It can be challenging to add fun to homeschool subjects that can become stale and boring, like language arts. After all, how can you possibly jazz up phonics?
Today, I’m sharing 24 borderline genius ways to relieve language arts boredom.
Sparking a Love for Language
Too, some of these tips can be used across multiple ages and other ideas will apply to only certain ages, but it will get your creative juices flowing.
- Try a scavenger hunt. This was a life saver for me while teaching my middle son phonics and sight words. And it doesn’t take long to set up. Use index cards, flashcards or sticky notes and hide them around the house.
- Send cards to grandma. For reluctant writers, sending a card to grandma or to extended family gives his writing a sense of purpose.
- Find a pen pal. A pen pal encourages a budding writer and other kids are not so judgmental of writing; it gives the novice writer a place to express his creative outlet whether it’s Lego playing, paper engineering or coding.
- Learn phonics, through nuts and bolts, make a tube, use letter cubes, create flip books, dig for them, rhyme it, make a phonics phone, an I spy game, make clip cards, and make an ant mobile.
- Go Fish. By grabbing more than one card deck, I wrote on the card and then the boys played together matching up sight words. Simple.
- Bingo. A fun way to learn letters, phonics, grammar and sight words.
More Language Arts Activities
- Add magnetic letters or puzzles to the refrigerator. My boys loved to stand and learn and the refrigerator was the perfect pallet.
- Scrabble, Jr. And my boys never tired of games that were fun.
- Combine P.E/phonics. Though I never recommend jumping off furniture in the house, it was the only way I could get one son to recite the vowels and sight words. He would jump off the couch and clap. Of course, this can be done outside when the weather is good, but at the time he was learning, it was pretty cold outside. So we did P.E. inside.
- Go see a Shakespeare play. The local college in our area hosted several plays throughout the year and it was a fun way for my boys to learn about subjects they initially found boring like Shakespeare.
- Make up a funny story. I would have the boys narrate back to me a silly story using the sight words or phonics word they were using. The sillier the better.
- Vocaroo. Your kids will love recording their voices so they can write back what they recorded.
- Mad Libs. They are always a hit in our home and anytime we could move away from a textbook or workbook to do a mad lib story, we did.
- Do crossword puzzles to learn spelling. Lists are a great way to learn spelling but crossword puzzles breathe life into learning spelling.
- A real audience counts for writing. Writers of any level are inspired when they have a breathing human being on the other end reading their creative expression. From elementary to high school writers, they can start a blog or enter creative writing contests.
- Have your kids keep a journal of words or phrases they find amusing. The first time my kids heard me use the phrase come-uppins or come-uppance they said it all day long. I never dreamed it was so comical, but apparently it is. They added it to their journal.
- Turn a book into a unit study. Look at a unit study about Charlotte’s Web.
- I love this idea of using matchbooks to do chapter summaries in a novel.
- Act out poetry or choose themed poetry. The art of poetry almost seems gone in the educational world. Poetry not only can teach complex sentence structure in an engaging way, but it is fun to learn. Grab some tips about the benefits of poetry from Mensa For Kids. And grab this Figures of Speech and Poetic Devices Free Printable Mini-posters.
- Do a book diorama.
- Make a coat hanger mobile book report. I was never into making my boys do written book reports because it did not engage them. With this idea, it is both hands-on and interactive, which is more meaningful.
- Do a cereal box book report. Another hands-on idea to illustrate what your child is learning.
- You have to check out the mint tin book report. So fun, tiny and engaging.
- Read a pop up grammar or punctuation book. If you have a hands-on learner, he’ll love this interactive book as way to learn grammar and punctuation.
Though it may seem that only science, history and art are easier to bring to life, language arts is the glue that bind the other subjects.
Teach language arts in a way that makes reading, spelling, phonics and even poetry a delight because when a child can read and write well, he nourishes his mind for a lifetime. What a gift!
Grab some other tips. How To Teach Your Homeschooled Children Shakespeare, Shakespeare Unit Study Starters and Free Middle and High School Homeschool Language Arts.
Hugs and love ya,
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