Fun Way to Teach Facts

Spread the love

Whether you homeschool or run a youth group or something similar, sometimes you are teaching a bunch of facts to a group of children but you want it to be fun. How can you do that without just reading the facts? This post has some ideas on a fun way to teach facts.

Whether you have a list of science facts or history facts or something else you want to make learning them fun. It’s not just about kids loving fun, you want them to have fun so they are more likely to retain what they learned.

So if you have a list of facts you want children to learn, try these ideas.

This post has some ideas on a fun way to teach facts in your homeschool or youth group.

Fun Ways to Teach Facts

These activities would work with 1 or more children. They are more fun with a larger crowd but if you only work with one child, they are doable.

True False Game

Take your list of facts and reword them as true/false questions. You want some to be true and some to be false. If you want you can include a note after false ones correcting the information. You would read this part after the answer is revealed.

You’ll need an open space of some kind. Put two chairs (or cones or anything you have) at either end of the space. These will mark the True and False spots.

The kids stand in the middle of the chairs. Tell them which chair is which (or label them). You read a fact out loud and then the kids go stand by the chair that represents their answer. Encourage them to think for themselves and not just follow the crowd. No fence sitting. They must pick one. You can make them run to the chair to make it more active. Then reveal the answer and give corrected information for false answers if desired. Kids go back to the center and you start again.

Facts Scavenger Hunt

This one works only if the kids you work with can read. Print or write your facts on cards that you hide around the room. Divide how many cards you have by the number of children you have to figure out how many cards each child should find. (e.g. 2 kids, 20 cards. So each kid finds 10.) One cards are hidden or scattered, tell them they the boundaries they can look in and how many they need to find. They say Go! Once all the cards are found gather the kids back in the middle. The kids take turns reading the facts out that they found for all to hear. The fact that they found them and they get to teach the group usually makes it more fun.

Act it Out

This one depends on the facts being learned but works well with young children who can’t read as well as those that can. Take a look at your facts and think about what they are about. How could the kids act out the facts as they learn them?

For example:

  • If you are teaching kids about how animals hibernate in the winter, have them build a fort and hibernate in it while you read the facts.
  • Sports facts? Act out the motions of the sports before each fact.
  • Facts about medieval times? Have a pretend jousting competition between each fact.
  • Facts about a country? Pretend to travel there first. Do you go by plane, car or boat? How do you say hello when you get there?

Turn it Into a Game

This one is harder to do, especially if you are not used to making games out of facts. Here is an example.

If you are teaching which birds go south for the winter and which don’t, you could make it a game. Make a list of some birds that do go south and some that don’t. Have kids at one end of and open space. You stand at the other end. When you list a bird that flies south, point behind you and they run towards you. Say a bird that stays north, and point in front of you. Try to get them going back and forth.

You basically use a game that already exists and change it for your needs. The game above is a variation on a game called Ship to Shore. Try changing tag or ring around the rosie or tug of war into a learning game. Be creative.

Teaching about dinosaurs? One of your group is a meat eater while the rest are plant eaters. Meat eater stands in middle of the room. Plant eaters try to make it across the room without getting tagged (eaten) by the meat eater. If they get eaten, they turn into a meat eater and help eat dinosaurs when they go back the other way. Keep going till everyone is a meat eater. (Sound familiar? This is like octopus tag!)

Do you have any great ideas?

Speak Your Mind

*