you need to do to improve your learning?
• Is there anything I can do to help you improve your learning?
• Does anything feel too easy or too difficult for you in your current course schedule?
• Are there any topics you’d like to revisit or get a refresher on?

You might even consider beginning each day with a daily check-in on how your student is feeling, their goals for the day, and any challenges they’re facing. Check out these worksheets our content team has created for checking in with your child! 

5. Join a Community 

Even though you may not be part of a traditional school system, there are over 3 million homeschool families in the U.S.! Consider finding a homeschool pod or group to join – whether online or with others in your local area. Share tips, resources, and best practices, and lean on each other when you encounter difficulties in your homeschooling journey. Check out our Facebook group and Instagram page, where you can connect with other parents who use Miacademy! Of course, homeschool students need socialization too! If you haven’t already, enable the community features on our site to allow students to connect with other homeschoolers, submit writing to the newspaper, and contribute videos to our monthly contests! 

The beginning of a new year is a great time to re-evaluate what’s working and what’s not in your homeschooling journey. Try these tips, and let the beginning of the new year be an opportunity for you to reflect, revisit, and refresh your homeschooling routines and procedures!

That’s a great question! It’s also a hard question to answer. Why? Because each homeschool is different. Let’s go through some factors that can affect how long it should take to get through a homeschool day. But, before we do, please remember that homeschool is not “school at home.” Students in a traditional classroom spend a longer time in each class because the teacher has to meet the needs of 20+ students. You are working with only one (and no busy work is needing to fill a scheduled class time). 

The age of your child

If you are homeschooling a second grade student, obviously it’s going to take less time each day than homeschooling a tenth grade student. Younger students have less educational content to learn each day than a high school student does, plus they need time for free play and movement. An older student has a longer attention span and can spend longer periods studying a concept. 

The abilities of your child

Each child is different and they learn at different speeds and in different ways. If you have a slower learner, it is going to take more time each day than it will for a child who picks up on concepts quickly. You may need to add more repetition to your homeschool days to reinforce learning. 

The number of children you are homeschooling

If you are homeschooling multiple children of various ages, your school day will take longer simply because you have multiple children to teach and your focus cannot be on just one of them. One thing to consider with multi-age students is to find a curriculum for some subjects that can be taught to various ages at one time. There are many things available in Science and Social Studies/History that are created just for multi-ages. This means only things like Language Arts and Math need to be taught at level. 

The curriculum you are using

Some curriculums are more labor-intensive than others. You will definitely find some that are heavy on busy work (aka desk work) and others that are more focused on hands-on learning. There is so much available to homeschoolers these days. We definitely recommend looking for something that fits with your child’s unique learning style and special needs. No curriculum is one-size-fits-all. What works for one child in your family may very well not be a good fit for another. 

The laws of your state

Some states require a certain number of days per year to be recorded on your homeschool schedule. Others require a certain number of hours per day. Check HSLDA to find the laws for your state and go from there. 

As a general rule, here’s a simple chart for the length of time you should expect your student to work each day based on grade level:

How does Miacademy work into our daily school schedule? 

Miacademy offers a full online curriculum for your K-8th grade homeschool student. From your parent account, you set the start and end date for your child’s school year, along with the subjects that you want him/her to study. The site will then schedule out your student’s entire school year. 

Assuming a 180 day school year, your child should be investing about as much time each day as in the chart above. If, however, you find that your child is completing work early each day, or seems to be breezing through the curriculum, we recommend the following: 

• Make sure you are utlitizing the PDFs (this is especially beneficial in Language Arts for writing practice).
• Add in pencil and paper tasks and hands-on activities for your young learners.
• Have your child submit their writing assignments to the site newspaper. 
• Your child can make video presentations about what they learned to submit to the site.
• Your child can review some of their online lessons in Dragon Egg or Dragon Race.
• Your child can create “book club” teams, or similar, to discuss favorite books they’ve read for school. 
• You can assign work from other grade levels.
• You can reassign lessons periodically to help retain information or to review things they may need extra practice with. 

We hope this eases your mind! If you have extra time in your homeschool day, play games, go outside, or plan some field trips! Spend time in the kitchen, cooking and creating. Enjoy spending time together as a family. That’s one of the many things that makes homeschooling unique and special! 

