What homeschool subjects are good when you have kids across a wide age range?

My kids cover a wide age range. Are there any homeschool subjects that are good for tots through teens to do together?

When you’re teaching across an age gap, the biggest challenge is finding something that’s engaging enough for older students while still being accessible to your younger ones. Fine arts classes, like art, music, and poetry, often fit the bill. A program like Meet the Masters or a book like Discovering Great Artists: Hands-On Art for Children in the Styles of the Great Masters gives kids an opportunity to study art history by making their own artistic creations, which can be as appealing to an artistic teen as to a scissors-happy kindergartner. (If you want to skip the history and go straight to the art-making, Mona Brookes’ Drawing With Children: A Creative Method for Adult Beginners, Too, is a fantastic resource for this.)

For music appreciation, it’s hard to beat the Classical Kids series (including Beethoven Lives Upstairs, Mr. Bach Comes to Call, and Mozart’s Magnificent Voyage), which introduces composers through music and words. These programs are just as likely to pop up on college radio stations as in preschool classrooms, so they really do have multi-age appeal.

With its dramatic costumes and exciting storylines, opera has surprising kid appeal, and the free Opera for Everyone podcast introduces the genre well.

And don’t underestimate the power of poetry as a multi-age study! A stack of poetry books from the library can be a springboard for great learning conversations.

Bottom line: When it comes to teaching multiple ages, hands-on topics that can go deep or stay light are your best bet. You can’t really go far wrong with fine arts.

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