Turning Challenging Subjects Into Fun Projects at Home

One of the benefits of homeschooling your child is that you have the freedom to tailor your teaching method to your child’s unique learning style. 

Your child may love math and calculations, or maybe they groan at the sight of an equation and struggle to understand formulas. 

Your child might thrive with creative writing and pay close attention to correct grammar, or they might struggle with correct sentence structure and find writing an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion a daunting task. 

To help your child learn to love subjects they may not be fans of, we’ve come up with creative ways to shake up your homeschool lessons—because who doesn’t like making learning fun?

Math → Real-Life Challenges

• Run a “Family Store” at home where your child sets prices, calculates change, and tracks profits.

• Build a simple birdhouse, bookshelf, or LEGO city to practice measurement, geometry, and budgeting.

• Create math “escape room” puzzles with clues that require solving equations.

Science → Experiments & Field Studies

• Kitchen chemistry (baking soda + vinegar rockets, homemade slime, testing pH of household items). Here is a fun, educational idea that involves baking a pizza.

• Nature journal: track birds, insects, or weather patterns around your neighborhood.

• Build a Rube Goldberg machine using household materials to learn about physics.

History & Social Studies → Immersive Experiences

• Time-travel dinners: cook a recipe from the era you’re studying.

• Make a historical “Instagram profile” for a famous figure using art or a slideshow.

• Build a timeline on a wall with string, photos, and student-written captions.

Language Arts → Creative Expression

• Turn a book report into a podcast episode or a short video. You can use the Voice Memos app to record a podcast, or iMovie to edit a video if you have an iPhone.

• Write a play or skit based on a story you’re reading and perform it for the family.

• Create a “newspaper” from the perspective of characters in a novel.

Geography → Hands-On Mapping

• Bake a “map cake” of a country or state you’re studying and label it with icing.

• Make a 3-D salt-dough map with mountains, rivers, and cities. Check out this video to learn how to make a 3-D salt-dough map.

• Use Google Earth to plan a virtual “trip” and write a travel brochure.