Dad’s Worksheets

Over the past 10 years, Dad’s Worksheets.com has created over 8,600 printable math worksheets, logic puzzles and math games for students at every level — and makes them available free for printing or downloading on their website. Just about any mathematics topic you can think of can be found here, including all the core math skills, number patterns, measurement & conversions, word problems, geometry, rounding numbers, factorization, and on and on. All worksheets can be printed or saved to PDF.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Physics, Science

Jefferson Labs’ Science Games & Puzzles

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, also known as Jefferson Lab, is a world-leading nuclear physics research facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. They have put together a great site offering over two dozen online educational games that aren’t full of shoot-em-ups and fancy graphics — but are very well designed… fun… and highly educational.

Included are COOL games about the Periodic Table of Elements… the truly fun and challenging Speed Math game, and other logic and science puzzles that are great additions to your homechool repertoire. Click on over and bookmark this!

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

Just for Fun

Crunchy Bunny: Can You Feel It?

From Jess Erskine’s new cartoon blog! We’ll be sharing a few of these here, but go to CrunchyBunny.com for them all!

“A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.”

-T. E. Hulme, 1908

Freebie Friday Roundup

Freebie Friday Roundup: Optics, Sand, The Jetsons, Peanuts, and Calvin & Hobbes

OPTICS: LIGHT, COLOR AND THEIR USES (PDF ebook)

A great hands-on experiment & study guide from NASA filled with great color and light activities using lenses, prisms and mirrors to create telescopes, periscopes, microscopes and kaleidoscopes. Other activities include finding focal length and understanding reflection, refraction and diffraction. Activities are marked by grade level, and can be adapted from K-12 (so they say). Anyway, this is a lot of fun!

CLICK HERE to go to the download page!

IT’S A JETSONS WORLD by Jeffrey Tucker (PDF ebook)

Today we feature this fascinating economics book, just published by the Mises Institute book for junior high – adult readers on how free market has changed our lives today, particularly in the digital universe, and yet we don’t appreciate or realize this nearly enough. Meanwhile, the public (government) sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter.
Easy to read, full of great stories, and written with an Austrian School of economics viewpoint, this book is and eye-opener for older students and parents who want to gain a better understanding on the changes in our world today and in the years ahead.

The pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that’s only for now, and who knows what next year will bring.
Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of “miracle fatigue”—too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all.

The Jetsons’ world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very font of the good life. But there is one major difference, and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have were it not for the government’s promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life to its smallest detail.

The government, however, is still the Flintstones, an anachronism that operates as this massive drag on our lives. With its money manipulations, regulations, taxation, wars (on people, products, and services), prisons, and injustices, we similarly look the other way. We try to find the workaround and keep living like the Jetsons.

CLICK HERE to go to the download page for this ebook

THE THEOLOGY OF CALVIN & HOBBES

Well, not quite… but today we feature something completely different: Here from the Experimental Theology blog is a playful and thoughtful “young-reader friendly” online book of theology lessons derived from none other than Calvin & Hobbes. “How can this possibly be?” you ask. Well, give it a look-see. Regardless of your theological persuasion, this contains some fascinating material (AND great cartoons) for young and old readers alike.

CLICK HERE to go to the online ebook!

And don’t worry PEANUTS fans… Mr. Beck has also got you covered. Check this out!

THIS IS SAND

Just for the fun of it, here’s a delightful little activity game to end your week. See what you can make of this virtual sand box.

CLICK HERE to go to the site! Then press or double click your left mouse button to drop sand.

Tip: Click on the little square in the upper left hand corner to get instructions. Use the “c” key occasionally to change your colors. Have fun!

Audio, Literature

The Jungle Book – Audio Dramatization Part 2

Here’s the conclusion to this wonderful full-cast audio dramatization of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, as originally broadcast on CBS Adventure Theater in 1977. This is much closer to the original story than the Disney movies, and has excellent sound quality. Tom Bosley (the father from “Happy Days” is the host and narrator). It’s 40 minutes of pure audio theater magic. Enjoy!

