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Geocaching and home-schooling?


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I am trying to get a friend into geocaching, and she home-schools (something we are also considering for the twins- now 14 months- when they are older). She was wondering if there are any parents who use geocaching as part of their home-schooling curriculum, such as to help teach geography, local history, biology, or whatever? I would love to hear your stories!

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I am trying to get a friend into geocaching, and she home-schools (something we are also considering for the twins- now 14 months- when they are older). She was wondering if there are any parents who use geocaching as part of their home-schooling curriculum, such as to help teach geography, local history, biology, or whatever? I would love to hear your stories!

For me, not really, kinda sorta. My two girls are home schooled, and geocaching is a little diversion during their frequent field trips. The younger one is not really interested, but the older one is, and logging lets her practice her writing skills.

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My sister home schools her children and she doesn't routinely work it into their curriculum, but sometimes she will. It's mainly her 3 youngest boys that are hooked on geocaching and they normally go out caching with me since homeschooling a large family (I think she's currently got 6 out of 10 kids still in school) keeps their family pretty busy. As you've pointed out there are a LOT of ways it can be integrated into a curriculum. If you're interested there is another Forum called "GPS in Education." I've glanced at it and I believe it's mainly traditional school teachers there, but I could be wrong. Anyways the real point of pointing out that Forum is it probably has some very good ideas that homeschoolers could implement too. If you want to save going back to the Forum main page to find the Forum I mentioned above you can CLICK HERE to get there faster. Good luck with working it into your homeschooling it should be real easy to do. Oh I'm a public school graduate myself so ignore any misspelling or bad grammar, lol. :)

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I am trying to get a friend into geocaching, and she home-schools (something we are also considering for the twins- now 14 months- when they are older). She was wondering if there are any parents who use geocaching as part of their home-schooling curriculum, such as to help teach geography, local history, biology, or whatever? I would love to hear your stories!

 

I've found 2 or 3 caches by someone outside my area, whose profile said they home school their kids, and use it as part of the curriculum. But sure enough, I found the profile, and references to home schooling are no longer there. You'll just have to take my word for it. So I have no stories for you, but there are definitely people who have done it. :)

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Not that I have any experience in home-schooling, but I can imagine there are lots of tie-ins to just about any subject:

  • The fact that we use maps/coordinates lends itself to geography.
  • There are so many science tie-ins, Earth Science has it's own category in Earth Caches, there's physics lessons in the way the satellites work, etc.
  • How the GPS knows where it is is one big math problem. Also, puzzle caches can involve math.
  • As mentioned above, writing skills are honed in writing logs, and can also be practiced in writing a cache page.
  • ...and the list goes on...

I found out about caching when my wife spotted a classroom's-worth of children wandering around the property of the museum she works at. Turns out, one of the teachers at a local school uses caching in her lesson plans, and they were on a "field trip." Although I don't know what subject she was teaching, if you PM me, I can put you in contact with her through her GC.com profile.

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I am trying to get a friend into geocaching, and she home-schools (something we are also considering for the twins- now 14 months- when they are older). She was wondering if there are any parents who use geocaching as part of their home-schooling curriculum, such as to help teach geography, local history, biology, or whatever? I would love to hear your stories!

 

Well as our uncle (Michigan Cacheman) said our mother home-schools us and she dos make geocaching part of our school. #1 It motivates us to d good with our school and to get it done because if we don't we can't go geocaching. #2 It gives school a fun twist If you want you can even bey a curriculum about geocaching.

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I am trying to get a friend into geocaching, and she home-schools (something we are also considering for the twins- now 14 months- when they are older). She was wondering if there are any parents who use geocaching as part of their home-schooling curriculum, such as to help teach geography, local history, biology, or whatever? I would love to hear your stories!

 

The nice thing about homeschooling is that once the schoolwork is done, the kids don't have a the customary two to three hours of homework that public schools force kids to do. My daughter loves to go outdoors, espcially after she is done with her school work for the day.

 

While out hiking, we incorporate entemology, botony, geology, and history.

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I can also tell you that geocaching is a lot of fun for kids with disabilities. My son loves this and it has been great for him to get him to want to go out and walk trails and learn how to use a GPS and read, geography, and other things. While he is not solely homeschooled, we do work a lot at home on these things. He is Autistic.

 

With that said, we find just like most other kids, if you find something they like, they will learn it, and in geocahing I have found CJ learning more about these topics,

 

Directions (including N,S,E,W)

Distance

Time to get somewhere

Reading

comprehension of information (cache descriptions)

geography

Biology (Plant and animal recognition)

and a lot more..

 

we even got him a animal tracking guide (foot prints and such) he loves to try and spot those while we hike in the woods)

 

Thats just some of the ways we have used it to get him into these subjects. I think it could be used in many ways in a homeschooling environment. Good luck to you and hope they like it.

 

CW

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