Home education

Parents are increasingly providing education to their own children at home in the UK, via approaches that include:

1. Providing extra educational activities at home, that supplement their children's work in school and the homework they receive.

2. Employing tutors, who visit the home to provide extra tuition for their children.

3. Taking their children out of school completely, and providing full time education for them at home, often in co-operation with other like-minded parents.

This section of the website includes:

Using K'NEX in Home Education
Some issues to consider
Lesson plans

Home educators are helped by the fact that often their children will already have used K'NEX and/or Kid K'NEX at primary school or at home.

Using K'NEX in Home Education

The strengths that make K'NEX such a good educational investment for schools are also relevant in a home education setting. These include:

K'NEX can help pupils aged 5 to 16 develop skills and knowledge in curriculum areas such as maths, technology, IT and science, in a hands-on way.
Kid K'NEX can also help children aged 3 to 7 develop early years skills and experience that are essential for that age group.
K'NEX and Kid K'NEX are relatively low cost.
Any home educator who buys K'NEX will find that their K'NEX "resource" will be used time and again, in different curriculum areas, and with different ages of children (if appropriate).
Asking children to work in small groups to build K'NEX models and complete K'NEX challenges also helps develop "life" skills such as teamworking skills, problem-solving skills and communications skills.
K'NEX can be used to provide extra education for children with special educational needs at home.
K'NEX can be used to provide extra education for gifted and talented children at home.

The main curriculum areas for K'NEX are shown in the Curriculum pages, together with information on using K'NEX with children with special educational needs, and with talented and gifted children.

Our K'NEX shop provides details of the many K'NEX and Kid K'NEX education sets. These sets are much larger and better value than the K'NEX and Kid K'NEX sets you can buy in the shops. The sets include general-purpose sets (such as the Discovery Building Set); Curriculum sets (such as the Exploring Machines sets); and themed sets (such as the Space Exploration set). The shop also sells two K'NEX guides entitled "101 K'NEX Challenges" and "101 K'NEX Maths activities" that may assist home educators.

We are also pleased to offer a free guide in our Free Downloads entitled "Using K'NEX in Home education", and a range of K'NEX Training workshops.

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Some issues to consider

A few of the general issues you may wish to consider when using K'NEX for home education are:

It will help greatly if you store your K'NEX carefully arranged in compartmented trays, rather than all mixed up in a big box. Many of the K'NEX Education sets now come with trays.
Once you and your children have mastered following the instructions for the K'NEX models in the teachers' guide, you may want to think about starting to use K'NEX Challenges. This will help you to use K'NEX to help develop your children's innovation skills and problem-solving skills.
Children do enjoy building K'NEX models and completing K'NEX challenges on their own, but additional educational benefits will be gained if they can work on K'NEX activities on occasion as a team. For instance, with brothers or sisters, with other children who are being educated at home, or with parents in a "family learning" setting.
You may find that your children become better at using K'NEX than you are yourself, in a similar way that children sometimes become more proficient with computers than their parents. Do not worry about this!

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Lesson plans

You can download a typical K'NEX lesson plan from a UK curriculum guide on the Free downloads page.

KNEX resources > Educational settings > Home Education


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