Homeschool Time Fillers That Aren't Busy Work (Even for High Schoolers!)

My high schooler would be horrified to know this, but I do sometimes assign her work that's more of a time-filler than it is a substantive assignment.

Sometimes, it's because she has a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to her stress.

Sometimes, it's because *I* have a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to *my* stress.

Sometimes we've finished up a big unit of study but it's not the perfect time to start the next one, or one of us isn't feeling 100%, or we've got an appointment or some other thing that would interrupt her flow, but I still want her learning that day.

Essentially, time fillers work well for all those times and gaps when you want your student doing something educational, but you also want it to be low-stakes for both of you. The student is using her mind but not wracking her brain, and YOU don't have to review, edit, correct, or evaluate!

Here's some of my favorites from my collection of high school-level time fillers that are educational but low-stakes:

Board Games

Sometimes teenagers just need a break from book work and screen work. Reading textbooks and solving problems and filling in answers is also just one limited, specific type of learning, so I don't like that to be all my high schooler does for school all day. 

We don't have a formal logic study currently, but logical thinking is an extremely beneficial skill, so I encourage a lot of logic games that I file as math enrichment. We play word games, association games, and creativity games for English credit, and historical games like Senet, Mancala, and Go for history/geography credit. Occasionally, I'll even find a game that we can play in my high schooler's target language.

Here are some of my favorites:

We've got some made-up games that we can play anywhere, as well, most notably the Wikipedia Game and Dictionary Definitions, and once in a blue moon I'll go to the trouble of downloading and printing an online-sourced game like Phylo, especially if it fits into a niche in a subject that we're studying. 

Documentaries

I already see the public library as my personal streaming service, so it doesn't feel like a big deal for me to do a quick catalog search whenever I'm planning the next few weeks' studies and just go ahead and request any documentaries that are on-topic and look interesting.

Documentaries about a topic of study build depth and context, and now that we're all such ipad babies, focusing on a piece of content for a whopping one hour really is something that we need to do every so often to stay in practice!

My immediate go-tos for documentaries are anything PBS, National Geographic, or BBC. Independent films and documentaries produced by news publications are also good, but I usually avoid anything else you might find on cable (TLC is most definitely NOT!) as being less in-depth than I want for a high schooler. The teenager and I are currently in the middle of a two-part PBS special on uranium, which I'm counting as enrichment for her Honors Chemistry study, but here are some other documentaries we've watched for high school:

Although they aren't quite documentaries, there are also a ton of lectures, presentations, and streams available on YouTube. Q&A sessions give me secondhand cringe, so we don't watch that part, meaning that the actual run-time is shorter than listed. This is also a good place to find performances that enhance liberal arts or language studies; my homeschoolers and I have watched lots of plays on YouTube, and lots of TV shows performed in whatever target language they're studying at that time:

Podcasts

We listen to a lot of audiobooks for the teenager's English credits, mostly while she works on her studio art and I do a handicraft and we chat. I don't want to give up that precious stitch-and-bitch time even when we're not burning through a 14-hour tome, though, so in between books I'll often fill in that space with a podcast. 

You can usually find a dozen different podcast episodes on any topic, so it's not hard to find something that fits into the teenager's current studies, but vetting new ones to see if they're good or if they're trash can take some time. We've also got favorite podcasts that are educational without necessarily being on-topic; here are a few:

 

Puzzles and Solitaire Games

We loooove our puzzles, with my teenager spending as much time working sudokus as my partner and I spend working crossword puzzles. Just in the last year or so the teenager seems to have mostly grown out of (or just mostly completed!) all of our in-house hands-on logic puzzles, but here are some of the favorites that she particularly enjoyed from childhood through the first couple of years of high school:

These days, if I want to assign her a short time-filler puzzle that's something fun, I'll have her do the daily Wordle, Murdle, or Set online. All three update daily, so there's always a new puzzle!

