Over on my Australian Homeschool Hub Membership, one of the things I love to share about in our Chat Space, are lesson activities & ideas. This is suitable for eclectic learners, unschoolers who might be facilitating learning around a certain interest their kiddo has, and can even work for more traditional homeschoolers.
I do this because I used to spend hours looking through the internet for something that was suitable (usually free too!) and by the time I'd done that, often my kids would have lost interest. Argh!!! When Pinterest came along, things got better but often the links would direct me to things that I needed to buy etc. I often found that PDFs were hard to find through Pinterest too. So I decided to create my Australian Homeschool Hub. Inside the Chat Space is a thread dedicated completely to lesson ideas and activities.
I thought I'd give you an example of a topic and what you would find under that topic here. Let's take the Human Brain as an example of a topic you might be covering.
I list the name of the topic and then will list a range of activities you might find helpful just like this:
Human Brain
Amazing website called Neuroscience for kids found here: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/introb.html
Brain Hemisphere Hats by Ellen JM Chenry found here: https://ellenjmchenry.com/store/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Brain-Hat-2.0-download.pdf
Video all about the Brain by National Geographic found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=pRFXSjkpKWA&feature=emb_logo
Brain Anatomy Quiz is found here: https://www.free-anatomy-quiz.com/brain.html
Learning Guide with worksheet from the Podcast Learning Hour can be found here: https://www.childrenshour.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Brain-2-TCH-learning-guide.pdf
Human Brain Colouring In Sheet found here: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/sites/default/files/image/coloring_pages/pdffiles/AAB_human_brain_coloring_page.pdf
Human Body Lapbook can be found here: https://www.homeschoolshare.com/human-body-lapbook/
Here are some of our own personal memories around learning about the brain from years gone by:
Filling our a brain worksheet labelling each section
Learning about how the brain controls our sense of taste and experimenting with that theory and jelly beans!
Making brain hats
And the last memory was a lamb's brain dissection we did. After the kids got over how gross it was, we dissected the brains (purchased from the local butcher). They wore gloves and had a knife and chopping board each.
I wish I'd know about how to do a dissection properly. I was struggling myself to find info on how to do it. I've since learned that Outschool* run some dissection classes so I'd highly recommend taking one if you plan on doing dissections. Over the years we've done many but it would have been good to have known how to confidently do one back then. Here is the link to a Basic Dissection Class that your child could take called 'Beginning Dissection'.
Here's what I wrote down after that dissection pictured above:
We had learnt about the cerebrum being the biggest part of the brain and tried to identify the cerebellum. We had learnt that the top bit that looks like intestines is called the cerebrum cortex, that the 'bumps' are called gyri and the fissures are called sulci. We'd also learnt about the 2 hemispheres of the brain; right and left and how each has hemisphere has 4 lobes; the frontal, occipital, temporal and parietal lobes that help us to function in different ways.
I went on to write a song about the Brain and you can find that (and the lyrics) in my Australian Homeschool Hub Membership too.
If you're a Member of the Australian Homeschool Hub, you also get the chance to ask me to find activities for you for a specific topic and I will post them up into the Chat Space so you (and others) can find them grouped together easily.
If you're keen to have this kind of thing at your fingertips (saving you time and effort!) then please consider joining the Australian Homeschool Hub.
More soon! Lusi x
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