48 Great Ways Homeschoolers are Using Pinterest

Pinterest has proven itself to be a valuable tool for so many people: photographers, designers, craft artists, wedding planners, moms, and more. It's a great place to discover interesting ideas, organize your thoughts, and pin down resources that otherwise might get lost in the shuffle. Homeschooling parents make up another group that benefits greatly from Pinterest, as they share unit studies, school room inspiration, and fun classroom project ideas. Read on to learn more about how homeschoolers are finding value in Pinterest, and some of the interesting ways they're putting the site to work in the home classroom.

Social

Whether you're connecting with a homeschool family at your church down the street or through Pinterest in another state, social interaction and sharing is a fun way to enrich homeschooling. These are a few of the ways Pinterest makes that easier.

1. Join homeschool groups: Homeschool communities are coming together to create collaborative boards with writing activities, classroom ideas, books, things to order and more, all put on Pinterest to share with the group and anyone else who wants to follow along.
2. Laugh about homeschooling: Connect with other homeschoolers on Pinterest to find humorous pins that will keep you going with a smile on your face.
3. Get feedback: Share ideas and resources from your homeschool classroom, curriculum, and more to find out what other homeschoolers think about what you're doing, and maybe even find ways to improve it.
4. Connect with similar homeschoolers: Stay on Pinterest long enough, and you're bound to run into others with similar ideas for homeschooling that you can collaborate and connect with.
5. Swap lesson plans: Have a lesson plan you loved? Put it on Pinterest, and look for great lesson plans from others.
6. See what homeschool looks like at someone else's home: Satisfy your curiosity for finding out what kind of homeschool experience other families are enjoying.
7. Find encouragement: Search for homeschool resources on Pinterest, and you're certain to find small pieces of encouragement to remind you why your job as a homeschooler is so important.

Resources

Spend any amount of time on Pinterest and you're bound to be flabbergasted by the sheer amount of inspiration and valuable resources you can find on the site. These are great ways homeschoolers can gather resources through Pinterest.

8. School room decor inspiration: Pinterest is full of great ideas for decor, including kids' rooms and even classrooms.
9. Create digital news clippings: Find news clippings that are relevant for your kids to check out and pin them to a rotating board that they use to start their school day, learning about current events and issues that are relevant to their curriculum.
10. Find homeschool planners: Pinners love to share their homeschool plans, so you can use the site to check out what other families are doing that week.
11. Discover great books: Use Pinterest to find the best homeschooling books and great books you can put to work in lessons.
12. Find studying cheat sheets: Use Pinterest to discover great sheets of information on lots of different subjects.
13. Resource gathering for presentations: Kids can use Pinterest to find ideas and photos to use in presentations.
14. Discovering lessons: At some point, the question of what to teach can be a problem for homeschoolers, but Pinterest offers endless ideas for lessons that you can try with your kids.
15. Get your kids out of the house: Use Pinterest to find outdoor nature ideas to use on a nice day, and burn off some energy in the backyard or park.
16. Find educational videos: Check out Pinterest to easily locate great videos that you can use in your home classroom.
17. Find the best photos for your lessons: Quickly and easily locate high-quality and inspiring photos to use in homeschooling lessons through Pinterest.
18. Gather free resources: Find homeschool freebies, free learning resources, printables, and much more on Pinterest.
19. Track homeschool-friendly activities: Find out about your city's activities at the zoo, special events, find classes at the history and science museum, and more.
20. Create study boards: Pinterest is a great place to add activities that suit specific study units, and then go back and browse them with the kids.
21. Highlighting great art: Find and pin fine art to study as part of a unit, or pin great photos and art ideas that you can try out yourself.
22. Develop hands-on learning: Check out Pinterest to find great ideas for hands-on learning projects, especially seasonal crafts.
23. Locating printables: Printable games, work projects, and more are coming out in droves on Pinterest, and you can quickly find and organize them with the site.
24. Discover experiments: Find great ideas for science experiments you can try at home on Pinterest, and bring your science lessons to life.
25. Kitchen chemistry inspiration: Pinterest is full of mouth-watering and fun recipes to try out, usually with plenty of photos and easy-to-follow steps that make them perfect for trying out with kids for a regular lesson in kitchen chemistry.
26. Finding homeschool blogs: Homeschool blogs are a great place to find ideas, and the selections you can find on Pinterest are just the tip of the iceberg. Using Pinterest to find great ideas can also help you find excellent homeschool blogs with even more great ideas.