Process-Oriented Projects

I think that sensorial knowledge is still important to continue building, even into these older kid years. It's also important to continue building one's creativity and to remain comfortable with play, experimentation, and the concept of doing something simply to experience the process. 

To encourage my teenager to stay creative and experimental, I'll sometimes surprise her with an assignment like finding a new cookie recipe to bake, or creating a sticker design based on something we've been studying, or flipping through a stack of books I got from the library with her in mind, etc. Basically, I just want to stretch her out of her comfort zone of what she normally likes to bake or draw or read. Or maybe I'm just craving cookies but don't want to make them for myself! 

The art/math combo is my favorite focal point for building sensorial knowledge and experimenting with process. Over her high school years, the teenager has been compiling a portfolio of geometric art, and adding to it is a great way to bake some low-stakes math enrichment into the school week. Making things like mandalas, polyominoes, and tesselations put sensorial math knowledge into use, and build on geometry process that she's learned. 

Also, I'm obsessed with the spirograph!

In the lead-up to a holiday, there are all kinds of sneakily educational, mathematically sophisticated holiday crafts to create. There's a lot of beautiful math involved in wire-wrapping beads to make stars, or folding precisely symmetrical paper ornaments, or stitching felt mandalas or snowflakes. 

When there's not a holiday on the horizon, sometimes we'll just do something random like check out an origami or paper airplane book, or buy ourselves a DIY kit and decide to learn how to crochet. I'm currently low-key obsessed with a friendship bracelet loom that I made out of corrugated cardboard, so there's a lot of weaving going on around here.

As we move into the Spring semester of the teenager's Senior year, I can't decide if we're going to be doing more of these types of assignments, or less. On the one hand, I'm not opposed to ending one's high school career with a whimper rather than a bang, so as the teenager starts to finish her last units of study one-by-one, I don't want to necessarily replace them with equal amounts of puzzles and documentaries. But on the other hand, I do think that most of us need a goodly amount of productive work most days, so I definitely don't want a teenager to finish up all her learning and then sit around on my couch for several months actively not learning, ahem. 

Perhaps I'll see if there's a larger, more culminating-type project that the teenager would be interested in working on during those increasingly free school hours further into Spring? Or perhaps we'll get very, VERY good at crochet!

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Homeschool High School Chemistry: Electrolysis of Water Lab

Another day, another kitchen table chemistry lab!

I don't know what the "proper" number of hands-on labs a high school student usually conducts in a non-AP Science class is (in her year of public school Honors Biology, my own teenager conducted one), but in our homeschool high school honors science classes, I try for at least ten high-quality labs, experiments, and/or demonstrations, all written up by the student in her lab notebook for that subject. 

And they don't have to be complicated! This Electrolysis of Water lab could be conducted by an early elementary student, it's so simple. It takes just minutes, and it's easy as pie to conduct at the kitchen table.

To make it appropriate for a high school Honors Chemistry lab, just add rigor! When she completed this lab, my teenager was studying Lewis Electron-Dot Structures and calculating chemical reaction formulas, so I wrote her Post-Lab Questions to require her to practice these skills in a real-world environment.

In AP Language and Literature, she's looking deeper into the etymologies of words, so I also included a question about that to build context. 

Here's the set-up for the lab (pretend that you don't see the erasable pen that my teenagers like to use to cheat the lab notebook system of "write in pen; no erasing"):

Salting the water to the proper ratio (feel free to admire the chopstick stirring rod...):

Attaching the wires to the battery (the electrodes are currently touching, but she'll fix that as soon as she notices):

And now... observation! I always think that this is the coolest, most magical demonstration. Look at all the bubbles!

A surprise to us all: we didn't expect the aluminum to start flaking away! 

Is it an aluminum oxide coating on the foil? A manufacturing flaw resulting in improper adhesion of the aluminum that weakens it?

My favorite thing about science is the way that new information inspires new questions!