If you still have questions about homeschooling with Miacademy, join our Facebook group or contact our helpful customer service team at parents-help@miacademy.co.

Last month, we launched MiaPrep, our new site for high school students, and we’ve had an overwhelming response! Parents are loving it because it’s an extension of the accredited K-8 learning that they have come to know and trust, and students are loving the engaging content that’s being created by our team of teachers and professional actors. If you haven’t taken the time to check out the site yet, we hope that you will do so. And just in case you’re wondering …

What does your membership include?

When you purchase a subscription, your student will receive his or her own account and you will receive your own parent account.

Features on your student’s account include the following:

• A Personalized Learning Path
• Access to all of our learning content
• Ability to publish stories, poems, and other articles in our online literary magazine
• Feedback from friends, and receive motivation in the process
• Positive interaction with other members in a safe environment

Our moderators review comments, pictures, and messages from members before they appear on MiaPrep. This provides a secure setting for your student in a safe, online environment.

In your parent account, you will be able to do the following:

• Receive weekly email updates about your student’s site activity
• Adjust learning grade level subject by subject
• Enable or disable specific learning categories to your preference
• Assign specific lessons, print progress reports, and track study time
• Reward your student for offline achievements

Don’t hesitate to reach out to our friendly customer service team if you still have questions about what’s included in your membership!​

What content can you expect to find on the site? 

Here are the courses that will be made available in full prior to the end of the 2021-22 school year. (Initial lessons will be available, with more being added throughout the school year.)

These courses are typically taken by 9th graders:

• Algebra I
• English I
• Geography
• Physical Science

These courses are typically taken at higher grade levels (i.e., geared towards more advanced high school students who join our program):

• Algebra II
• English II
• Literary Analysis
• Civics (2nd semester of this school year)
• Chemistry

In addition to the above full courses, we will also have a couple electives that will be available.

Plus, our 7th and 8th grade content will be made available for students who want to review material from previous grade levels.

Learn more! 

We’d love to have you join our Facebook group! This group consists of team members and site parents, so it’s a great place to have your questions answered. 

A big concern with homeschooling is how to find the right program. Every child has a different learning style that is conducive to their learning. As each child is so unique, and different, it is important to find the right place for both you as a parent and your child as well. A curriculum that checks all the boxes will help set both of you up for success in your homeschooling journey. 

We have many children with varying learning challenges that use our sites. We work hard to make sure our program is user-friendly for all abilities in learning. Below we will go into a few of the features that make our program work for a multitude of learning styles.

– The ability to schedule from any grade for each subject. A common question we get asked is if our program can be set for different grade levels for different subjects. The answer is yes! With our program, you as a parent will have the ability to assign work for your child from any grade level K-8 for each of our subjects. You can even go to a particular subject such as addition, and assign just that from another grade level, depending on your child’s needs. It is very customizable in this regard.

– The ability to work at your own pace. Our program does not require children to be present during specific times of the day. The program works entirely on your own schedule. Work that seems too much for one day can be left for the following day, or children can work ahead as often as they would like as well. Parents also have the ability to schedule breaks for children in case they need to step away and return at a later time.

– The ability to turn on our read-aloud feature and closed captions. Most of our lessons will read the questions and answers to the child. This is especially helpful for new readers or children who have dyslexia. The closed captions are available for each of our teaching videos.

– No timed work or assessments. Most of our lessons are in 3 parts: An instructional video, a practice lesson, and an assessment. Each of these segments is optional and can be done at the child’s own pace. Tests are not timed and are optional for children who do not do well with testing. They can always be returned to at a later date as well.

– Game-based platform: Your child learns through play, making it non-pressured learning. Children will be given questions and can receive “gold” the currency for our program.

– Option for repetition: Lessons that a child needs more work with, or just needs to take a break from, can be reassigned and repeated as often as you’d like. There is no limit to how long a child can work on a lesson or come back to try again.

We work hard to keep all learners in mind when developing our videos, lessons, and the platform itself. We are always looking for new suggestions and improvements for our sites. If you do not see something that you would like with our program, please suggest it, and we will take it into consideration as we continue improving our program! 

MiaPrep is the newest online high school curriculum offering from the Miaplaza family of educational sites. It offers a flexible, self-paced curriculum that you can tailor to your student’s learning needs. 

