Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!
On another note, do you enjoy browsing around quality homeschooling sites?
Check out Danny Carlton’s site called Homeschool Gold. It’s a really well designed collection of the best homeschool sites, ranked by popularity.
If you have a blog or website and would like the join, the member button (that you put on your site) is really nice and actually looks a bit like an award.
Able to pay shipping costs?
These folks over at Barclay Blocks will ship you the wood that they can’t use for their products. Check it out here.
Great stuff for teachers, schools, or anybody else that hankers to make wooden crafts, toys, or anything else from hard maple scrap. We pack a 12″ by 12″ by 12″ inch box with scrap (Some un-sanded). It contains defective blocks, unsorted block stock, plank stock, round stock and other cut-offs and trim we have left over from making blocks. This totals about 20 lbs. Every box is different. You pay the shipping costs plus $4.95 for the box and handling.
Actually sounds like a good plan to me. 🙂
I liked this one from School of thought as it gave good answers to why people are concerned about homeschooling vs public schooling.
Heart of Harmony helps us consider steps to take when making a child’s garden.
I can’t say that poetry is my thing, and I think I will find teaching it a tad bit difficult, but teach poetry I shall at least attempt. This post from Higher up and Further talks about poetic narration (whatever that is)
Free math worksheets (PDF format) at Twaddle-free math handouts.
High Desert hi-jinks brings a post on resources for doing a fox study.
My Domestic Church has a recommendation for using material from Bravewriter. Sounds like it might be a good program to use.
I’m catching up so here’s a hodgepodge of freebies on-line to help with homeschooling.
You Need a Story. you need to go to his site to sign up for his free weekly newsletter. Each newsletter will have a story. This is part of what he has to say:
At our house, reading aloud to the children is one of the pillars of their early education. And when I read to my own, I’d love to have your young’ns gather ’round with them. There’s always room for a couple more. In fact, if you’ll let me know where to send it, I’ll be glad to email you a FREE audio story each and every week in our FREE Weekly Newsletter. Sometimes I’ll do the reading, sometimes it may be someone else. But each installment brings you an exhilarating audio adventure —unabridged, of course—to enrich your children’s minds (not to mention keep them occupied with something beneficial while you get other things done). The selection may be one of the great classics. Or, it may be one of those hidden gems from the vast wealth of children’s literature. Or, it may be an enthralling story that has never yet been published. But it will always be clean, wholesome, and enjoyable for the whole family.
Home with Kids has a number of links that go to free homeschooling resources. this is what they have to say:
Most of the links listed below will take you to free resources. There are so many wonderful free educational sites now available online, that I can’t possibly list them all. Use the links below as a starting point, but don’t be afraid to explore what the world wide web has to offer.
The International Bible Society has a couple of videos that can be viewed on “who is Jesus” and “he has done it” Check them out.
Want to make a smoothie with your children? Check out Elkan’s Paradise Smoothie.
I haven’t had the time to really listen to this site called Just One More Book. It is a podcast on books.
Lessons at Home with Kids. This is a site with different monthly activities. A link that is from the same folks also does activities topically.
Family Education has a St Patricks day activity, a craft, and st paddy’s cookie recipe.
This Old Schoolhouse sends out emails to me every week. They often have a great deal of good information in them. Today’s email contained places to find help with teaching children good handwriting skills.
These are the links
ready for kindergarten. This page lists a bunch of different activities to help children learn skills they need in order to perform other skills later. Good resource I think.
ABC teach. This site allows a person to download pages to help with learning how to print and write. Saves a person time in having to create these pages on their own. In the long run, this is a paid for service site, but they do have some pages listed for free.
Handwriting Worksheets. The URL in this page seems to indicate that is also comes from the ABC teach page, but the page is set up differently. Whether it is or not, free pages saves me time and energy in making them myself.
ESL Writing Wizard brings us this site on writing in Paragraphs.
Handwriting for Kids. Basic copying pages for children to learn good style in printing.
I managed to continue this theme by doing a search on my own.
Young Minds Handwriting Practice Sheets. Some of their items have been discontinued on-line and need to be purchased, but they contain more than the practice your letters pages. They have some “pre-writing” pages as well.
Tracer pages is a rather neat site. They allow you to make differently themed pages using different styles of printing. I never knew that there were different styles before. Apparently there is Zaner-Bloser, d’nealian, and cursive. Cursive I knew but the other two I did not.