If that's not enough electrolysis for you, here are a few extension activities:

• incorporate Snap Circuits. I actually thought pretty hard about incorporating part of this demonstration, because we have sooooo many Snap Circuits. This would be an especially good extension if your focus is actually on electricity. 
• incorporate a pH indicator. This is a neat addition, especially if you've recently studied pH. Red cabbage pH indicator is another excellent homeschool DIY project!
• clean iron. The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has a giant electrolysis tank where you can observe the real-time process of rust removal from one of Captain Kidd's cannons, so you can observe this real-world bit of science in action even if you don't have your own iron to clean via electrolysis.

And here are a couple of books that include similar electrolysis experiments. The Marie Curie book is even written TO middle-grade kids!

And there you have it: excellent science using household materials in just a few minutes. With that little time spent on the actual lab, you've got plenty of room to really ramp up the rigor of the post-lab questions!

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A Snarky Frankenstein Unit Study Appropriate for Snarky High Schoolers

Listening to audiobooks with my teenager is just about my current favorite thing about homeschooling. So far this semester, we've listened to History of the Kings of Britain, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and we're currently one hour and 40 minutes into 12 Years a Slave, and we're VERY into it.

Frankenstein is a book study that we did last year, but somehow I never got around to writing about it even though it was AWESOME! I don't know if you know this, but a teenager is the best companion to have when reading a book. We speculate on every character's sexuality (*cough, cough* Walton was IN LOVE with Victor *cough, cough*), mercilessly roast every character (but mostly Victor), gasp in shock and horror at the kinds of behavior that was apparently normal at the time but is 100% taboo now (I'm sorry, but Victor and Elizabeth were raised as siblings!), and cheer at all the murders...

... and we sneak in some literary and cultural analyses, maybe a bit of creative writing, definitely some comparative analysis with other books and films. Book studies somehow always manages to feel low-stakes while being quite rigorous academically. It's some of the best schoolwork that we do together, and whatever we're studying, I tend to always have a book unit going.

Here's some of what we did for Frankenstein, and some other stuff that we could have done but didn't.

Pre-Reading

I wouldn't want to do anything that would give away any spoilers for a book, even a book as iconic as Frankenstein. I work with teenagers pretty often, and I am equally as often surprised at the background knowledge that they can lack--I would never assume that a kid who hadn't read Frankenstein knows ANYTHING, no matter how basic, about the plot!

That being said, a good video can often be a good, evocative setup for a book, especially a book with as interesting an origin as Frankenstein! This TED-Ed video sets the scene without giving away too much:

We've spoken about Lord Byron before back when we were studying Ada Lovelace, so mentioning that he was there did quite a lot to explain the setting of the creation of Shelley's novel to my teenager, ahem. Other good pieces of background info could include brief bios of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, alchemy, the Gothic and Romantic movements, etc.

While Reading

Whatever you do, don't incorporate ALL of this into your literature study. I like to see what's intriguing my kids and expand on that, or encourage projects that build up skills I want them to learn, that follow their interests, or that could add a cross-curricular component that I could also count for a different subject.

