Patria Lincoln

No better phrase fits the 2020-2021 school year than "different strokes for different folks"! Whether your family has chosen in-person, virtual or homeschool learning, we know that it wasn't an easy decision for your family. If you have chosen home-schooling for this year, this post may help provide some organization inspiration as your kitchen table becomes the classroom.

Whether you are new to homeschooling or are looking to up your organization skills, we've pulled together a few of our favorite tips that we hope will help you ease into this school year feeling prepared.

Find a consistent spot for homeschool.

Consistency is key! Studies show that having a place dedicated to working helps the brain focus its attention to the task at hand. While it may not be feasible to convert an entire room to homeschooling, creating a workstation at the kitchen or dining room table will help your child focus on schoolwork with limited distraction. The Create-a-Space Bundle is a great all--in-one way to easily store all of your homeschool supplies. The magnetic, sealable pouches can store manipulatives for counting or letter practice while the circular tray can house writing utensils, markers, glue sticks and any other items needed quickly and easily. The circular tray can also be picked up quickly at the end of your school day so your table can serve dinner. Pulling these items out at the beginning of each school day will create a routine and help your child's brain switch from kitchen table to desk.

Color code.

Easily track and locate different work by color coding. Not only will this help make your home school a bit more colorful and fun, it will help both you and your child to organize work by color. The Write & Wipe Pockets are great for being eco-friendly too! Reuse worksheets by sliding them into these dry-erase pockets and fit in with your color coordination. Color coding is also really helpful if you have more than one child learning at home. Having a distinction between work for different children, subjects or days can help you as an educator and parent locate work or items more easily.

Make sure everything has a place.

Just like socks and shoes have a designated spot in your home, so should school work. Rather than letting papers pile up and get lost, figure out a filing system that works for you that ensures everything school-related has a place. Repurposing plastic bins, bookshelves or magazine holders are a great way to get started with figuring out a system using items you already have in your home. Don't forget about items like  dry erase markers and your supplies! This Magnetic Whiteboard Storage Pocket is easy to stick on your dry erase board so that your items don't always end up in your child's supply bin.

Get creative with how you store items.

You don't have to dedicate an entire room in your house to homeschooling to make it work! Think of creative ways to store items that will not be used after your school day ends. Are there places you can hang items, rather than lay them down? What can be folded up and tucked away? Are there items in your house that can be repurposed for storing homeschool material? While it can be daunting to think about, we promise that homeschool materials do not have to take over your life! One recommendation is adding zip ties to the end of pointers, rulers or other items that have a hole to them. Hang these up using magnetic hooks to make them easy to locate while still being out of the way.

Similar to how we all faced quarantine, we're all in this new and likely challenging school year together, even if that looks different to everyone! What are your tips for home school organization?

Sensory Play: Plant a Veggie Patch!

Looking for a way to freshen up your little one’s play food adventures? We had an absolute blast teaming up our Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set with some homemade ‘soil’ for this awesome hands on vegetable planting activity.

What you need:

• Learning Resources Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set
• 2 batches of cocoa cloud dough (to make one batch mix 2 cups all purpose flour, ¼ cup cocoa and ¼ cup vegetable oil and then crumble the mixture together by hand)
• Measuring cups
• Spoons
• Muffin tins

Making the Soil

It can be tempting to make the sensory base ahead of time to avoid too much mess but I promise you it is such an enriching part of the activity to get your kiddo involved with the making process. My 3 year old loves getting to measure and pour out the ingredients! We made two batches of the cocoa cloud dough. For each batch we mixed 2 cups of all purpose flour with ¼ cup cocoa powder.

Then we added ¼ cup vegetable oil and stirred it with a spoon. The next part is really important to make sure you get a good consistency. Use your fingertips to squish and crumble the mixture together. My daughter loved doing this and she kept commenting on how soft and smooth it felt.

You want to end up with the cloud dough looking nice and brown. It should hold together when formed into balls, but when you apply pressure or poke it, the mixture will crumble apart.

Let’s get Planting

Once we had our ‘soil’ we picked out our favorite vegetables from the Farmer’s Market set. This was a great opportunity for my daughter to recognize which pieces of the set were fruit and which were vegetables. So much descriptive language and vocabulary being shared! To plant the chosen veggies we had two muffin tins ready, along with a spoon and our cloud dough ‘soil’.

My little one carefully added some ‘soil’ to each of the muffin tin compartments. This was great for fine motor skills and we even linked it to some early numeracy by using simple volume words such as empty, full, more and less.

Next my daughter got to choose which veggies to plant where. You would not believe the delicate thought process that went into choosing each one. She was so careful to make sure that her precious veggies were planted in the middle of the soil, sometimes even making a little hole for them to perch in.

It was fantastic to see my toddler so hands on with the sensory material. It is important to give your children opportunities to build their confidence when using different sensory materials. I love that she confidently touches materials and asks questions / makes descriptive comments about them.

Each time she added a new vegetable she was working her fine and gross motor skills hard. She regularly crossed the midline to place and plant the vegetables which is an important skill for children to develop because it helps to promote the coordination and communication between the two sides of the brain.

