Monday, August 16, 2010

This Rocks Our Schoolhouse

Homeschooling is always an adventure. Every child has a different learning style and different strengths. Even twins. Ask me how I know.

Fun integrated into school always helps lighten the mood or an otherwise difficult subject area. Sometimes it's difficult to find just the right "fun" thing to implement, especially when it isn't necessarily conducive to crafting or your kids are over that age.

Years ago, as in maybe six, we saw a Schoolhouse Rock DVD set in the store. It had all the original Schoolhouse Rock songs on a couple of DVDs. Since Hubby and I grew up waiting with bated breath every Saturday morning for the cartoon breaks where they would show one of the songs, this was kind of a no-brainer. It was like Brady Bunch coming out on DVD was for me.

We wanted to show the kids all the fun songs that we would occasionally break out singing. What gave us cause to break out singing any of them is beyond me, but we find ways.

What we didn't realize at the time was that our kids would come to like them and how educational they were in such a little nutshell. This was to our benefit, especially the Grammar Rocks songs.

There have been times when we're working on our grammar and talking about parts of speech and one of the kids is struggling. I'll ask what song was about that part of speech, or I'll start singing one line so they can sing it in their head or with me. It has almost always gotten things moving in the right direction. Last school year we all sat down and watched all the grammar songs as a refresher.

We've put things to songs ourselves, like days of the week and months of the year when the kids were young, to prepositions and helping verbs as they were older. It helps to memorize lists, but it also helps to make things fun.

Schoolhouse Rock songs are fun and some are downright funny. You can check them out on YouTube. I can never pick my favorite, so here is one of them:


2 comments:

Ronnica said...

I think that Schoolhouse Rock has taught several generations by now!

Mari said...

Schoolhouse Rock really rocks!

 
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