• discussion questions/essay topics: A nice thing about homeschooling is that we can talk day and night about the books we're reading. We roast main characters over dinner, gossip about who's into who in the car, rewrite minor plot points via late-night texts across the house, and revisit our favorite bits years later--we're still cackling about our recurring joke involving Gandalf's favorite horse, and we finished that book five years ago! I don't usually use discussion questions or talking points to inspire our conversations, but I can see how they'd be useful, especially to set an essay topic.
• family tree/cast of characters. There's not a giant cast of characters in Frankenstein, but enough that it's easy to forget who someone is by the time they wander back into the picture. We do NOT want to forget how Victor and Elizabeth know each other, for instance (barf!), nor who our delightful little William is. There are tons of ways to create family trees and graphic character lists, and I do like to have kids create their own from scratch, illustrations and all... but here's a cheat sheet. 
• food. We usually enjoy cooking recipes themed on what we're reading or watching, but Frankenstein doesn't give one a lot to work with, ahem. Ah, well... perhaps a picnic while we read out loud to each other!
• geography. I LOVE using maps in my homeschool. I think it's so important to be able to visualize places from history and literature, and to build geographic context. Here's a Google Earth tour of the many geographic settings in Frankenstein, but I feel like my own kids don't always look hard enough at already-created maps to absorb the information; I'd rather show them a Google Earth tour of a different book, then have them create one for Frankenstein from scratch, or go completely old-school and create it with a printed map. This Smithsonian article about places that inspired Mary Shelley is another good resource. 
• practice using quotes as evidence: The year that my teenager went to public school, her English teacher had a terrific technique to teach the kids how to respond to a text. She'd give them a text, then ask them to 1) highlight claims, and 2) for each claim, respond with a sentence that agreed and gave a reason, or disagreed and gave a reason, or expanded on/qualified the claim. It was a great way to remind the kids that they did need to have their own opinions about texts, and to model for them how it works. This worksheet encourages the same strategy; when responding, encourage the student to find textual evidence for their response, and then you have a natural entry point for teaching them how to incorporate quotes into their writing. 
• supplemental texts. We do a lot of cross-curricular work in our homeschool, and one of my favorite ways to incorporate that kind of work is a supplementary reading that also applies to a separate study. For a novel like Frankenstein, supplemental texts in the fields of science, history, and mythology would all be easy to source. Or go in a different direction and offer supplemental pieces of artwork!
• travel. I really like to incorporate field trips, day trips, and other types of travel into our homeschool studies. Alas, for my final homeschooling teen haaaates to travel, but I still insist more often than she'd like... but a lot less often than I'd like! Travel to Bath, England, to visit the Frankenstein museum isn't exactly feasible, but I'm always on the lookout for traveling museum exhibitions, festivals, academic presentations at our local university, or high-quality live theater experiences.

After Reading

After finishing a book is when I like to incorporate comparative analysis. With Frankenstein, there are a lot of different directions you could go with this!

• Frankenstein films. With these, you can illustrate the growth and development of the Frankenstein trope, and critique its various manifestations. In our homeschool, we usually do at least one of these as an official Family Movie Night, with everyone contributing cheezy novelty recipes to a themed meal that we can eat while we watch. Here are a few of my favorite Frankenstein films that go quite well with Frankenstein meatloaf and Frankenstein broccoli florets and Frankenstein pudding cups and a Frankenstein cocktail/mocktail:

• children's books. Usually, the Frankenstein in a picture book is just a goofy-looking Halloween character that doesn't make any particular literary references. For an artistic kid, though, it's interesting to compare and analyze the various kid-friendly depictions of the monster, then create their own in response. Kids who are interested in folklore, anthropology, the organization of information, or books in general can enjoy logging the characteristics of each kid-friendly character and seeing if they can figure out the stereotypes or analyze what the representations are meant to imply. Here are a few of my favorite kid books that feature Frankenstein:

• other Frankenstein retellings. You can make thoughtful comparisons with versions of the story told in different times and places; they highlight different values and fears in our changing cultures, and often speak to the original version in important ways. Here are a few of my favorite Frankenstein retellings:

• secondary sources. I don't always incorporate these, but if a book has really struck a kid's fancy (as with the huge hit that Le Morte d'Arthur turned out to be!), I'll keep those good vibes going, perhaps with a bit of long-form non-fiction! Histories, biographies, and cultural analyses are always a good bet with books. Here are a few good ones for Frankenstein:

While supplementary activities can add a lot of content and rigor to a book study, keep in mind that it's also perfectly okay, and perfectly at-level, to simply read the book, talk about it, and move on with your lives! Discussion is a great way to address the content and themes of a book, so that even if you don't write an essay, if you've have lots of conversations about it you HAVE formed opinions, made claims, supported them with evidence, responded to another's claim with your own thoughts, and essentially performed quite a lot of analytical work. 

