Our family likes to use hands-on activities to enhance our learning. Some of our favorite activities are:

1. Building maps. From salt dough maps to edible maps made from cookie dough, seeing the topography of a continent, country or state really makes your studies come alive and provides an excellent visual aid for exploring geography.
2. Creating games. Bingo, matching, and Go Fish are all games that lend themselves easily to almost any topic. Tying a magnet to a dowel rod with twine makes a simple fishing pole that can be used to catch construction paper or index card fish with paper clips attached. A stack of index cards and the board to most any board game can be used to create homemade learning games.
3. Making our own flashcards. Use index cards, crayon or markers, stickers or even clip art to create your own personalized set of flash cards.
4. “Publishing” our own newspaper or magazine highlighting key people, places or events from your topic of study.
5. Building models. Shoe boxes, newspaper, wood, Styrofoam and plastic bottles can all be the basis for everything from a diorama to a paper mache creation.
6. Doing an experiment. The ideas can come from books, the Internet or even your own imagination. Just be sure to write out your hypothesis, then, see if it works.
7. Putting on a play or a puppet show. It’s fun, its authenticity can show mastery of the topic and it gets in some extra practice in writing and organizing thoughts.
8. Cooking. We love to make dishes related to the country, people or time periods that we’re studying. It’s also fun to try, when possible, the methods that would have (or are) traditionally used to make the dish.

What are some fun activities that your family uses to bring a study to life?

Photo by yogi