For those who don’t know our story of how we came to homeschool, I’ll give a quick re-cap. I wanted to homeschool for a while, mostly for religious reasons. My husband was not comfortable with the idea of homeschooling. So my son went to kindergarten at our local public school last year. He attended a gifted “enrichment” class once a week, which he loved, but the rest of the week he struggled in his kindergarten class. After asking the school if they could provide more challenging work for him, and they declined to do so, we decided to homeschool this year. I’ve learned a great deal about my sons academic needs and how his brain works over the past year and a half. With the assistance of his gifted teacher and my own research, I’ve found some great activities and resources for bright learners. Actually any learner will benefit, including us grown ups!

1. Weird word of the day: This is something they did in my son’s gifted class and I decided to do it in homeschool. As part of “morning work” we learn a new word and try to put it into a sentence. We learn about where the word came from and how it’s used. The web site I use is: AWAD. They send me a new word everyday to my email.

2. Logi-puzzles: These are puzzles that use algebraic thinking and logic. The web site I get them from is here. They also have logic riddles that we enjoy doing.

3. MindWare Bella’s Mystery Deck is a new find for us. My son loves reading the Encyclopedia Brown series. He’s training his mind to pay attention to clues and try to solve the mystery before the book tells him the answer. The mystery deck is a shorter version of the same idea. Each card has a brief mystery and you try to guess the answer. To see if you have the correct answer, they provide a small mirror to read the clue that is printed backwords at the bottom of the card.

4. Tanagrams: This is IQ building 101. Doing tanagrams is great for building logic skills and an activity that can be done alone. We like the SuperMind Regular Edition.

5. “Mommy, how do cars work?” “How does air conditioning work?” For children who never stop asking: why, how and what, we love the Science Channel. Two shows in particular: How it’s Made and How do they do it? The shows take you inside factories and workshops where things are made and you get to watch the item being built step by step.

6. And a couple of favorite educational websites: https://www.brainpop.com/ and https://www.sheppardsoftware.com/