How to Homeschool Multiple Age Groups

Making the decision to homeschool is not always easy. One thing that people often have to consider is whether they will be able to homeschool children of different ages at the same time. When you are homeschooling one child, it is all about them. However, if you have more than one child you will have to think about how you can meet all of their different needs.

Learning about the sense - Taste

As you know we have been learning about the senses. The next sense we have been exploring is the sense of taste. I think this was the children's favourite as they have been asking to do these activities everyday since! First, we read the next book in our senses series; 'Taste that'! 

Then, we did some practical activities. I am a big fan of practical learning experiences, especially for young children. It really engages their attention which makes it more likely they will enjoy, understand and remember what they learn. Here's what we did.

Learning about Skeletons

Now that we have finished our astronomy topic, we are moving on to the human body. We started off by learning all about bones and the skeleton. 

Learning About Astronomy - the Planets

Our final astronomy topic was the planets. We started by reading these books about the planets which are great for children. Each book covers two planets.

Then we made posters with all the planets on. This was a lot of fun. The children were given a long, thin piece of black paper and circles of white paper of different sizes. They then used poster paints to paint each planet. They looked at pictures of the planets to help them do this.

As they painted, we talked about the different features of each planet. What colours were they? Were they made of gas or rock? Did they have any moons or rings?

Learning about astronomy - the Earth

We have already learnt about the stars, the Moon and planets. Our next astronomy topic covered the Earth. As our planet, the Earth is something we all know a lot about. We started by thinking about all the things we love about our planet. 

Learning About Astronomy - the Stars

Our next topic in our astronomy project was stars. Stars are such a broad topic and you can cover many different areas; types of stars, the life cycle of a star, the birth of stars and our star - the Sun. We started off by watching a short video about stars which I found on YouTube by Storybots. Storybots really make learning fun by introducing topics through song.

Learning About Astronomy - the Moon

We have spent the last month or so learning about astronomy as our science topic. We have learnt about the planets, the Earth, stars and the moon. We go to a project group once a week where the children learn about these topics together with other children. They love this weekly group and have started to make some good friendships. We often continue learning about these topics at home and they form the basis of our science curriculum, giving it structure and focus.

We were not able to cover the moon during our project group sessions so we spent a week learning about it at home. 

Learning about the senses - Smell

        

The final installment of our learning about the senses posts! This time I will be telling you all about how we learnt about the sense of smell. This was an interesting one to think up activities for. I don't think I have ever done a smell-based activity with the children before but these activities were great fun. 

        

I soon spotted this post which was all about spice painting and thought it would be a great way for the children to explore different smells. To make spice paint you simply dilute some PVA glue with a bit of water and then mix in the different spices. The children loved helping me prepare the paint. We used herbs as well as spices for some extra sensory fun!

        

Here are the paints all ready to be used. I love the earthy colours.

               

The children got stuck in painting pictures with their homemade paints. We talked about the different smells as they painted.

        

R looks like he's enjoying it!

        

D was practicing her writing. She just loves to write at the moment, Though she's not so interested in reading yet.

        

Here is some more writing.

                   

D also painted a picture of a girl. She likes to draw and paint people.

        

This is what R painted. I think the spices worked better for these paints as they were ground up very finely so mixed well with the glue. The herbs, because they weren't ground up, did not work so well.

        

Next, D surprised me by coming up with another sensory idea I had never thought of before. She found a little scented pouch of lavender she had made and brought it over to the table along with some double sided tape.

                     

Then, she set to work sticking tape on a piece of paper and sprinkling the lavender on top. I was very impressed with her spontaneity and imagination. I love it when children use their imagination to create something special. Sometimes we can learn a lot from our children.

Check out these posts to find out how we learnt about the sense of taste, touch, sight and hearing.






                                                   

Learning about the senses - Touch

             

We have been learning about the senses recently and I have already written about how we learnt about the sense of sight, hearing, touch and taste. The next sense we learnt about was the sense of touch. As before, we read one of Sally Hewitt's books, this time it was 'Touch that', all about the sense of touch.

         

Next, we played a guessing game. I got together 10 items that felt different, and placed them in a bag.

                

The children had to put their hand into the bag and feel an item and try and guess what it was they were feeling. They absolutely loved this game and we had to play it over and over again! I tried to make sure they closed their eyes while handling the objects to really make them use their sense of touch to think about the objects and what they could be. R found keeping his eyes shut extremely difficult. He would open his eyes after only a few seconds!

