 Hey everybody, welcome to The Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is a let's chat how to make learning fun. So I don't know about you, but the last thing I want is a boring, dull learning to be happening. I wanna be enjoying what we're doing and I want Emily to be enjoying what we're doing. I want learning to be something she looks forward to, something she's excited about and to be looking forward to it and to be excited about it. In her mind, it has to be fun. So today I'm going to share five simple tips to make learning fun in your homeschool. Tip number one is to use incentive. Now I'm not talking about anything giant. You don't have to go buy something or spend tons of money to do this. I'm talking a little, like little teeny incentives that make your child look forward to a lesson, especially if it's a lesson that maybe has to be done whether it's fun or not or maybe that's not as easy to make fun. So when Emily was learning to read when she was in like preschool to kindergarten, we used to use many chocolate chips and we would put them down the sides of her paper for any time she had to read fluency. So those sight words or those fluency sentences that she needed to do that there's just, not a ton of ways you can make super fun, we would use little tiny mini chocolate chips and we'd put them down the side. So when she'd finished reading the word or the sentence, she'd get to eat that mini chocolate chip and by the time she was done, she may be eight, 12 on like the best day, the most she ever ate was maybe 12. Then spoil her appetite, it wasn't like anything horrible but for her, she knew that something that maybe wouldn't have been super fun like fluency meant mini chocolate chips and so she looked forward to it. There was no pushback, she wasn't gonna be bored, she was excited and thought it was a blast to be able to read and get mini chocolate chips. We still do that. If there's a lesson that we really need to get done, I'll say, hey, if we finish this lesson, you can have a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup or we add snacks, you know, like, oh, let's add snacks. Anytime you add food, it makes it more fun. Little incentives. For writing, I let her go into my stash of special pens and choose any kind of pen she wants to write with because it's incentive for her to want to do it if she gets to use something special that she wouldn't normally get to use like one of mommy's pens. So anytime you can add a little something, you know, let them bring a special toy to the table. Let them, you know, have a little friend like a, you know, one of the little stuffed animals or a Lego mini figure to do work with or let them, you know, use some sort of crazy glasses to read when they're reading or use those crazy little pointer fingers to help, you know, follow the words. We used to use the little witches fingers at Halloween or crazy pointers or whatever it takes. Use some sort of special incentive to spice it up and make it more fun. Tip number two is to make it interactive. Make it something your child can interact with. Instead of it just being pencil and paper or even pen and paper, make it something that they can actually physically touch and do. So one time we were practicing addition and we used Legos. And so all of the like smaller four peg Legos, I wrote single numbers on. And then on the larger where you would put the two together, I wrote bigger numbers like the sum. And so she would have to physically build the sum in order to do the math problem. And so that was something that she was interacting with. She was, you know, being hands-on. She was doing something like that. You can do that with, let's say you have a worksheet in your curriculum and you wanna use your curriculum that you chose that's maybe 15 or 20 problems of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, whatever your child's learning. And you want to make it more fun. You wanna make it more interactive, but you still wanna do the curriculum that you purchased. Take those same 15 or 20 problems. And instead of having them just sit there with pencil and paper, write them one index cards and hide them all of your house and make it this fun thing. They have to go hunt for it and then tell you the answer. And then you just write it down for them. Or maybe it's a relay race, you know, they have to run to one into the house to get it and then run it back to you and see how fast they can answer it. You can still make even just the regular pen and paper, things that you'd be using your standard curriculum form more fun by making it leap off the page. Find a way to make it interactive. Find a way to make it something your child can interact with. Something hands on. You don't have to buy anything extra. You don't have to have all the extra manipulatives. They're nice, they're fun, but you don't need them. You can just make it simple. Just write the problems and have them run and go find them. Hide them around the house. Quiz each other, you know. Emily used to do math facts while bouncing on her exercise ball because it made it more fun. And for her, it helped her remember them. So it can be simple little things that make it more interactive. Number three is dress up. You guys know I am the first one that will put on a silly costume and that all started because the more engaged, the more I go all out, the more excited Emily gets. So if I put on the full Professor McGonigal costume, which you guys know, I dorm the beginning of every school year, Emily gets super excited for our school years because I went that extra mile. I dressed up. It doesn't just have to be you or even a full costume. You can just wear a hat or you can just wear a lab coat for science or just wear the goggles on the top of your head if you're gonna do a special science experiment. You being more engaged is going to make them want to be more engaged. If you're learning about dinosaurs, let your kids make dinosaur masks and wear them to the table. Let them roar once if the answer is yes or roar two if the answer is no. Let them become so engaged and engrossed with it by dressing up and acting it out that they don't even realize they're learning because they're having so much fun. That is just such a simple way to do something. Make a mask, wear a hat, a coat. If you're studying cold weather, wear a jacket, simple little things like that that just make them more engaged and more interested in what you're learning. Tip number four is to play a game or in this case, substitute a game for a maybe more boring lesson. So let's say you need to learn parts of speech. Maybe instead of just learning parts of speech with whatever your curriculum is if your child finds that boring, maybe you use Mad Libs or maybe you use a game that studies parts of speech. If you want to learn about dinosaurs, there are plenty of games that you can use to learn more about dinosaurs by playing them. One of our absolute favorite games is Professor Noggin because there are so many different topics and it's trivia but you get to roll the dice and ask the questions and you have that extra layer of gameplay that just makes it more fun. So anytime you find that you need a little bit of extra practice in a certain subject or maybe you're starting to hit those days where things are a little bit more dull, skip the curriculum and maybe play a game in place of it and whatever that lesson is. Look at your next lesson. If it's addition and subtraction, play an addition subtraction game. You know, if it's parts of speech or if it's punctuation, play a game that's parts of speech or punctuation. Just substitute playing a game in place of whatever lesson you were going to do then maybe isn't quite as fun. And tip number five is to make it an experience. So using all of those things that we just talked about, if you can make it an experience, make it an experience they won't forget. Bring it to life, take them on a field trip. If you're studying the ancient time periods and you have a museum that has ancient artifacts, go there. If you're studying animals, go to the zoo. Let them experience those things in real life. Let them see them, let them touch them, let them experience them. If you can't see it, touch it, experience it. Because I know right now, field trips are not the easiest thing to do. Maybe try to find a YouTube, a virtual tour, something that they can at least experience it through virtual. And there are tons of those. You can search on YouTube, search on the internet, virtual field trips. Somebody, somewhere took a tour that you can experience whatever it is you're learning about and feel almost like you're there and experiencing it for yourself. I hope you found these tips helpful and I hope they help add a little bit of fun to your home school. And if you have tips for making learning fun, please leave them in the comments down below.