This Page

San Juan Capistrano School District teacher strike;

Parents- now could be the time to consider schooling options for your family, maybe dabble a bit with the idea of homeschooling...or, if homeschooling is not in your future, you will be thinking about how to keep your kids learning.

Hopefully, the walk-out will be a short one, but during the time your kids are out of school, a plan might be helpful.

First, in your shoes, I would have my kids bring home their textbooks if they can. Find out where they are in Math, language arts, Science and Social Studies and plan on covering maybe a page a day in Math/language arts/handwriting/spelling. Subjects like Science and Social Studies are not usually taught everyday for the younger grades- pick 1 day to work on Social Studies and 1 day to work on Science. For High School, you could take the same sort of approach, but pick 1 or 2 days to dive into a subject for a greater length of time.

If you cannot get the textbooks, or you know the other kids still attending the school will not be doing academics during this time ( a really big bet there...) you could instead get a little creative with your week and concentrate on encouraging a love of learning and educational exploration.

Fun for all involved and a good way to cement math facts and teach them to compute at a faster rate.

• play with 2 dice- roll the dice and then have your students compute the 2 numbers the way you command: multiply, divide, add or subtract. Roll again and have them compute another function to the answer- the numbers will get bigger and your child's brain will be working, his understanding will be increasing.
  
• Write a number on a piece of paper such as 125; give each student a piece of paper and have them write as many different equations as they can to equal 125. If you only have 1 student, you play against them. The winner has the most equations.
• play multiplication/division or addition/subtraction relay. Student runs to one point, answers the flashcard quickly, runs to the next point and answers another.
• math war, card game- use playing cards, have a pile for each player. The players turn over 1 card each from their stack and then the winner yells out the answer to the sum of the two numbers, or subtract the smaller number from the larger, or use multiplication. Keep points.

Labels: homeschool California