Homeschooling Boys

My son is a very different character to homeschool than my daughter. Even though she is an 'honorary boy' and often gets mistaken for one, she has a much greater ability to sit still and concentrate. My son needs to be hands on. He needs to move around and touch things. So I have had to be more creative in coming up with homeschool ideas.

Homeschool Ideas

Bows and Arrows

Historically, there is evidence that bows and arrows were used in Paleolithic times for hunting and war. When discussing bows and arrows, you could talk about

We looked at bow designs, and found some useful ideas about making bows here. Then we began looking for wood. Elm, hazel and ash work well as the branch needs to be straight and springy. We did some tree-identification, then went off to find fallen branches that we could use. This might also be a good time to find a branch to join in the Tree Project.

We made the arrows from dowling, with duct-tape instead of feathers at the end. We also talked about how historically, flint would have been used as an arrowhead - we had looked at this in our Stig of the Dump project. Finally, we needed a quiver! My daughter had been weaving a scarf and that was cut from the loom and pressed into service. My son used a piece of wool cloth I had in my fabric box.

I set up some rules (NO pointing the bow at other people), set up a target, and off we went. Hmmm... maybe we should have measured how far we could fire the arrows!