Home School Supplies: magnets

My kids love magnets, they love things that make lots of noise, and they love hands on anything and everything.  So with a little bit of creativity, especially needed with wiggly boys, magnets can be used 100's of different ways.  All this does is help reinforce learning is fun, learning is using your imagination.

Math: Here is some things that we have created for Math, but can also be used for any educational magnets.  I bought 2 pizza pans at the Dollar Tree, as well as 2 packets of wooden magnetic numbers.  So each boy has his own set.  My 4 year old is learning to count, he can count to 10 in Spanish, and 25 in English.  We also use magnetic  geometric shapes for math time too.

Reading: For reading we use magnetic words to help build sentences, for spelling tests, for reading tests, and reading activities.  We bought a big package of magnetic words from The Teacher Store down the road.  We bought 2 packages from the Dollar Tree (that came with matching pictures).  We bought 1 package from Target in their school supplies section during one of their Back to School Events.  Now with that many packages, we have separated each topic in our magnetic word piles to the topics such as the following: people, word tenses, house hold, food, vehicles, colors, numbers, punctuation marks, site words, and sentence materials.

Spelling: for this subject we do many of the same things as reading, but with a more concentrated effort on learning how to spell words by topics.  We use the packages of magnetic words with the pictures mostly for spelling, because my 6 year old is very visual, and audio when it comes to retaining what he's taught.  Matching games are great, and since they are magnets he can play them on his pizza pan, his cookie sheet, the refrigerator, or on his magnetic mini sheet.  We'll even mix in white erase boards with magnetic words because at the Home School Store you can buy magnetic white erase boards.  Totally Awesome!  For my 4 year old we use his magnetic mini sheet with magnetic plastic letters.  He learns simple words, and really just what the letter looks like, and its sound.


You can buy magnets anywhere pretty much, and use them for so many subjects with school: counting, sorting, reading, spelling, letters, numbers, science, opposites, negative/ positive, extra curricular activities and games as well.  One thing you can be guaranteed is that your children are going to have a lot of fun, and enjoy using magnets for school!