Organization

As a visual bookmarking site, Pinterest is an organizer's dream. Here are just a few of the ways homeschoolers can get organized with Pinterest.

27. Create a wishlist: Build a wishlist and shopping list to keep track of all of the items you'd like to have for your classroom.
28. Taming the magazine pile: If you have homeschool and craft magazines clogging up your classroom, you can photograph and pin your favorite ideas to save and organize them, and then dispose of the magazines without guilt or anxiety.
29. Avoiding distraction: Distracted mama brain can leave you paralyzed, but with Pinterest, you can just pin resources that you come across and check it out later.
30. Save holiday activities for the future: If you're months away from Christmas, but found some really great ornament crafts to try out in the classroom, you can pin them to a holiday-specific board, and they'll be right there waiting for you when the holiday comes around again.
31. Organized resources: The Internet is full of worksheets, craft ideas, educational games, and more, and with Pinterest, you can keep them all in neat and highly visual organized bookmarks.
32. Inventory your books: Save your library to Pinterest, and your kids can visually browse all of the books you have whether they're near the bookcase or not. They can even add comments to the pin and repin them to boards for units or favorite novels.
33. Easy access to bookmarks: Homeschooling parents who once had thousands upon thousands of text bookmarks can now use Pinterest instead, browsing them in a fun and visual way.
34. Streamlining weekly lesson planning: Planning lessons can take a lot of time each week, but homeschool parents who have used Pinterest to pin to theme boards have been able to cut out hours of planning time.
35. Find new ways to make your classroom more organized: Pinterest has seemingly endless ideas for organizing spaces, and you can find great resources for corralling the mess of papers and projects that your classroom accumulates through Pinterest.
36. Remember your favorite lessons: If you loved it, remember it, and save it in a special board to revisit later with younger children or share with homeschool friends.
37. Create seasonal boards: Highlight ideas for winter, spring, summer, or fall, and go back to reference them when the time is right.
38. Create themed weeks: Follow and share calendars on Pinterest to create and participate in themed weeks with other homeschoolers.

Assignments

Pinterest isn't just a great tool for teaching parents; it's perfect for students as well. See how students can take on Pinterest assignments.

39. Showcase outstanding work: If your child has done some particularly impressive schoolwork, pin it to a special board to let them know you really appreciate their effort and hard work.
40. Create collages: As a kid, you probably made collages from magazine pages and mod podged them to a poster board, but your kids can create collages on Pinterest instead.
41. Lapbooks: Kids can create lapbooks on Pinterest, collecting great resources on a single subject to supplement their curriculum.
42. A lesson in pinning: Have students use Pinterest to collect and pin items that all have certain criteria in common.
43. Create photo journals from family vacations: Enjoy your vacation, and when you get back, give the kids an assignment to pin photos that best tell the story of your adventure.
44. Create a virtual field trip: Even if you can't travel to the Smithsonian, you can go to their website and pin your favorite exhibits and collections as a virtual field trip.
45. Put together creative writing vision boards: For kids who are working on creative writing assignments, they can put together themes and vision boards on Pinterest.
46. Family challenges: Lots of Pinterest users gather, gather, and gather some more, but never actually put all of the great ideas they've found to work. You can make it a homeschool challenge for each child (and you) to take on at least one great idea from Pinterest each week.
47. Save your sanity on a rainy day: If you can't make it outside, but the natives are getting restless, turn to your pins for fun and educational ideas, or quickly browse to find new ideas to put to work right away.
48. Turn kids into curators: Pinterest is so easy, even younger kids can use it. Help students create Pinterest boards for their favorite things, like animals or even paper dolls.

Taken From Online College