Self-paced/independent work through, flexible

The self-paced aspect of MiaPrep allows your student to take the time they need to actually understand the concepts presented to them. They’ll never get left behind in a topic because they can redo lessons and assessments as many times as they need.

If you have an advanced learner, they can push ahead in the subjects they excel in, rather than having to wait for the next school year to begin. When you enroll with MiaPrep, you are given access to the full suite of high school curriculum, so you can fit lessons directly to your student’s learning needs and abilities. Set the number of lessons you want your student to accomplish over the set amount of days you had in mind, and watch them take ownership of their own education. 

Homeschool Schedule

On your parent account, you are in control of when lessons begin, when they end, and when you or your student needs to take a break. And since it’s all internet-based, your student can take their learning along with them when your family decides to take that spontaneous vacation you always wanted! This flexibility puts you in charge of your family’s schedule, rather than being forced to shape your family’s life around your local school district. 

How Parents Can Stay Engaged

Though you encourage your learner to be independent and take responsibility for their education, you obviously still want to be involved with their work. MiaPrep allows you to be as engaged as you’d like.

You can view your student’s progress and assessment scores on the Reports tab on the Parent Portal. You can check and make sure your student is completing lessons at the pace you assigned, and assess any weaknesses for possible review. As with our lower school curriculum found on Miacademy, Always Ice Cream, and Clever Dragons, MiaPrep’s online high school curriculum offers offline work and printables for you and your student to engage with together if you so choose. 

MiaPrep offers you the best of all worlds: a top-of-the-line curriculum developed by experts in their fields with online and offline work, a flexible schedule based on your family’s lifestyle, independent and self-paced work that gets your student ready for the more autonomous learning expected from them in college, and Reports to help you keep your student on track. We’re excited to help you and your family flourish through high school life!  

If you still have questions, join our Parent Facebook Group or contact our friendly customer service team at parents-help@miaprep.com.

Written by: Chelsie Morris

MiaPrep’s online high school curriculum offers fully-moderated Community features. This enables your student to engage with students across the world in a safe, adult-supervised environment. 

MiaPrep’s Community feature allows students to direct message each other, create teams centered around certain topics, write in a weekly online literary magazine read by their peers, create and upload videos (must be approved by parents and site moderators), create digital art, and run an online shop selling their digital art for “gold,” our virtual site currency, which they can spend on other digital items around the site. 

Unlike other social media platforms, MiaPrep has a team of trained adult moderators that must read and approve every message, post, design item, video, and status update before it goes live for other students to see. If anything violates MiaPrep’s Community guidelines, our moderators delete the post and send a note to the student explaining why it was denied approval. Often, a post will be rejected because it breaks a safety rule that a student doesn’t understand.

For example, we have strict rules about what a student can share about their location. If they share the name of any local organizations they participate in (like a school name or the name of a local place of worship), or any other possible local identifiers like radio stations, camps, or places of business, our moderators reject it with with a note explaining why it is unsafe to share location identifiers. 

Disrespect toward other students, including unkind comments and bullying, is also tagged and rejected with a note about respecting others on the internet. If a student persists in rude or inappropriate behavior, we notify parents or guardians through email and “ground” that student from community features for a certain time period (time varies according to infraction). During this grounding period, students will have access to lessons and assignments but will not be able to interact with other students.

 We do not allow students to share links to other websites, nor do we allow them to share usernames where they could be found outside of our MiaPrep platform and engage in unmoderated communication. We reject all material that is considered inappropriate for high school ages, based on age-ratings found at Common Sense Media. Many of these rules are enforced as part of federal regulation, COPPA, which was enacted to protect children’s privacy online. For more information on COPPA, visit Complying with COPPA: Frequently Asked Questions.

You can think of MiaPrep’s Community platform as social media on training wheels: a safe, supervised introduction to the world of social media. With our moderated Community, your student learns important life skills while discussing ideas and connecting with other students. This is definitely a favorite feature in our elementary and middle school programs. Many students on those sites are looking forward to being able to continue to interact with their friends online on MiaPrep while their parents are resting easily, knowing their children are not being exposed to inappropriate or damaging content.    

If you have any questions about our MiaPrep Community features, our team of qualified customer service representatives are online and ready to help. You can contact representatives by chat. Simply select the blue “Support” or “Chat” button at the bottom right. You can also find us on Facebook, or email us at parents – help @ miacademy . co (without spaces).