You should definitely make thematically-appropriate novelty foods and eat them while watching a related movie, though. that's a very important part of the process! 

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The Poured Rice Fantasy Map Project

I've seen the poured rice fantasy maps being made on Tiktok and YouTube, but my actual inspiration for this project was subbing in an art class in which the kids were hard at work on their own fantasy maps. They'd already done the poured rice step and were deep into embellishing their maps with fantasy and cartography elements. Their teacher had a long list of categories and a Google Slide Deck of reference images for them to use, and I spent two days in that class walking around and cooing over everyone's maps, encouraging them to add elements from a new category, debating river placement and what kinds of sea monsters are the scariest and how many volcanoes one island can reasonably contain.

You know who else is currently writing a fantasy novel AND loves art? My very own homeschooler!

For a Creative Writing/Studio Art enrichment lesson one day, she and I sat down with some large-format drawing paper, our eight-year-old kilogram of rice, and my favorite drawing pens (these are the teenager's favorite drawing pens). 

To make the map, you simply pour out your rice (I've seen some people use lentils, but I loved all the fjordy bits that the rice made)--

--then trace around it!

You can, of course, artificially manipulate the rice to spread it however you want, but the idea is that by letting it do its thing you make a map that looks organic and random and has a particularly detailed coastline.

After that, you listen to music, and you draw!

The teenager was quite happy with creating from her own brain, but I preferred to use reference images. Here's the teenager trying to show me how to draw cliffs like Dover:

I kind of got the idea, but I couldn't make it look good on the map. Oh, well--at least my barrows look awesome!

It's impossible to do any work whatsoever without Mr. Jones being actively weird in your face:

The art class kids who were spending several days on this project had to add a billion details, a compass rose, and a banner title, but the teenager and I were satisfied with our maps after just a couple of hours hanging out together, drawing and listening to music. Here's my fantastic fantasy map:

A henge is OBVIOUSLY at the center of my island, with various barrows around the outskirts. My snowcapped mountains are an embarrassment, but I'm quite proud of my road and my swampland. 

And here is the teenager's. She packed a LOT of detail into just a couple of hours!

I LOVE that her map also has a henge! All the Giant Rocks Day is such a good memory!

I'd suggested that the teenager might want to use her fantasy map as THE map for her fantasy novel, but she preferred to make it just a fantastical fantasy of a map, no lore included. But it did get her thinking about geography and place in her story, so I'm keeping this project as a cross-curricular Creative Writing/Studio Art effort.

If a kid is up for an entire world-building experience, I do think it would be cool to actually make this map in coordination with creative writing, perhaps adding new features to the map as you think of them for a story, and vice versa. Otherwise, this project lends itself to all kinds of geography extensions, from basic map-reading to AP Human Geography. Or make up your own coordinate system and then locate places on the map using it! Model the terrain in salt dough! Photocopy the outline and create a political map showing population and government! Invent a flag, then sew it! Find a partner who also created a map, pretend their island is in the same world, and form a political alliance... or declare war! 

This was our eight-year-old kilogram of rice's final act of service. It began its time as a sensory material, lived most of its life as a kid-measured exact kilogram for admiration and reference, and after this, its last hurrah as an implement of cartographic creation, it was ceremoniously retired around the backyard, where it can end its days by offering sustenance and enrichment to our flock of half-wild chickens.

It's only now occurring to me to wonder if whatever I used to dye that rice eight years ago is okay for chickens to eat now. OMG ISN'T A THING THAT BIRDS AREN'T ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO EAT DRY RICE?

You know what? Whatever, I'm sure it's fine. If you come back to my blog and find this post deleted, though, it's because I accidentally killed our flock of chickens and I need to cover my tracks.

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