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You have certainly heard of paperless offices but a paperless home school?
Don’t just go paperless in the workplace! If you happen to home school you have the unique opportunity to be as environmentally friendly as you like. While other parents are being required to buy their child’s weight in notebooks and supplies you can create a virtually paperless home school environment, depending on the age of your child.
Are you intrigued? We have been doing this for several years in my home and it works very well. Not only do we save money but there are fewer reams of paper to buy, and less trash to throw away, shred, recycle or otherwise deal with. There are different techniques for each learning level but here are some of the things we are doing at our house.
Paperless Home School in the Early Elementary Years
It is a simple thing to go paperless in the early years of home schooling. Younger children, up to about age ten, can have difficulty with abstract things and do very well when they can use all of their senses to help them learn. Here are some tips for these early grades.
Home School Language Arts
If you have home schooled very long you may have heard about the Charlotte Mason method. One of the basic techniques used requires the parent to read a story or chapter and then have young children narrate, or “tell back” what they have heard. It not only helps them with concentration, memory, and language skills, but by repeating classic literature they learn grammar and sentence structure by “ear” so to speak.
I happen to think it helps with linguistics as well, but I can’t prove it. My husband and I are both linguists so our children may come by languages naturally.
Writing skills can be accomplished at this early age by using a finger in a cookie sheet of cornmeal. This is especially good for boys whose fine motor skills often develop later than girls. The texture of the cornmeal and the process of making the letters with a finger helps your child remember the shape and look of the letter. If he is just learning to read have him make the sound as he writes the letter. Keep the cornmeal in a specially marked, sealed container with a bay leaf or two and it will last a long time. Once a child knows his letters and can make them in sand or cornmeal then an old fashioned hand held chalkboard or a white board is the next step. Words can be written on the board, and later whole sentences and quotes can be copied. You will have to continue to buy chalk or erasable markers but it tends to last longer than paper does. Bonus? It is way more fun!
Home School Math
Don’t freak out over home school math. You use it every day and so does your child. Playing with measuring cups and water (or more cornmeal) will help teach measurement and fractions. If you have a clock in your house that is not digital, then it is easy to learn to tell time.
Counting? Have him count real objects; the steps to his room, the number of blue cars that he sees on the way to the store, how many red legos he can put into a box. Writing those numbers can be accomplished in the same way as writing letters.
Learning to do math facts is easy when you use beans or counters to create the problems. If you are using the cornmeal, for example, just write the fact in the cornmeal. Place counters next to each number in the fact. Your child will be able to touch and see the concrete form of the problem while associating it with the abstract. All without one piece of paper being used.
Flash cards are another excellent, reusable tool for teaching math. They should be used in conjunction with other techniques. Flash cards can be made out of anything, including scrap paper, and can teach anything. You can put clock faces, addition, fractions, or algebraic equations on flash cards with great results. Sometimes I slip in a picture of a cookie or a special treat just to keep things fun.
Home School Geography
One of my favorite geography activities for almost any age is making maps and marking the cities, rivers, and important lakes. While many parents may print off blank map copies I prefer my cookie sheet and a rolling pin. Take your favorite rolled cookie recipe and have your children, with your help as necessary, cut out the shape of the country you are studying. Bake the dough until it is firm and golden and let it cool. Now, use frosting and decorating tips, colored sugar, candy or whatever you like to mark cities, capitols, rivers, and lakes. This is a great family activity.
Give you child the opportunity to spend time out of doors, observing rivers, lakes, and other landforms. One of the biggest benefits of home-schooling is the ability to give your children life experiences and not just academics.
Home School Science
Science is not an area that we go paperless because I like the kids to keep nature notebooks to record the things they see outside. These may be filled with drawings, descriptions, or photographs of the insects, wildlife, and wildflowers they see. There may be drawings of oddly shaped cloud formations, or a fossil we found in the creek, or even a pressed flower or leaf. This is where I spend most of my paper budget, nature notebooks and art papers. Of course you can make your own notebook from scrap paper.
And that is why I can only claim to be almost paperless.
Of Course, the Proof Is in the Pudding, Right?
Allowing our children to scrounge materials to build forts, work with the livestock, and spend time observing nature from the top of a tree has given them something that tests and reports could never give them. They love nature because they experience it every day.
I know. You don’t know me and I could just be saying all of this. What experience do I bring? How do I know it works over the long term? We have eight children and we have home schooled since 1989. We have two adult children that have graduated and gone on to successful lives. Our seventeen year old is starting his sophomore year at the local community college. The paperless home school works just fine, from toddler to l teen. It gets a little trickier as your child moves toward high school but it can be done. More about that next time.
Paper is only required for the diploma, not the education.
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