Is MiaPrep accredited? 

Our K-8 grade program, Miacademy, is accredited with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges as a “Supplemental Educational Program” (SEP), and we are pursuing accreditation for MiaPrep. However, the accreditation process is thorough and it can take a few months to get approved. We anticipate MiaPrep will be accredited in early 2022.

How is MiaPrep different from other online learning sources?

MiaPrep is extremely customizable and flexible. When you enroll with MiaPrep, you automatically have access to any course from grades 7-12. That means your student can work ahead in math, but maybe shore up some English and Reading skills that could use a little work (or vice versa!). With no required start or end date, your student can work at their own pace, spending as much or as little time as they need on any subject, lesson, or assignment. Individual components of each lesson can be reassigned as often as needed, or even removed by the parent, which gives your student the time and space to really learn and understand the lesson material. 

This flexibility is also fantastic for family life. If you want to take a little off-season vacation to the beach without your student falling behind, you can pause their lesson schedule, or simply bring it with you! The mobility and flexibility of MiaPrep puts the power of your family’s schedule in your hands. 

We also offer a fully adult-moderated, online, social component so your student can safely connect and communicate with other learners at MiaPrep, with the ability to be turned on or off by the parent account.This is a very popular function in our elementary/middle school platforms and we look forward to offering it on our high school platform.

Does MiaPrep offer a full curriculum?

For the 2021-2022 school year, we are offering a full set of courses for students entering 9th grade, as well as at least one additional higher-level course for students who have completed their 9th grade courses. We have hired a large team of highly qualified high school teachers and professors to fill out the remaining high school content, with the goal being that your student can progress smoothly through their high school curriculum in the coming terms.

Does MiaPrep offer a diploma?

MiaPrep does not offer a diploma. However, our Parent Portal allows you to print reports that can easily be converted to a transcript. Homeschool diplomas can be purchased through HSLDA  (as well as other online sources). Our easy-to-generate reports do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to record keeping, not to mention can save you oodles of storage space and organizational time. If you run into trouble trying to figure it all out, our friendly customer service team is on-call and ready to help.

How many credits is each course? 

As with many traditional high schools, MiaPrep’s courses in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies will be full, one-credit courses. Other courses with individual lessons or electives will vary based on the amount of content available and how long it takes to complete the course. 

If you have any other questions, make sure you check out our Facebook Page and feel free to e-mail our friendly customer service representatives at parents-help@miacademy.co.

We are thrilled to be counting down the weeks until our new site, MiaPrep, launches! MiaPrep follows our K-8 program, Miacademy. It will be geared toward 9th-12th grades and will serve as our high school curriculum, and will prepare students for life and higher education. Throughout the next few weeks, we are going to be sharing information about the program that will help answer many of your frequently asked questions! If you would like to subscribe to further newsletters and information, please fill out this form.

What Courses Will be Available?

Our team of content developers is made up of experienced, certified teachers and experts in the field of education, and they are working hard to put together as many courses as possible, so high schoolers can begin using MiaPrep as a full curriculum as early as this fall. 

During the first year of our platform launch, you can expect to see these initial subject lessons on MiaPrep:

•  Language Arts: instructional videos, literary extensions, writing assignments, daily vocabulary, practice work, and assessments

Courses available in full by the end of ‘21-’22 school year: English I, English II, Literary Analysis

• Math: instructional videos that can be paused and reviewed, practice work, and printable assessments that can be repeated as necessary

Courses available in full by the end of ‘21-’22 school year: Algebra I, Algebra II

• Science: instructional videos, text extensions, printable labs, practice work, and assessments

Courses available in full by the end of ‘21-’22 school year: Physical Science, Chemistry

• Social Studies: instructional videos, PDF resources, recommended independent study, practice work, and assessments

Courses available in full by the end of ‘21-’22 school year: Geography, World History

• Electives: Spanish I (practice work only; full course to follow); Career Exploration activities to help students consider areas they may want to pursue; other resources to follow
• Review: 7^th and 8^th grade material available for students who need a refresher or want to take a closer look at the lower-level courses

More subjects and content will be added as the school year progresses in such areas as English III and IV, Geometry, Biology, and U.S. History and Civics. Many lessons will be available to begin at the start of the semester, and as more are added, students can work through the next steps in their courses. The goal is to have the next lessons ready by the time the first available ones commence, and so on, throughout the first year. 