To listen online, just click the link below. To download the MP3 program to your computer, RIGHT CLICK the link, then “save link” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key, then click the link and save to your mac.

THE JUNGLE BOOK, PART TWO – “TIGER, TIGER”

Audio, Literature

The Jungle Book – Audio Dramatization, Part 1

Here’s a wonderful full-cast audio dramatization of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, as originally broadcast on CBS Adventure Theater in 1977. This is much closer to the original story than the Disney movies, and has excellent sound quality. Tom Bosley (the father from “Happy Days” is the host and narrator). Today we feature part one of this two part story: “Mowgli” is a fantastic 40 minute audio story your kids will love. Look for the conclusion, “Tiger, Tiger” tomorrow!

THE JUNGLE BOOK, PART ONE – “MOWGLI”

Physics, Science, Video

Random Experiments from The King of Random

“Welcome to a world of garage science and backyard experimenting. This page is all sciencey guy stuff .. but girls can play too!”

Here’s a delightfully geeky Facebook video channel with over 70 fun and interesting videos from, with all sorts of “garage science” experiments, inventions, and science — including making waterproof sand, all sorts of colored smokes, slime, a smoke ring cannon, a David & Goliath sling, a T-shirt cannon, melting marbles with electricity, and lots more.

Most of these are NOT suitable for most homeschoolers to try for themselves, as they involve some hazardous chemicals, fire, etc. and are really meant for older experimenters. However, they are full of fun ideas and plenty of science (which is usually fully explained by the very likeable, good natured hosts), and just may pique your student’s interest in physics, chemistry and science.

(We also didn’t spot anything off-color or objectionable on the videos we watched, but then we did not watch all 71 of the videos. You may want to preview some of the more off-the-wall experiments if they freak you out.)

CLICK HERE to go to their Facebook video channel.

History, Nature Studies

Wizard of Science – George Washington Carver

Today we are featuring this fascinating vintage comic book biography of George Washington Carver (1860 – 1943).

Carver, the son of a slave, was an American botanist, environmentalist and inventor who actively promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, he developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops, such as peanuts & sweet potatoes, both as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. In an era of very high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the black community. He was widely recognized and praised in the white community for his many achievements and talents.

This seven page story was originally published in Negro Heroes #1 way back in 1944. The full comic book, along with thousands of other vintage public domain comic books, can be found at the Digital Comic Museum website.

To download this PDF comic book story, RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save link” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key, then click the link and save the PDF to your Mac.

Freebie Friday Roundup

FREEBIE FRIDAY ROUNDUP: Legos, Pennies & Hearts

LEARNING WITH LEGOS UNIT STUDY

Here’s a fun Unit Study using everybody’s favorite building blocks from WalkingByTheWay.com. The Learning with LEGOs unit study is written to the student and each day includes four components: copywork, a word of the day, explore and learn, and a building challenge.

CLICK HERE to go to the download page!

THE MEGA PENNY PROJECT

Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is.
The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: “What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?”

CLICK HERE to go to the site, and have fun!

THE HUMAN HEART

Did you know that the human heart beats about 100,000 times a day, 35 million times a year, and two and a half billion times in an average lifetime?
Did you know that, on any given day, your heart beats roughly 100,000 times and your blood travels about 12,000 miles as it circulates throughout your body?
Did you know the average heart pumps more that a gallon of blood a minute?
Did you know a kid’s heart is about the size of a fist… and an adult’s heart is the size of two fists?

Here is a great collection of links from “Education World” all about the human heart. You’ll learn how the heart works, take an interactive tour of the heart, learn about the heart’s electrical system, blood flow and blood supply, see some amazing videos, and much more.

CLICK HERE then follow the links!

Arts & Crafts

Art for Teens Who Say They Can’t Draw

StartsAtEight.com has a great post on how to help your tween and teen-aged student dramatically improve their drawing skills, utilizing “right brain / left brain” exercises as popularized in the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. Included are links to five downloadable lessons to help guide your student into putting this into practice.

PS. This really works.