Crafting with Kids: Enhancing Your Child’s Learning

Meet Stephanie! She’s a 29 year old stay at home Mom, who couldn’t ask for a better blessing than to be home with her kids!! Their favorite things to do together are working on art projects and they enjoy sharing them with people at Crafting with Bug!! In her free time she enjoys reading and scrapbooking!!

We started homeschooling when my daughter was 3 years old. Come time for four year old kindergarten, we tried public schools. Although the school district we live in is phenomenal, the schedule wasn’t for us. So, we have been homeschooling since she was in Kindergarten. We use a virtual school curriculum but, we are always searching for ways to enhance and reinforce what she is learning.

You don’t need to homeschool to enhance or reinforce what your kids are learning. Yes, kids bring home homework from school to help with this but, sometimes adding other ways can make it “click” much faster. Summer is coming soon and that may be the best time of all to sneak these things in.

It is easiest if you find something that is of interest of your child. Any subject can be incorporated into their interests. So, for example, if your child likes animals, a trip to the zoo can be helpful. Instead of just walking around and looking at the animals, take the time to read the provided signs. Doing this will give them more specific information about each animal and can be counted towards Science. To incorporate Math, you could have them figure out how many pounds of food it takes to feed the animal for a week or even a month. If you see Zookeepers walking around feel free to ask them questions too! Most of the time they are usually willing to answer questions for you.

Another helpful tool that we use every so often are documentaries. It can be difficult to find kid friendly ones but, when you can they are a great resource. The easiest places to find these are at your local library or our other “go to” is Netflix.

You can use anything from 3D puzzles to day trip to museums to help enhance your kids interests. There really is no limit to what you can do. Most of it doesn’t take much preparation either. When I am low on ideas I look on Google and Pinterest to help spark my inspiration. Be creative with it. Enhancing their learning doesn’t have to be intensive to get through to them. Simple is best. Just make it fun.
The most important thing to remember is that kids learn through play and exploration. Even if it seems like they are not learning (or they say they didn’t learn anything), they have. The best thing about doing the enhancing through play and exploration is they don’t always realize they are learning.

 

Check out all of Crafting with Kids article here!