How a Simple Sharpie Can Make Your Kids WANT to Learn

practice spelling … nope!

And then there are times when a kid will sit down and just do their assignment.

No whining. No crying. No begging.

I wish I had a crystal ball to explain why sometimes it’s easy … and sometimes it’s not.

But I don’t!

What I DO have is a simple sharpie trick that seems to help (at least some of the time!)

(P.S. This trick ALSO works wonders if the Sharpies get into the hands of your artist 2 year old!)

CLICK HERE for some cool, colorfu​​l sharpies for your homeschool.

And if you a whiteboard like the one I show you, you can find it here.

Transcript

Hey guys, I'm ToriAnn Perkey. From my homeschool to your homeschool, today I want to talk about the simple Sharpie. Sharpies are permanent markers and, oh my goodness, they can be the bane of every mom's existence. If you've ever tried to get Sharpie off the wall or anything else, you know that this sucker is very, very permanent. I know this because I had a certain daughter who wrote all over her bedroom and all over my sheets and her sheets with a Sharpie.

Yeah, not fun.  

But today I want to talk about how you can use a Sharpie, a simple little Sharpie, to make homeschooling so much more fun. Your kids will want to learn. As I'm doing that, I'm going to show you a little trick that's like magic. It seems like magic, and it's made such a difference, and we've used it tons in my homeschool.

So, the cool thing about a Sharpie is it is permanent … except if you apply alcohol to it, you can get it off, which is why you may know that if you take a Sharpie and then you draw on something and then take a dry erase marker and draw over it, it will often pull the Sharpie off.  I know, super cool. So, I decided that I would figure out if I could use a Sharpie on a whiteboard without the dry erase marker and have it work -- and it does.

So, let me show you. So, I have these cool whiteboards, and this side is plain and this side is lined, and we have used these tons because they have the line size we've done a ton of our handwriting assignments on these and my kids use this side to do math. It's a lot like having a slate from like 120 years ago -- little chalkboard slates they used to carry around -- only we have these whiteboard slates. What's really fun is I can take the Sharpie and I can draw all over the whiteboard and because it's Sharpie it doesn't come off. It's permanent.

My kids can do a handwriting assignment or a math assignment or whatever they need to do, and they can then come show it to me ... particularly the handwriting side but either way … they can show it to me, and it doesn't rub off accidently. And particularly for lefthanders when they're writing, and they will write this way, right? And then their hand will smear it while they're writing.  

But then if you take rubbing alcohol -- and I just bought this container to put the rubbing alcohol in. You do have to have the highest concentration of alcohol you can get. So, you want a 91 percent alcohol.

You take the rubbing alcohol, and you take either a rag or a paper towel, and you can put the rubbing alcohol on the rag or the actual whiteboard and then you go like this. Do you see that?  Do you see that? It's like magic, and off it comes. 

What I love is that Sharpies have this amazing kinesthetic feel. So, not only do we use black ones, but we get all the colored Sharpies. And my kids who maybe were a little resistant to do handwriting or were resistant to do math when you can write on a surface there's something about Sharpie or dry erase marker on a whiteboard surface that just is so fun and so tactile, and it shifts the learning, and my kids want to do their assignments because they're drawing with colors and they're drawing here. 

You can get Sharpies in fine point as well as in the -- well, fine point and then extra fine point. And now that I can buy even extra point, we can do even more complicated math and things that take a much finer writing because you have even just a finer point that you can write with.

So, there it is -- the Sharpie with a dry erase board. So much that we've done in our homeschool with those two humble tools. Ninety one percent alcohol, use a paper towel or a rag.  Simple, simple, simple. (Just so you know 91 percent alcohol also gets Sharpie off bunk beds. Who knew?)

So, I'm going to give a link up above or down below. You can check out the Sharpies. You can check out the whiteboard that I recommend on Amazon, if that's something you want to incorporate in your homeschool. Really, really fun. Super cool.

I'm ToriAnn Perkey, and from my homeschool to your homeschool, I bring you these videos every single week so that you can be a super successful and confident homeschool mom.

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