Mix it up

A few other great ways to teach your busy bodies:

1. Charades - ask them to act out their answers to your questions or act out what you are trying to teach them

2.  Singing - ask them to sing the spelling of their spelling words.  Making up songs with the words will also really help them remember.

3.  Dance/Sports Bargaining - if you do need them to sit and write, such as sentences for example, tell them to do 2-3, then they can get up and dance to the radio for 2-3 minutes or bounce a ball on the back porch for 2-3. Then they have to run back inside or back to their chair and do another 2-3 sentence and so on.  It will take less time overall, if you don't have to haggle with them or spend any time yelling and screaming to sit still.

Learning on the run

Energetic kids can be quite difficult to teach... at least in the conventional way of expecting them to sit down, and listen.  Just like the hyperbole, the ants start crawling, distracting them from paying good attention and really processing anything, but that need to get up and move.

I have decided if I want my son to learn and pay attention to what I am saying,  I just take that "ants in your pants" feeling out of the equation.  How do I do this?

Easy... I teach him while he's moving.

We practice our spelling with jumping jacks.  "Spell gift"... and he goes "G" - "I"...and so on as he is doing jumping jacks.  We laugh when he has to start over. 

We add while we jog around the block.  I say "45 + 90?"  and he jogs and bam, answers! 

An alternative is to simply teach while doing things.  Take the math homework, go to a store, a park, a bank, somewhere... and make it real life.   Try to apply the concepts on the worksheet with something tangible.   They will have to stop periodically to write their answers, but it is way easier than asking them to sit for a half hour without moving and expecting it to be done. 

Make learning interACTIVE!   If your child can do any physical movements while practicing, the homework/learning experience will be a whole lot smoother and they will get so much more out of it!

Reading Games: The Silly Sentence Game

This is a great activity for engaging active kids in learning how to spell.  Spelling can be an inherently boring subject for children who are active.  There isn't much action in just simply asking a child to spell words over and over so engage them with "The Silly Sentence Game!"

Try this:
- Make index or flash cards with one word on each card. Place cards in shoebox or container. Cards should be a mix of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs.

- Ask child to take out 3 cards and make sentence with those 3 words…the sentence can be silly. The whole idea is just to get them encouraged to want to construct and read a sentence. For example, they pull out the words: fish, car, and talk. Ask them to lay them out, and make a silly sentence. So the child puts the words in this order: car, talk and fish. Then they say, “The car drove down the street to take me to go talk to the fish.” Be sure to show excitement, no matter how silly the sentence.

- Add to this by pointing to each chosen word to teach whether it is a verb, noun, adjective, etc. Then mix the words up and you make a sentence with them for your child.

- Continue mixing them in the shoebox til you have made all the silly sentences you want.

Colorful Math

Making math interesting for kids can be difficult.   Sometimes just sitting down with a pencil and paper can be extremely tedious and boring for young kids.  Think out of the box and let kids start doing tactile activities.

Grab one of your big containers of crayons

o Ask them to sort by color, by size

o Put them in a sequence and ask them to continue the sequence (ex: red, blue, orange, yellow, green…red, blue, orange, yellow…now what’s next?)

o Ask them to guess how many are in each sorted pile

o Then have them count how many are in each pile and make tally marks and practice writing numbers