How to use kids' magazines for homeschooling
There are a great many lively, entertaining, and educational magazines available for children and they can be especially useful as a teaching aid within your homeschool curriculum.
Kids' magazines are published for all ages and grade levels - preschool through high school, so whatever age your children are there are magazines that can be very helpful in the planning and teaching of your curriculum.
Children also love magazines published especially for them and will delight in receiving a magazine in the mail that has many things for them to do. Each magazine has many age-appropriate activities that can be used for teaching. There are reading, spelling, and math activities. There are magazines about ecology, the environment, and science. There are stories, poems, and worksheets.
Amazon.com lists 72 best-selling kids' magazines, so there is a lot to choose from. To pick the magazines best for your homeschooling crew just go to www.amazon.com and do a search for children's magazines. Check out the ages and the subjects. There are specific science, animal, math, and ecology magazines. There are also magazines specific to girls or boys, or geared to specific sports activities such as baseball.
It is a good idea to pick out a main magazine that is age appropriate and published 12 times a year. This will give the child something new and exciting each month. Once you have picked out the main magazine, you could also get one or two other magazines that come only four to six times a year to fill in the gaps each month.
Children learn fast and thrive on new and exciting material, so providing them with the wonderful opportunity of magazines arriving in the mail can be just one way to build learning excitement in your child.
Amazon lists some great kids magazines for
Kids under 4
*Baby Bug
*Your Big Backyard
*Preschool Playroom
*Ladybug
Kids 4-8
*Spider
*Chirp
*Chickadee
*Click
Kids 8-12
*Cricket
*Muse
*National Geographic Kids
Other popular kids magazines are Ranger Rick, Zoobooks, Highlights for Children, Dogs for Kids, Disney and Me, Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty's, and Turtle.
Magazines such as School Science and Mathematics, Social Studies and the Young Learner, Know: The Science Magazine for Curious Kids, and School Arts - The Art Education Magazine for K-12, can be great teaching tools for your homeschool curriculum.
www.world-newspapers.com/children.html also lists magazines for kids including a few online magazines - Children's Web Magazine and Cyberkids.
You can use magazines in various ways to stimulate your child's education. You can either read to your child from them or assign them reading assignments. Most of the magazines offer interesting activities that can be used as teaching assignments. You can have your child read a story and then write an essay about the story. Or after reading a story you can discuss it and the child can write his own story.
The stories and activities in children's magazines can just be additional information you add to a lesson or they can be the whole lesson depending on what is available in each magazine and how the magazine relates to what you are teaching.
You can make copies of activity pages and use for tests. They can be used first as an activity and then as a test to see if the child has mastered the activity or to reinforce the learning the activity provided.
There are many different ways you can use magazines as a teaching aid in your homeschool program and just by going through the magazine and seeing what is there you may come up with your own creative ways to use the material.
The homeschool education program should offer a variety of ways to stimulate the child's learning. Magazines are just one of the many ways you can enrich your homeschool program. They might also provide you, the homeschool teacher with so many ideas that you can develop your entire curriculum around what you find in those wonderful kids' magazines.