Household Items for Hands-on Learning

A common misconception about homeschool is that one must have lots of money to do it. While some families do choose to spend money on homeschool supplies, there are also many budget friendly ways. Manipulatives are a hot topic in schools today as they are physical items that allow hands-on, kinesthetic learners to experience learning with their hands. There are many different manipulatives you can find to buy, but we want to share with you some things you can find around your home that work wonderfully.

Manipulatives for Different Subjects

Math Manipulatives

Math is the most common subject that uses manipulatives. They can be used to help with adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, understanding arrays, place value and many more things. Here are some ideas of things you can use as counters that you likely have laying around the house:

• Beans
• Nuts
• Pebbles from outside
• Goldfish crackers, chocolate chips, cheerios, or other snacks
• Small plastic toy animals
• Uniform size blocks
• Twigs and pebbles together can be used for base 10 blocks

Printing Manipulatives

For some kids, having something unconventional to use makes learning more fun.  When learning to form letters, there are some household items you can use:

• Salt (Put it on a tray or plate and have them write the letter in it with their finger.)
• Flour or sugar (same as above)
• Shaving cream (same idea as above)
• Playdough (Roll it out and use it to form a letter.)
• Window markers
• Dry erase markers

Spelling Manipulatives

• Mega blocks, other types of linking blocks (See this activity)
• Little cars (Check out this activity)
• Scrabble tiles

We hope this gets your imagination going on different items you have around your house that could be used as tools for your hands-on learners! You could even engage their creativity by asking “What do you think you could use to help you with this counting activity?” or something along those lines.

Happy hands-on learning!

This article has been written by homeschooling staff writers of The Canadian Schoolhouse (TCS). Enjoy more of our content from TCS contributors and staff writers by visiting our Front Door page that has content on our monthly theme and links to all our content sections.