Instead of assigning standard essays, how about encouraging your child to do a book review in a medium of her choice? She can make a video blog or a podcast or a slideshow. These days children are adept at using video and audio recording, whether on a laptop, tablet, or phone. She could also write fan fiction or adapt scenes from her book into a screenplay. It all depends on her talents and interests.
To practice area and perimeter, she can use graph paper to design her dream home, drawing each room on the paper to certain size specifications. If she’s a LEGO fanatic, she could use those for the same project. I once used players’ football stats to help a college freshman — a huge NFL fan — in his statistics course. Sports data could become a whole project for a student studying percentages, averages, and coordinate grids.
For ecosystems, he could grow his own plants, start a compost, or identify the flora and fauna in the yard or neighborhood. To learn about evolution, he could do research on your household pet and figure out how Buddy evolved and came to be domesticated. Or he could design a pack of original animals who have evolved in interesting ways.
If she’s into sports, she could study the physiology of athletes and how they train their bodies to maximize performance. If she likes video games, she could analyze the physics of the characters and gameplay and determine how realistic a game is. For chemistry, there are all sorts ofWe want our students to re-engage with learning after a tough, remote-schooling year.