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Make easy and healthy food for your homeschool kids. Here are our favorites.

Homeschool breakfasts:

1. Cereal with fruit and yogurt

2. Pancakes with fruit

3. Waffles with fruit

4. Eggs, toast, and fruit

5. French toast with fruit

Homeschool lunches:

1. Macaroni and cheese with broccoli

2. Veggie pizza

3. Tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich

4. Pasta salad and a ham sandwich

5. Vegetable soup and a turkey or tuna sandwich

Homeschool dinners:

1. Meatloaf, potatoes, and vegetables

2. Tacos

3. Spaghetti and a salad

4. Fettucine alfredo with vegetables

5. Chicken with rice and vegetables

Arts and crafts are a fun and creative part of our homeschooling. We get children's art books at the library and find ideas for arts and crafts ideas online. We connect arts and crafts to a topic or theme that we are currently learning about in science, social studies, or language arts. For basic art supplies, we use pencils, crayons, colored pencils, markers, drawing paper, glue, construction paper, paint, paint brushes, scissors, paper scraps, fabric scraps, ribbon, yarn, googly eyes, buttons, felt, cardboard, pipe cleaners, pom poms, popsicle sticks, and modeling clay.

We use a dry erase board sometimes to write spelling or vocabulary words, practice grammar, or to do math problems. It helps to practice these skills without wasting paper. It is also a fun alternative sometimes from writing in a notebook. We have a variety of colors of dry erase markers to make it colorful.

We use BrainPOP often for our homeschool. It has short animated movies covering the subjects of science, social studies, English, math, art, technology, and health. BrainPOP Jr. is for grades K-3 and BrainPOP is for grades 3-12. It is available by subscription. We watch a video on a topic from the subjects that we want to learn about and then talk about what we learned after the video. The videos explain information in a way that is easy and brief for my kids to understand and to be interested.

Chores are a way for kids to learn about helping others, kindness, self-reliance, confidence and responsibility. Kids can do chores at home like cook, set the table, clear and wipe the table, wash and dry dishes, load and unload dishwasher, do laundry, put away clothes, iron, clean their room, make the bed, collect garbage and recycling, sweep the floor, vacuum, dust, put away groceries, water plants, feed and care for pets, clean the bathroom, rake leaves, and yardwork.

Have family meals together to give a sense of belonging. Take the time to sit together, without distractions (turn off electronics), to connect and learn about events that happened with each other and talk about things. Studies have shown family mealtime increases social skills and decreases negative behaviors. Family mealtime lets kids practice table manners, good eating habits, and nutritious food choices.

Researchers conducted a large longitudinal study of how parents spend their time and how their kids perform. The study which was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2015 used time diaries and survey data to track how accessible mothers were to their children and linked that data to kids’ outcomes in the areas of behavior, emotion and academics. The results showed that the quantity of time parents spend with their children doesn’t make much of a difference in how they turn out, instead it was the quality of that time spent together that mattered. How warm and affectionate the mom was showed a major difference. Other factors that predicted success more reliably than any amount of time spent with kids were social resources like income and a mother’s educational level.