Homeschool Extracurricular Activities for Quarantine
How to Bring Extracurriculars to Your Home
Suddenly everyone in America has been thrust into homeschooling as social distancing becomes mandatory. It doesn’t have to be boring or as hard once you learn how to bring the extracurricular activities home!
Finding homeschool extracurriculars isn’t as difficult as you may think with all the amazing resources the internet provides.
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Coronavirus Caused Homeschool for Me
I know why your here.
Coronavirus 2020 has grown out of control. In an attempt to slow the spread of the virus and protect our nation’s hospitals from quickly being overloaded, everything is being shut down day by day.
Schools have been closed for 3 weeks, some for 6, and others through the rest of the school year.
You probably don’t homeschool, and that is ok. I have lots of reasons that homeschooling is the best choice for my family and we’ve altered a lot of things to make it happen and to make it keep happening!
But let’s be real. Homeschooling is hard!
“Homeschooling takes the typical patience required by parenting and multiplies it by 100.”
If you need helpful ideas every day for fun homeschool activities follow my Facebook page or this new IG that popped up in response to Coronavirus with fun homeschool activities every day! I’ve been homeschooling 6 years and I know how hard it can be so want to help where I can.
You not only need to now know how to get along with your kids, guide them, and help them become strong able adults.
Nope. NOW you need to teach them reading, writing, arithmetic, and oh my gosh so much more!
And you know what the real challenge is? It actually isn’t that you n6w have to recall things you learned 20-30 years ago and kind of sort of remember to now teach it to them!
The challenge is that everyone learns differently. What is easy for you isn’t easy for them. And creativity must strike or fortunately in response to this virus outbreak there of tons of free resources to help you over this hurdle.
I Have Been Quarantined For 3 Months… COVID-19?
Nope. This virus hasn’t been known to be in America that long, though I have remained home that long.
Why and how you might ask?
I have a 3-month-old. My last baby (this is my third) was born into a terrible cold and flu season for my family that led us to learn 11 amazing ways to boost our immune systems naturally!
But even with us feeling healthy, I have not wanted to risk the kids getting sick. With a newborn and a highly sensitive 4-year-old it just wasn’t worth it to me. We work from home and homeschool, so I just decided to take it a step further and bring all the extracurriculars to our home for a couple months (and now longer).
At first, I thought finding extracurricular activities to do at home was pure craziness… but then I found amazing resources.
You Can Bring Extracurricular Classes to Your Home
I wanted my kids in lots of fun classes like gymnastics, art, music, and PE.
Though I can’t bring all of that home I can run pretty creative PE classes as a personal fitness trainer like “fun exercises to do with your toddler through big kid.” But everything else is not my specialty!
So I did a bunch of research on Google, Pinterest, and Amazon and found some really amazing ways to bring extracurriculars to our home… and honestly for less than we would have spent out of the house.
So now let’s learn to bring all those fun classes home while you practice social distancing!
RELATED: Are you pregnant too and want to know your risks with COVID-19?
7 Extracurricular Lessons to Do From Home
1. Piano
Ok so we actually bought a keyboard because it is way cheaper and only missing one octave of keys. Meaning anything she is going to learn through years of homeschool piano classes will be attainable on this keyboard.
We spent about $40 more than the cheap ones and got an amazing full set with a stand, stool, music stand, microphone, and headphones. Yup, we got the full Monty for around only $100 bucks! (You can grab that one here.)(But I don’t really understand how they usually come without the stand and seat?)
Though you can completely learn through youtube and printing your own songs, we picked up a super basic book to teach some easy songs and instill the love for playing before the formalities. Plus, it comes with letter stickers for the keys that are so helpful my 4 year old already has 2 songs memorized!
2. Ukelele
This instrument makes such a beautiful sound and may become their passion, or lead to building a wonderful base for instruments with more strings like guitar and violin.
A professional ukelele is really affordable and we got this introduction to ukulele book for kids for guidance and follow along on Youtube lessons.
Searching for inspiration? Have you ever seen 12-year-old Grace Vanderwaal from America’s Got Talent? Super inspiring!
3. Canvas Painting
My daughter painted one picture on canvas she was given as a gift and was absolutely hooked! By picking up only some basic acrylic paints, artists’ paintbrushes, and some small canvases you can follow along with online classes and easily learn to create a masterpiece step-by-step!
We bought a huge stack of flat canvases and just frame them for learning which makes it so much more affordable than I thought canvas painting would be!
We also found this awesome painting tutorial YouTube channel that posts a new tutorial every day!
4. Geology Club
This is where my big kids’ (my nine-year-olds’) passion lies this year so have built our own resources to bring the learning home.
- We got the two books above for Christmas which are, bright, colorful, and absolutely amazing resources for geology studies and only around $10 each! (We bought tons of encyclopedia type books like this for Christmas and these are the most affordable AND getting the most use!)
- Instead of a 3rd subscription box last month, we got this Rock On Board Game for kids! Which came with so many rock specimens included it was worth the price on that alone! Plus the educational bingo and trivia games are fun too!
- We picked up a rock tumbler with everything included! AND went rock hounding in our community and tumbled those rocks too. (Which we could identify from the previously mentioned books.)
- We got some crack your own Geodes that were a lot of fun and really pretty to display because of course my kids have their own rock museum in our shed
RELATED: Home school PE Classes for Social Distancing
5. Yoga Class
My kids have always taken a yoga class. It is so much more valuable than just stretching.
Yoga has tons of benefits for both children and adults such as:
- increases flexibility
- increases strength
- helps you practice mindfulness
- teaches children listening skills
- teaches how to follow directions
- yoga can teach you how to modify challenges to best conquer them
- Yoga teaches deep breathing techniques
- and more!!!
Since there is no class where we are now, we follow along with Cosmic Kids Yoga for a fun class that can keep any age entertained!
6. Coding for Kids
This is our favorite subscription box. Kids subscription boxes are a way to spend even less than you can on any monthly class, and have the directions for it sent straight to your door.
Subscription boxes lack the direction a teacher provides but they teach you how to self-teach because the activities are so darn intriguing!
Lots of subscription boxes for kids are available on Amazon!
We tried out Bitsbox which is coding for kids and our first choice subscription box love! Your child gets access to am easy interface where each month they learn a new aspect of coding to create their own “tablet games.”
It is AWESOME and available as a 3 month or 6 month program!
7. STEM Club
So once again, not an actual “club” but our version of one through a subscription box.
It is really awesome there are tons of STEM or even STEAM (which stands for science, technology, engineering, art, and math which you can get here) available these days but the one we chose to bring science home was this one!
I think they were most intrigued by building their own bouncy balls the first week. Of course there’s a wonderful mini lesson that comes with each activity too.
Wrapping Up How to Do Extracurricular Activities at Home
When I first thought about bringing all our extracurriculars home I thought it was impossible, Instead it is amazing!
I have been able to see my children learn and grow in a safe, healthy, comfortable environment in way I would have never imagined!
I hope you enjoy bringing some of these extracurricular activities to your home for your family too whether we are still in quarantine or not!
More Activities for Kids at Home
- PE classes to do on Youtube for Kids
- Great Exercises to Do with Your Toddler
- Amazing Lunch Ideas for the Whole Year