Customize Your Student’s Curriculum with MiaPrep

Though this program will be our high school-level courses, your child will continue to have access to all of our 7th and 8th-grade material in addition to the 9th-12th grade material. This ensures that your child will be able to review pre-requisite material where needed. It is also beneficial for students who may have trouble in some subjects, and excel in others. This allows parents the flexibility to create a customized learning path for their child.

Getting the Most of MiaPrep

Miaprep will offer a curriculum that is constantly expanding with new teaching videos, practice games, tests, and instructional documents. Nonetheless ours, like those of every other online curriculum, will have areas that are more complete than others. Thus, we recommend supplementing the learning content offered on our sites with additional hands-on learning, such as science experiments, reading and interpreting literature, and other activities that work well for your student

As always, knowing whether or not you can use the site alongside your core curriculum depends a great deal on the state in which you live.  We encourage you to check with HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) to review what is required in your state. 

Written by Kelsey K.

To introduce my family a bit here, I am a mother of 5 children, ages 8 down to 7 months. I don’t have any special qualifications for homeschooling and I am currently working part time. Our life hasn’t perfectly aligned for homeschooling, but we have made it work! 

We started our family homeschool journey in August of 2020. My husband was homeschooled as a child, and I always had the desire to homeschool, but the typical “worries” of homeschooling really kept me from making the plunge.

Reaching the Decision to Homeschool

 When Covid hit, I knew I didn’t want to make my kids go through the drama of being in and out of school, back and forth, with no consistency for them. That’s when we decided it would be best to pull them out. I always had the comforting thoughts knowing that if things got less messy with the school system, we could always put them back in school if homeschooling was a total disaster. Fortunately, it has been anything but. We have had so many encouraging moments along the way that have made me confident with our decision. 

Currently, I homeschool my son Jaxson, and my daughter Grace. A little about Jaxson: while in 1st grade, his teacher mentioned the areas he struggled in. He would do the work, he just would take longer to do it. He lacked motivation for “school stuff” and would rather play. He was on the verge of needing an IEP, but she was confident that as he aged and matured a bit more, things would catch on better for him. 

As a mother, it made me anxious to hear things like this, and I wanted to help him figure out his own learning path and style. In August, 2020, he was set to start 2nd grade. We decided to put both children at the 2nd grade level to make things a little easier on us. While Jaxson takes a little longer to figure things out, Grace is pretty quick to catch on. It has worked out really well for us. We have definitely had our ups and downs, but the benefits we have seen overall have been incredible. 

The Window Homeschooling Gave to My Children’s Learning

One of my favorite moments during this journey has been seeing my son enjoy learning and watching things click for him. As I mentioned above, he’s a typical 8 year old who would rather spend his days playing than learning double-digit addition. I have been trying to figure out areas that are fun for him and use those for motivational tools to learn in the less fun areas. One of those fun areas has been learning about the United States. 

One day while we were driving out of town, the song “Fifty Nifty United States” started playing and my husband sang along. He had it memorized from when he was a kid. We all laughed and had no idea that was something he knew. Right then, Jaxson decided he wanted to learn the song too. 

From our little road trip, we played that song over and over and he had the whole song down by the time we got to our destination. Now he can sing all 50 states alphabetically! He was so proud of himself. The best part was that Grace and our 4 year old also learned the song with him. They all request the song frequently and I catch them singing it here and there.

Using Homeschooling to Dive Deeper into Genuine Interests

With that, we decided to use Miacademy’s state game lessons and help him learn where each state is located. I was shocked when I walked in and watched him clicking the mouse so quickly. I just assumed he was messing around, rather than doing his lesson. To my surprise, he was reading the state and finding it on the political map game, getting them all correct! 

After that, I knew this was an area I wanted to really explore more with him. We bought him a fun US states facts book. Each night we picked a new state and learned all about it. Not only was he learning important history and information about America, but he was really enjoying it at the same time. 

