5 Tips on Teaching Homeschool Subjects I Loathe

I have been on a homeschool confession sort of roll and in that spirit I might as well confess my dislike for math.

All you math lovers don’t leave because I need you here on my blog.

Teaching homeschool subjects I loathe I guess really boils down to just one and it’s math but I am so thankful that none of my boys feel the same way.

However, these tips I am sharing today will work for any homeschool subject.

The tips are really kind of like a formula I have followed when we have covered tough subjects or ones that we had less interest in.

5 Tips on Teaching Homeschool Subjects I Loathe

Believe me, it’s not because I am a brain-iac in math that my boys actually love math, though I do feel differently about it now than I did when I first started teaching my boys math.

Looking back now and if you have a math bent, I think you would agree with me that sometimes math can be plain easy to teach because of the predictable formulas and operations that you follow.

That part of math saved me in a sense once I figured out it was like learning a foreign language in a way.

It is sort of like defining terms.  Once you understand the operations, terms and formulas, a lot of it is practical sense.

However, before getting to that point, I struggled with picking math curriculum for my boys because I didn’t want them to not like it.

I knew my dislike of math was traced back to my school days.

It is actually kind of ironic or a twist because I did not have good math teachers or start to enjoy it until high school.

Up until that time I struggled with math.  I had dedicated public high school teachers who allowed me to stay after school and they would tutor me.

Oh, I soon caught up and did four years of math and took advanced classes in the end, but I still remember my struggle and dislike.

What I am trying to say is that the beginning mattered more than the ending because it set the tone for how I still feel today.

I just wanted you to know all that background because our weakness affects the way we set out to teach a homeschool subject we loathe.

Look at the these tips that I learned that made math a favorite subject for my boys and that really can be applied to any homeschool subject you loathe teaching.

One/ Understand the approach.

What I didn’t realize about myself was that I needed less drill when I was younger and longer time in between concepts to think about them.

I needed something to add a mystery of suspense to math and to allow me to think about it, which is how I still am today.

You know for the most part I don’t make knee jerk decisions and it’s the way I approach learning too.

Remembering this, I took a long time looking over math curriculum to give my boys a good head start and settled on Singapore Math as a good beginning math curriculum.

I was such a good choice because it was not boring and it is a mastery approach, meaning it had less drill and kill.

It focuses on conceptual understanding, which was lacking in my own elementary years.

Also, I liked how it focused on concrete things before moving the boys too quick onto abstract.

Knowing that I wanted my sons to understand the concepts before rote memorization, I feel, made all the difference for them.

Math just made sense to them from the beginning, unlike my own experience.

For any subject, think about the approach they use whether it’s a spiral approach with lots of repetition or has some repetition, but moves on at a steady pace.

Two/ Use as many hands-on manipulatives as you like and don’t get rid of them too fast.

My first son was the only one I rushed when using math manipulatives because when the math curriculum stopped giving me instruction like: “Show your child this operation with blocks, shapes or a number line”, I stopped doing them.

I realized soon after that my sons benefited from using the hands-on activities longer.

So I soon ignored the advice to use them only in the younger grades, again, because I recalled my limited use in the younger grades with hands-on manipulatives.

Why do we have to leave off those vital things in the first or second grade?  There simply is no rush.

Each of my boys on their own gradually moved away from using them as they understood the concepts.

If they couldn’t show me with a picture or manipulative, I knew they didn’t fully understand.

Three/ Games are NOT just for young learners.

Then another thing I did was to be sure I kept the subject fun by adding in games.

A simple deck of cards used to drill multiplication facts took priority anytime over a boring worksheet.

Tell a boy we are going to play War with the cards and he is in and brushes up too on his math facts so that he can win.

Dominoes, Uno and Monopoly were called “school” and took the place of our math time on many occasions because again I was determined for my boys to feel differently about math.

Four/ Read a math story.

When they were little, I used math time to read aloud.

I loved it when I was unpredictable when assigning them their math for the day.

Reading a living math book for the day was always a winner.

Living Math Books for Homeschool Middle School Too

I never minded that the boys felt like they were getting away with not doing school because we only read.

It hasn’t hurt one bit to let them feel that that way because it always added an air of fun to math.

Too, though there are many living math books for the younger grades there are also many books to use even for middle school.

One book, Lawn Boy, I read to one of my sons who struggled a bit more to show him the value of learning math.

He needed a valid reason to learn math and making money is certainly an inspiration for learning.

Too, I didn’t want them to sigh when they heard the word “math” and I did want to invoke warm feelings toward learning math.

Five/ Join a Chess Club.

Even though at the time we lived far out in the country and it was about a 40 minute drive one way to meet with other homeschoolers, my boys played chess with other homeschoolers.

It helped to burn off some of that mental energy they had for numbers as they grew.

It wasn’t anything formal, the other moms had boys and girls too who enjoyed being challenged and had math lovers.

These five time tested tips have been the starting point when teaching homeschool subjects I loathed.

Not wanting to model for my sons my dislike for any subject, I can say today that though math may never be my favorite subject to teach, it certainly has way more appeal to me as we homeschool.

What is your least favorite subject to teach? What tips work for your kids?

Hugs and love ya,

Also, look at tips at my post 25 Creative and Tasty Edible Math Activities that Keeps Learning Fun.