Top 6 Reasons to Use Hands-on Projects

Why do hands-on projects?

Here are six main benefits of hands-on learning.

1. FUN

Children love them! (And lots of moms do to!) Doing hands-on activities increases motivation to "do homeschool." Your children will be more enthusiastic and pay more attention to their lessons.

2. CREATIVITY

Working on a project is the perfect opportunity to highlight your children's creative skills. Offer some guidance and lots of raw materials, and let your children be free to create an original product that reflects their own insights of the topic being studied.
Warning - Moms, be careful not to squelch the creative aspect of hands-on learning by over planning, over managing, and by unrealistic expectations. The finished product needs to be your child's and not your own. For example, let her use her own childish drawings instead of the lovely full color images you printed from the Internet, if she wants.

3. RETENTION

It has been proven through educational research that students will have a vivid and lasting understanding of what they DO much more than what they only hear or see. Make sure that your project directly ties to learning the facts of your unit study or curriculum. As you're creating, continually remind your children WHY you are doing this activity. The project gives them a concrete, visible foundation for learning the abstract, conceptual facts you want them to know.

4. ACCOMPLISHMENT

Persevering through a project and seeing it to completion gives your child a great sense of accomplishment! Seeing your child's pride in a job well done is worth your trouble of organizing and cleaning up a hands-on project. (Really, it is!)

5. REVIEW

This one is wonderfully tied to the sense of accomplishment. Your children will love to look at their hands-on projects again and again. By doing so, they are reviewing what they learned! When a relative or friend comes to visit and your son pulls out his model ship, he again reviews what he learned in homeschool. This review fosters retention of the subject matter! (See, it really was worth the clean up!)

6. COOPERATION

Your children can work together on a hands-on project. Or even if you have an only child (like me), you and your child are working together. This cooperation, this working together, is what being a family is. This is why many of us chose to homeschool in the first place. Doing hands-on projects creates family memories and strong relationships.

Many moms really dislike the hands-on aspect of their curriculum -- the crafts or the science experiments. It just seems like a huge time waster or a big mess to clean up. And then there's the issue of what to do with all these projects after they are made.

Well, yes, doing hands-on learning can mean more messes, more clean-up, and more preparation time. But there are some ways to make hands-on projects more palatable.

1. Leave them all for one day.

Postpone the hands-on activities for one day or for one entire week. Don't do any other school that day - just the fun stuff. You house will be a mess, but only for that one day. You will see your children's faces light up when you tell them that today's school is all hands-on.

2. Enlist the children in clean up.

This goes without saying, but it's a good reminder: Mom, you don't have to do all the cleaning. You can even tell the children that part of the bargain with having this all day, hands-on, fun homeschool is that at the end of the day they have to help clean up.

3. Consider that the price is worth it.

Some things cost a lot, but we're willing to pay big bucks because we really want them or because the quality is really good. Hands-on projects are like that. They do cost a bit by way of planning time, organizing and buying materials, actually doing the project, and then clean up. BUT the payoff is worth the hassle. Review the benefits to remind yourself.

4. Be creative with these finished products!

My favorite tip is to take digital photos of the project. I usually upload the images online at Flickr. Flickr is a great resource for homeschoolers to record their hands-on projects. Then I post the electronic photos on my blog, and save the images to disc as well. We forever have a record of the diorama or the recycled trash cat. And the actual craft can be thrown away (when your dear children are not looking, of course).

Winter Promise has a fabulous list of suggestions called, "What Should We Do to Enjoy Our Crafts Long-Term -- Without Them Taking Over the House?" So I'll just let you pop over there are read all the great ideas they have. (Scroll down a bit until you see that catchy question.)

The Homeschool Classroom also has a helpful article titled Organizing and Displaying Children's Artwork. There are several example photos there to give you great ideas.

5. Realize that these years pass quickly.

Cherish each moment, each lesson, each messy craft with your children. You are making memories. In a few more years, they won't want to do a craft or science project with you.

Hands-On Learning: Cross-Curricular Projects to Make Learning Come Alive!

is an eBook by Kris of

Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

A veteran homeschool mom of over 9 years, Kris shares her secrets of making learning fun with hands-on activities.

Click here to view more details