My favorite part about this is that we decided to really go all in and do a road trip across the country and see these things that we have been learning about first hand. Some of our favorite stops have been St. Louis and seeing the arch, where we learned that it’s nicknamed “The gateway to the West”. Visiting Mount Rushmore and learning about how and why it was built was another favorite. Oh! And seeing the Grand Canyon in our home state. 

We make sure to visit the capitol buildings in states when we can. My son is such a sweet boy and appreciates the beauty of our country while also geeking out about the cool buildings and structures. I never expected this to be an area he would so thoroughly enjoy.

I love that homeschooling gives us the flexibility to really slow things down and nurture areas that our children enjoy, while also helping them individually in areas they need more work in. I could go on and on with the different moments that have been so amazing during our first year. My daughter has repeatedly said things like “I’m really good at this, right?” And it has made it all worth it. I wouldn’t trade our year of homeschooling for anything! 

By Jodi Whisenhunt

My favorite way to homeschool is to think outside the textbook. This is an especially helpful technique on those days when bookwork is monotonous, when the material is just not sinking in, when you are low on mental energy, when…well, just whenever! 

Sometimes we just need a break from structured learning. To be honest, I have found that my kids learn best when they don’t realize they are learning. What? What I mean is that sometimes it is best to learn while you play.

Take a Break and Get Refreshed Outside

Nature is an excellent classroom. There’s no greater way to expand the walls of the home classroom than to knock them down and step outdoors. Believe it or not, all core educational subjects can be addressed just by taking a walk. 

Stroll with me on this lovely spring day:

Butterflies Offer an Easy, Beautiful Learning Day

Flowers are in full bloom in many parts of the world right now, and that means butterflies are flitting about. Butterflies can be found on every continent except Antarctica, of course, and can thrive in a variety of conditions, such as wetlands, lowlands, tropics, mountains, forests, and farmlands. You can even spot them in your own backyard! These pretty pollinators keep our plants thriving. Snap photos of those you find or draw them in a sketchbook, and see if you can identify them online or at the library later. For additional fun, purchase a butterfly garden at your local craft, pet, or garden store, and raise and release your own butterflies to the environment! 

“Fish are friends, not food” ~Bruce, Finding Nemo.

Do you live near a river, lake, or pond? Pick up some fish pellets at a local pet store and venture to the waterside (with attentive parental supervision, of course). Lightly sprinkle some on the water and observe what critters surface for a snack. Again, photograph or sketch what you see and identify them online or at the library later. If a body of water isn’t accessible, go to the pet store and check out all the fish tanks! There are many different species for sale. Observe an employee during fish feeding time and let them explain what is required to keep their numerous aquariums properly filtered and life supporting, and maybe pick up one of their handbooks to study at home.

A Break with Birds

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University hosts an annual program called The Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) each February. The purpose is to get people all around the world to get out in nature–in their own backyards–and note the birds they see around them. Grab a field guide online or check one out from the library and investigate what large or small aviators take flight around you. You might see chickadees, Northern Cardinals, Tufted Titmice, Steller’s Jays, or if you’re in Florida or Alaska, even a bald eagle! The Audubon Society is a great resource and has many ways to protect birds in your area.

Lots to Learn in the Dirt

Grow something! I’ve saved this for last, because it’s my least-credentialed area. Let’s just say neither of my thumbs are the slightest bit green. However, gardening can be simple. For those who have limited space, or for those like me with not-so-green thumbs, there are many how-to tutorials available online. For example, you can create a single-container garden to supply herbs like thyme, basil, or oregano to your kitchen pantry. You could gather fallen acorns from your oak tree, collect maple seed pods (you know, those little helicopter things), or even, yes, dandelion fluff. Investigate how to propagate them, and get growing!

Incorporate Your Findings into Your Homeschool Curriculum

Once you’ve explored the world around you, gather your findings and incorporate these valuable resources into your curriculum over the coming days. Your students can do further scientific studies or experiments and learn lab protocol. They can research a topic and write an informative paper about it. Younger students can practice tallying, adding, and subtracting when tracking the things they see around them. Kids can learn about geography by investigating what parts of the world the plants and animals they observe are native to, their growing/living zones, and habitat characteristics. They can also learn good citizenship when they learn how they can help the earth and its inhabitants. 

One final benefit: everyone can enjoy the breath of fresh air!

What do you do when you need a break from homeschooling? Tell us about your easy learning days in the comments!