Handwriting Pages is a site the is a compilation of handwriting pages on the web. I have not looked through all the sites, the ones I saw looked either useless or okay.
Alphabet Printable Materials this site looks promising.
Handwriting worksheets has this to say about itself
Print the Handwriting Worksheets to make a handwriting book for each letter of the alphabet. For each letter, there are 5 different printable handwriting worksheets for 2 styles of writing. The first five are Zaner Bloser style, the next five are D’Nealian style. Print the handwritng worksheets and bind together to make a book.
There were lots more pages that I could examine, but I figured this gave me a place to start.
We are as of yet, a couple years away from printing, and at least four from writing. 🙂
So anyways, I was just browsing around and discovered this site.
Called the Ultimate Homeschool Expo 2007.
This is what part of the intro says
Ready for a big dose of encouragement?
No time to travel?
No extra money for hotels…parking…and eating out?
Can’t break away from your family? Well…we have the PERFECT solution! Join us for our:
Ultimate Homeschool Expo 2007!
May 1-5, 2007 (PLUS! Preview Chats weekly leading up to the event)
Ready for a fun Virtual Seminar??? One that promises to make homeschooling easy and doable? This is your event! Right there in the comfort of your home you can join us! We have an amazing speaker line-up! AND…if you have to miss any sessions, we are recording it for you to download by Mp3 and listen to at your convenience! Can you beat that? No crowds!
No makeup!
No parking!
No walking for blocks and blocks!
No expensive trips or hotel stays!
No babysitters!
Just plan something fun for your family–maybe a
cozy movie day or a fun project to keep them busy–then, kick back to enjoy! Talk about FUN! This is one that you will not want to miss!
anyways, tickets are 35$ a pop. doesn’t sound too bad for what they are offering, mind I’ve never been to a homeschool expo so I would have no idea what to expect.
freebies always sound good to me though……. 🙂
Links for these things.
Live Free Learn Free is a magazine for unschoolers and other natural learners. All material is written by those who home educate – both parents and children. It is an inclusive magazine, not only for and by experienced unschoolers, but also for and by those just starting down the path. It embraces those who are radical in their unschooling methods and those who are less so.
Life Learning, founded in 2002, is an intelligent, high quality, professionally edited and produced, 48-page magazine written by and for unschooling families who trust themselves and their children to learn freely and naturally what they need to know to live successful, happy lives.
The Link A USA based news link of all types of homeschooling information. Might be a good resource.
This website presents homeschooling information, support and encouragement, resources and reviews, free newsletters, networking and discussion lists, and – best of all – the online archives of Home Education Magazine, offering 10 years of articles, interviews, columns, resources, reviews and more which you can read online, anytime – FREE!
The Home Educator’s Tutor magazine is a resource for parents and anyone who works with children. The goal of the H.E. Tutor is to provide a resource for the studies that go beyond a basic education to fulfill a liberal (generous) education that is affordable.
HomeSchool World. This is where you can find information on the Practical Homeschooling Magazine. You can go there and request a free copy of their magazine.
provides encouragement, inspiration, practical teaching ideas, complete unit studies, educational craft projects, and much more in a manageable, easy-to-read format! Enrich your homeschool
A bi-monthly magazine that encourages readers through interest stories, curriculum and teaching tools that can be used in the home-classroom, family matters, educational travel, …. and much more.
Welcome to Ambleside Online, a free curriculum designed to be as close as possible to the curriculum that Charlotte Mason used in her own PNEU schools. Our goal is to be true to Charlotte Mason’s high literary standards. Ambleside Online uses the highest quality books and costs no more than the cost of texts. The curriculum uses as many free online books as possible, and there is no cost to use this information or join the support group
Welcome to An Old-Fashioned Education. I’m Miss Maggie, owner and creator of this site. You’ll find here a directory of free homeschool curricula, literature and text books organized for the use of homeschooling families.
A Beka Books. A publishing place as far as I can tell.
My Father’s World. Does a curriculum.
Preschool through High School
Easy to Teach
A Home for Homeschoolers. This is a homeschooling forum. I am sure there are other homeschooling forums out there but I have yet to find them. if anyone knows of other ones, please let me know, both so I know of them, and also so I can list them as resources for other folks.