Ways to Extend the Play

The main event here was most definitely getting to plant the vegetables in the cloud dough, but there are so many great ways to extend the play. Here’s a few ways we continued to enjoy this set up:

• Numeracy links - simple counting questions such as how many green vegetables did you plant? Or how many vegetables are in each muffin tin?
• What’s missing - with just one muffin tin in front of them, ask your child to carefully study what’s in front of them. Then ask them to close their eyes while you remove one of the vegetables. Can they tell you which one is missing? Let them remove one while you close your eyes too, they will think they are being so sneaky!
• Guess which veggie - a simplified version of Guess Who where your child can ask you questions about the vegetable you have in mind to try and narrow down the answer.
• Re-planting - yup it’s as simple as that, take all the vegetables out, pour out the ‘soil’ and re-plant those vegetables in a different container. You could use a large storage container to make it more like a farmer’s field.

We truly had so much fun with this set up. It allowed for my toddler to be hands on at all times and there are so many great links to numeracy and literacy learning, as well as fine and gross motor development. The great news is that you can store the cloud dough in an airtight container or bag for use months later too. Don’t worry if you don’t have our Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set, you can enjoy this activity with many different toys such as mini dinos, insects or even making muddy pools for people counters. Happy learning!

Digital technologies and the ever-shifting needs of the modern job market are continuously transforming how children and adults learn, what they prioritize in their curriculums, and how knowledge is acquired and retained in a digital age. While the public school system is unlikely to experience any dramatic shifts in the years to come due to many factors that are out of our control, that doesn’t mean that other trends in the education sector are not on the rise, like instilling a love of STEM from a young age or learning how to leverage technology to learn online.

Now that students are forced to stay at home and honor the lockdown rules, there is an even greater incentive to embrace and adopt the growing trends in order to make at-home learning a breeze and celebrate their success and achievements. With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at the up-and-coming trends that will make a big impact on learning and personal development.

Teaching complementary subjects

When students decide on a career path, it’s usually to specialize in a specific field of study where they will spend their time involved in their work, most likely without making significant contact with scientists and professionals from complementary industries. It can be easy for a young scientist to get so wrapped up in their field of study that they forget that their colleagues from other fields might hold the answers they are trying to get.

This is why cross-field collaboration is so important in the modern scientific world, and why collaboration and multi-disciplinary science will become more commonplace in the future. One of the biggest problem of modern scientific communities, for example, is that there is not enough collaboration. This, for example, means that a molecular biologist might spend years trying to make an experiment work, having no idea that a physicist or a geneticist might be able to uncover the process that will get them there. This is a problem that collaboration and multi-disciplinary science can fix.

Inspiring learning from a younger age

Aside from inspiring young students to take an interest in multiple subjects and the scientific field, and aside from teaching them the importance of inter-disciplinary collaboration, it’s also important to note that education of the future will start from a progressively younger age. Even as we speak scientists from around the world are trying to uncover the secrets of how young children adopt and retain information and how they develop their interests and inclinations.

As the child grows and begins to explore the world around them, it will be up to the professionals and the parents to use engaging methods like using this fun geometric heart STEM challenge to educate young children and inspire them to become passionate about learning from a very young age.

Online learning is blossoming quickly

One of the biggest trends that is already transforming the way we learn and retain information is online learning, or better known in the digital world as eLearning. Even though individuals and freelancers are popularizing this trend, it is the innovative and professional eLearning hubs like Clutch Prep that are leading the entire industry forward with vast learning resources, engaging videos and curriculums that complement the textbooks that students use in school.

The key here is to create a fun and engaging online learning environment that will make adopting and retaining information easier, while inspiring passion and love for lifelong learning. What’s more, online learning platforms allow students to broaden their interests and delve deeper into the subject matter, which will ultimately inspire them to build a thriving and well-rounded career.

Using virtual reality for learning

Much like eLearning is making education fun and rewarding, virtual reality is making the modern learning environment more engaging for the tech-savvy student. VR headsets are nowadays becoming more affordable, and students are able to learn in a fully-digital environment, allowing teachers to take them on grand learning adventures without ever leaving the classroom.

Students will soon have the ability to learn about the solar system by traveling through space in a VR spaceship, or to explore the intricacies of the human body by shrinking down to the size of a blood cell. VR technology can serve many a purpose, and even help the youngest among us to learn coding and various computer sciences with ease.

Weaving artificial intelligence into the process

Finally, artificial intelligence is making a big impact on education as we speak, and it might not get adopted on a grand scale for some time, it will still disrupt and ultimately change the way teachers communicate knowledge to their students. Introducing AI-driven technologies into the classroom will improve scoring, help teachers discover the student’s pain points and knowledge gaps, and it will help them optimize the entire curriculum for maximum retention and student engagement.

Wrapping up

The education sector is always evolving with technological innovation, but it’s also important to note how students are adopting new trends at home and in the classroom. Be sure to use these insights to gain a better understanding of the course that education is taking, and how your children can use these trends to one day become successful, thriving adults.