50+ Magical Ways to Learn Together This Week

Looking for some fun ways to learn with the kiddos? Here are oodles of ways to use fun and games to learn math, history, geography, reading, writing, science and more!

Visit a museum in your area that you’ve never been to.
Close your eyes, spin the globe, and put your finger down. Look to see where you landed and talk about that location.
Look at constellations after dark.
Bake together.
Visit an elderly neighbor or relative and ask them to tell you about something happy in their childhood.
Look for seed pods and see how many different kinds you can collect.
Go to your back yard or to the park and count how many different kinds of birds you see in 15 minutes.
Write words on little stones or shells and make poems or stories with them.
Make a dartboard map — put a world map over a big piece of cork board and then throw darts at it. Read the location of where you hit so you can easily learn places around the world.
Sew something together.
Visit a rock shop and pick out a few cool specimens.
Do Mad Libs (you can also find lots for free online or even make your own by taking turns crossing out words in books or newspaper articles).
Have a jumping contest and measure who jumps the farthest.
Put out a plate of various things somewhere in your yard with ants and see which foods they prefer.
Make up a secret code and leave notes in it.
Look for a documentary on the weirdest thing you can think of and watch it together.
Flip a coin 50 times and see how many times you get heads. Is it the number you expected? What if you do it 50 more times?
Make cards and deliver them to the local nursing home.
Volunteer at your local animal shelter.
Put some moist dirt and some seeds in a balloon, blow it up, hang it in the window and see what happens.
Attend a free art show in your area.
Use a magnifying app to take pictures of lots of things really close.
Dig up some weeds to do experiments with.
Write your congressperson about an issue that matters to you and see if they write back.
Make purple cabbage water and then turn it colors by adding various kinds of acids and bases to it.
Start a new read-aloud book together.
Try to start a (safe!) fire with a magnifying glass in the sun.
Take cuttings of various houseplants and garden plants and try to root them to make new plants.
Trace each other’s shadows in the driveway in the morning, noon and night and compare how it looks.
Learn how to say thank you in a whole bunch of different languages.
Build 3-D structures out of mini marshmallows and toothpicks.
Write and film a short movie with friends.
Look up the history for the day you were born and when your parents were born.
Take turns opening the dictionary to a random page with your eyes closed and picking a word with your finger, and then using it in a sentence.
Try to have a conversation at lunch or dinner entirely in rhyme.
Make baking soda and vinegar volcanoes, but add food coloring to the vinegar so you can make lots of color combinations.
Make wacky ransom notes from clipped words from the newspaper or magazines.
Visit a local pet store and check out all the fish and animals.
Play 20 questions as famous people from history and see if people can guess who you are.
Try to keep a balloon up in the air bopping it back and forth, but each person has to call out something before they can hit it (like state names or words starting with K or chemical elements).
Take a magnet around the house and see how many magnetic things you can find.
Plant seeds from fruits and veggies you eat this week in little cups of soil on the window sill and see what grows.
Make pie charts of all kinds of things about your family — how many people are taller than 5 feet, how many like cabbage, how many are over 20, what everyone’s favorite colors are, etc.
Ask on Facebook or other social media sites for friends to send postcards from wherever they live. Mark or pin on the map everywhere you get a postcard from.
Play ingredient guess — take turns looking at a food product’s ingredients and see how many of them the other person can guess. Who can get the most?
Declare a brown sign month — any time you pass a new brown historical sign on the highway this month, the family will pull over and find out what happened there. If you want, guess ahead of time what the event might have been.
Build something together.
Figure out what various family members are the weight or height of that’s completely nontraditional, like the weight of an antelope or the height of an ostrich. You’ll have to look up lots of animals to figure it out!
Find a Citizen Science project to join in on based on something you like.
See how many different words you can make from the letters in your name.
Make a list of 50 things you’d like to do and learn this year, and see how many you can cross off by this time next year.