               

Then, I asked the children to describe what each of the items felt like and I wrote this down.

       

Finally, we made some cardboard feely hands! I got some cardboard and drew round the children's hands. Then, I cut them out and gave them to the children along with a bag full of fabric. We searched for different textures of fabric to use to stick on the cardboard hands. The children loved being able to explore the different fabrics. As they explored, I asked them to describe how the fabrics felt.

Next we will be exploring the sense of smell!

Learning about teeth

         

One day D stated that she would like to learn about teeth! I was surprised but it is not the first time she has surprised me with her unusual (is it unusual or is it just me?) requests. Maybe it was the activities we did last week about the sense of taste when we learnt about the tongue that sparked this interest, who knows? But, as a firm believer in following the child's lead, I began to put together some learning activities based on this topic.

                     

The first activity we did was some finger painting! This is always good fun for young children as it is quite easy for them to do successfully. I cut a mouth out of red paper, then put some white paint in a pot for the children to use to paint the teeth.

                     

I think it looked quite effective!

                     

This is R's attempt, a good try.

         

Whilst the paint was out, I thought of another painting craft. I cut a paper plate in half and told D to paint some red lips round the edge. Then, she drew some teeth inside.

                   

Next, I asked D to think of some adjectives that describe teeth. Here are the words she thought of. 

         

She wrote them down herself. She loves writing.

                     

Next, we talked about ways we could look after our teeth. D had become a bit tired of writing by this stage so I wrote down what she said.

                   

Whilst we were doing the writing activities, R had some colouring in to do.

                      

Here's what he got up to.

Learning about the senses - Hearing

               

The next sense we learnt about in our discovery of the senses was the sense of hearing. This was such a great sense to explore. We were able to do a lot of fun activities about this topic. First we read the book 'Hear this!'. It is the next book in our senses series and had a lot of good activity ideas in it. We learnt about how we hear and about how sound waves travel through the air from the object making the sound to your ear where the sound is heard. D was fascinated by this and has been going around telling people about the sound waves in the air. 

                     

This is the book we read. After this I asked the children to close their eyes and see if they could work out where I was when I walked around the room. I walked, then stopped and asked if they could point to me by listening to where the sound of my voice was coming from. They thought this activity was great fun and after they had had a few attempts at listening D said it was my turn to listen! So I sat down and tried to work out where she was from listening to the direction her voice was coming from.

                       

We spoke about which sounds we can hear outside.

                        

And which sounds we can hear inside.

               

We spoke about different pitches of sound, how some sound high pitched and some sound low pitched. I set up this activity for the children to explore pitch. Simply fill some glasses with different amounts of water, get a metal spoon, hit the glasses and listen to the sounds. I asked the children to listen to the sounds carefully and tell me which sounded high and which sounded low.

               

They really enjoyed this homemade musical instrument!

                        

We talked about different volumes and D told me things that sound loud and things that sound quiet. She started to write the words down herself but quickly got bored of writing so I finished the writing for her.

                 

Next, we moved onto vibrations and learnt how sound waves vibrate to produce sound. I followed the guidelines in the book to set up this activity. Take a bowl and place some clingfilm very tightly over the top. Then scatter some rice on top of the clingfilm. Use the wooden spoon to bang the sandwich tin close to the bowl but not touching it. You should be able to see the rice jump around due to the vibrations. 

                 

We started off with quite a lot of rice on top but discovered it didn't work too well. So, we took some off and it worked much better. Wowever, it still was not moving too much so I decided to try something else; salt.

                 

The salt is much lighter so jumped about much more easily. The children loved watching this. They loved to make the salt 'dance'!

                 

                         

Afterwards we spoke about the sound waves and how they vibrate. We filled in this worksheet.

             

The final activity we did was perhaps the favourite. I got some musical instruments and placed them on the floor. Next, I covered the instruments with a blanket. I played one instrument at a time and , after playing, I took the blanket away and asked the children which instrument I had just played. This is a really great activity to get your child practising their listening skills. It also involves sound discrimination which is a vital skill for speech development. You need to be able to distinguish between sounds in order to be able to produce them correctly as well as being able to distinguish between different words that you hear.

Check out these posts to see how we learnt about the sense of touch, taste, smell and sight.