Extracurricular Activities at an Online School
Are you looking for extracurricular activities for your homeschooler? Some families are fortunate to have lots of opportunities for extracurricular activities in their local communities, but others may need to look online for them.
Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to find great online sources for extracurricular activities of all kinds! Whether your children attend an online school or are homeschooled and you are looking for some extracurricular activities online, let’s talk about some options you have.
While homeschooling has grown more popular over the past several years, and online education continues to proliferate, there is still a lot to discover about the opportunities online education provides, specifically when it comes to extracurricular activities.
Online learning offers a wealth of opportunities beyond the traditional classroom, allowing students to attend classes from anywhere with an Internet connection and complete courses at their own pace. While this flexibility is a major benefit, it’s important to supplement academic studies with extracurricular activities to enrich your child’s learning experience and foster important social skills.
Why Extracurricular Activities Matter
Participating in extracurricular activities helps students develop into well-rounded individuals. These activities provide avenues for meeting new friends, building social skills, and exploring interests outside of academics.
For homeschoolers, extracurricular activities are particularly valuable as they offer a chance for students to interact with peers and ease any concerns parents may have about socialization.
Exploring Extracurricular Activities Online
Here are some ideas for extracurricular activities that can enhance your child’s social skills and academic interests, all available online:
- Art or Music Lessons: Take online lessons in art, music, or other creative pursuits to develop new skills. (More on this later in the post!)
- Church Events: Attend online church events that provide a sense of community and spiritual growth.
- Field Trips: Explore virtual field trip options to museums, historical sites, and other educational destinations.
- Personal Hobbies: Encourage your child to explore a variety of hobbies they can learn online via videos, lessons, classes, and webinars. There are plenty of options, including all kinds of niche cooking, gardening, sewing, collecting, journaling, or photography.
- Online Sports or Athletics: Online athletic classes might teach gymnastics or dance. There are also a variety of virtual options to stay active and build teamwork skills.
- Student Clubs: Join online clubs related to interests such as Scouts, chess, reading, 4-H, film, skateboarding, math, or debate.
- Theater or Concerts: You might also want to attend virtual theater performances or concerts with your children to cultivate an appreciation for the arts.
- Volunteer Groups: Look for virtual volunteer opportunities that align with your child’s passions and interests. Of course, actual volunteering requires an in-person commitment, but you can likely find these opportunities and learn more about them by searching online.
- Youth Camps or Retreats: Participate in virtual camps or retreats that offer opportunities for learning and socializing.
Extracurricular Activities Your Kids Might Enjoy
Here are some specific sources you can find educational extracurricular activities that will help your children in their online learning.
Extracurricular Activities at an Online School
Music
Sarah Strings is an online music lesson course based on the philosophy of Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, who believed that, given the time and space for children to grasp the intricacies of music fully, children would have the ability to discover those same nuances of music on an instrument with little direction from an instructor. Like many homeschoolers’ philosophies, he considered youthful minds to be wildly capable and that the younger they are, the more proficient they could be at picking up new skills. If you want to teach your children music, this might be a great place to start.
Team Piano Music School Lessons are conducted by a live teacher via Skype. They use dual cameras that allow a hand view (on top) as well as a normal face-to-face view. This allows the lessons to be thorough for things like finger placement while allowing them to be personal too. Ivan Todorov, a professional pianist with undergraduate and graduate degrees in piano, teaches the lessons. (Even with his piano degrees, he’s able to teach students in a way they can understand!)
Simply Music offers a method that makes learning to play the piano easy. Playing beautiful, two-handed pieces with chords can happen immediately, and just about any age person can learn to play. It’s never too late, says Neil Moore, the director of this “Australian-designed breakthrough in music education.”
Art
ArtAchieve is a perfect curriculum for mothers who want a drawing program that gives them step-by-step drawing instructions and much more! Not only is it a terrific drawing program, but it is also easy to tie into your homeschool geography, social studies, language arts, and science programs.
Creating a Masterpiece offers step-by-step DVD art instruction, guided by a talented and well-spoken artist, Sharon Hofer. Sharon teaches students in a variety of mediums with more being added each year. Your children can receive easy-to-follow lessons in charcoal drawing, sculpture, pencil drawing, watercolor painting, acrylic painting, ink, or pastel painting.
Notgrass Learn to Draw features thirty simple lessons that cover the basics of art! Divided into two parts, Part I teaches concepts and techniques such as lines, shapes, placement, overlapping, shading, the horizon, and more, while Part II features specific drawing examples of animals, objects, landscapes, and people. Each lesson features a scripture verse at the top and room to draw within the page. Consumable non-reproducible workbook with 30 lessons of drawing instruction.
Online Curricular Subjects
While this post is focused on extracurricular activities, there are plenty of online options for scholastic subjects as well. Here are a few:
Apologia’s online general science class is designed for middle schoolers. It includes a live, online class that meets weekly for 90 minutes with work on the other four weekdays that consist of reading, hands-on experiments, timed tests, note-taking, and live lectures. It is designed “to be a student’s first systematic introduction to the sciences” for middle school kids with 14 modules that include broad topics such as the scientific method, designing experiments, simple machines, geology, archaeology, biology, astronomy, environmental science, and more. Their highly organized online courses is taught by gifted instructors
CTCMath is an online, subscription-based program perfect for families with working homeschool moms. Because it is online, working moms can be assured that their children are getting quality math instruction even if a parent can’t provide it. This curriculum is an excellent mastery approach option for homeschool families with children in kindergarten through 12th grade. It works for a variety of learners in different kinds of learning situations.
Brave Writer Language Arts online classes are specially designed with the busy homeschooling parent in mind. Classes last anywhere from four to six weeks. Their courses address a specific writing need so that you can take the ones that suit your family throughout the school year. Short class sessions enable you to work around family vacations, out-of-town swim meets, recovering from wisdom teeth removal, and visits from grandparents. They operate on the quarter system, including a summer session, and their most popular classes repeat each quarter while others are seasonal.