5 Ways for Parents to Use AI in a Homeschool

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I recently learned about a few ways to use AI in a homeschool and I wanted to share them with you because I think they can really make homeschooling a little easier. I’m sure we could all use a little extra time in our days!

My husband and son are very into tech, so I had heard about AI (artificial intelligence) systems like Chat GPT and thought they sounded cool. I hadn’t thought about how they could actually make my job as a homeschool mom a bit easier though until one day when I was chatting with my husband.

We were walking our foster puppy and I was complaining that I wasn’t ready for our daughter’s book club. Normally I read the book and prepare discussion questions, but I had run out of time. I couldn’t find any questions for the book online and there was no time to read the book unless I wanted to pull an all-nighter (which I did NOT).

He suggested that I ask Chat GPT to create discussion questions. I was skeptical but didn’t have anything to lose, so I gave it a try. I assumed the questions would be generic.

I typed the prompt into the free version of Chat GPT. I asked it to create 10 discussion questions for Part of Your World by Liz Braswell. The AI instantly spit out 10 insightful and relevant questions for this specific book. Then I asked for 10 more discussion questions. Those questions were great too!

In just a few minutes I had 20 fantastic discussion questions for my daughter’s book club.

Here are a few ways that parents can use AI in a homeschool.

Ways to Use AI in Homeschool

Create Discussion Questions

AI can quickly create a few types of discussion questions:

• Books
• Topics

Books – AI can offer discussion questions for many books. These questions could be used as an informal homeschool discussion, a book club, or even as essay questions. Chat GPT isn’t quite as accurate on literature published after 2021, but it works well for earlier published works.

Sample prompt: Create 20 discussion questions for The Great Gatsby. Include answers.

Topics – Sometimes we want to discuss a topic we are studying to make sure our kids understand, but we don’t have the energy to think of questions. This is especially true if we have multiple kids all learning different things! We can ask AI to create the questions for us.

Sample prompt: Create 10 elementary discussion questions about the solar system.

If you want the answers to the discussion questions, just include that in your prompt.

Outline a Unit Study

Sometimes we can’t find a unit study that matches what we want to teach or what our kids want to learn. When that happens we need to make our own unit study.

Sometimes the hardest part of creating a unit study is deciding what to teach. This is where AI can be really helpful.

Chat GPT can create a fairly detailed outline for a unit study.

Sample prompt: Outline a 6-week unit study for 7th graders about Ancient Rome.

This prompt supplied me with a 6-week plan. Each week had a focus and 3 – 4 suggested discussions or activities.

Once you have the outline you can gather resources (AI can suggest those too) and create your lesson plans.

Brainstorm Engaging Homeschool Activities

AI can even add some fun to our homeschools. Scrolling Pinterest and Instagram for engaging educational activities can be fun, but it can also be a huge time suck. AI can suggest fun activities that are specific to what we want to teach.

Once we have ideas from AI, then we can plug those ideas into Pinterest if we want to visualize the ideas.

Sample prompt: Give me 6 hands-on activities for learning about butterflies.

Write Lesson Plans

Many curriculum companies provide lesson plans that correspond to their program, but sometimes we need to write our own lesson plans. Maybe we have an extra week that we need to fill or maybe we want to review a topic before moving on.

AI can create lesson plan outlines with clear objectives, activities, and assessments.

Sample prompt: Write a lesson plan for third graders that lasts one week. The topic is how to write a paragraph.

Create Quizzes

Any time I share a curriculum or unit study I have created, I am always asked about quizzes. Truthfully, I don’t use quizzes very often in my homeschool. I prefer to discuss topics with my kids and see what they understand (or don’t).

However, lots of families want to use quizzes as a quick way to demonstrate knowledge. This is particularly true among homeschool families who are required to maintain a homeschool portfolio.

Thankfully, AI can create quizzes for us on just about any topic.

The quizzes can be short answers or multiple choice. It can always include the answers.

Sample prompt: Create a 10-question quiz about mitosis. Include the answers.

Sample prompt: Create a 10-question quiz about two-digit multiplication. Include the answers.

Just copy and paste the text into a document. Move the answers to their own page. Then print it out.

Tips for Using AI in Your Homeschool

1. Be specific – You will get better results if you tell the AI exactly what you want. List the number of weeks, lessons, or questions. Tell it a specific grade level or range. Ask for answers to the questions.
2. Play around with it. Currently, there is a free version of Chat GPT that seems to work well. Try a few things and see how it works for your homeschool.
3. Use it as a time saver, but remember to fact-check things if anything sounds off.

AI is all over the news right now. It seems like the news likes to emphasize the downsides of AI, but rarely mentions the advantages it offers.

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