If you’re a homeschooling or unschooling family you have a much better chance of spreading green values and living skills to your kids. Thus far, conventional schools, minus specific charters or private programs, tend to have a limited green scope. As a homeschool family, you can focus as much as you like on green issues, and hopefully your goal with this is substantial.
Tips that can help you green your homeschooling experience:
Borrow don’t buy: Curriculum pushers, as most homeschoolers know, can be hard core. However, there’s no reason to give in. If your choice is to use a set curriculum, you can buy used sets, go in on a set with another family (or two), photo copy for sibling use, or see if renting a set is possible.
You can also borrow books and videos on all topics at the library of course.
Get it used: Used homeschool materials are super easy to come by. Thrift stores, garage sales, and library sales are great places to get used, slightly used, or even brand new (that otherwise might be tossed) materials. Look for school and daycare sales. Often if a daycare is relocating or closing up shop you can get killer deals on all sorts of learning materials.
Make learning renewable: If you don’t have to keep careful records, you can invest in a large chalkboard or white board for doing things like math problems, drawing maps, and learning letters. If you do need to keep records, you can adjust this method by using a digital camera to record progress.
Supplies: Like for kids in school, any learning supplies for homeschoolers can be found in recyclable or reused version. There are plenty of recycled papers, pencils, pens, and so on you can invest in vs. conventional versions. Also look for non-toxic versions of things like glue and crayons.
Don’t make green a “lesson”: Live green to live green. Sure you have more time to do special green projects like start a worm composting project or build your own rain barrel, but really, green living is best learned as life experience, not a lesson. Instead of reading about and discussing recycling in the home, do it on a regular basis.
Field trips: Because you’re at home trips to the forest, recycling center, paper mill, community garden, beach clean-ups, and more are within an easier reach. Contact local green businesses and see if your child can shadow for a day.
More green homeschool tips to come…
[image via stock.xchng]
And just think of all that paper we are saving – the millions of forms kids come home with daily from teachers. LOL We always buy used if possible. But I tend to get each kid their own student book instead of making copies. (Sometimes copywrite laws are in place and you can’t anyways.) We don’t use a lot of workbook-type curriculum though, usually just math & this year Science. But the energy, paper, and ink used by me printing off sheets is more than what it would take to produce the book itself. Plus it is way more expensive for me to do the printing myself. But some things we do print because I bought e-book versions (one being our history maps).
Well put. Also, via homeschooling there are a lot less diesel fueled bus trips and ziplocked bag lunches going in to the world.
Another cool thing that I use with my Jr High and up kids is to have them blog rather than journal, and use Microsoft office for their writing rather than paper.
Using an office program when coupled with a digital camera and good phot program allows them to be creative on a new level.
We still do nature journals, sketches and such on paper ..but we use other things like writing on large leaves adn then laminating and making pages that way.