Arts & Crafts

Housing a Forest

Tammy Dube loves being creative and encouraging kids to be creative as well.  Her website Housing A Forest is packed full of fun experiments, art tutorials, educational activities and good old fashioned fun your kids will love.

40+ experiments, including how to make a barometer & how to make a frozen bubble, are here

Over 200 crafts projects, including straw rockets & licence plate rubbings, are here

Over 100 kid art projects, including compass painting & marble painted rainbows, are here

Take some time to browse the site and check out the different project categories too. Highly recommended!

Language Arts

“The Good and the Beautiful” Language Arts Course

The Good and the Beautiful website offers a great Language Arts curriculum, and Levels 1 thru 5 are currently available as free PDF downloads from their website.

Here’s what they say on the site about this course on their site:

Connects learning to the good and the beautiful: family, God, high moral character, wholesome literature, and the wonders and beauty of nature and human life

Requires no daily prep time—just open the book and follow the instructions, learning and exploring along with your child.

Combines multiple subjects, connecting learning, adding meaning, shortening school time, making learning more enjoyable, and eliminating the need for 6 to 7 different courses. Reading, writing, literature, spelling, grammar & punctuation, vocabulary, geography, and art are all in one course.

Emphasizes literature of the highest literary and moral merit. 

Full phonics reading program creates excellent readers. Phonics instruction is included through Level 3.

Strong writing program creates excellent writers!

Thorough and advanced courses leave no gaps! There is no need to supplement.

There are lots of resources on the site (both downloadable and printed) that are available for purchase, but again, Levels 1 – 5 of the Language Arts course are free downloads in PDF format. You will need to go through their checkout to get them.

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

Language Arts

Listen, Write and Read

Listen, Write and Read is a multi-sensory series of five workbooks incorporating dictation, writing and reading of simple sight word sentences. Its primary goal is to help students both young and old to read and write.

Here’s what Paul J. Wickham, creator of the series, says about its origin:

For nine years, I taught reading and writing to children and adults in Los Angeles. At the end of each school term, all my students could write clear, coherent sentences and paragraphs that developed a central idea.

The dramatic improvement in their reading and writing skills over a single school term was attributable to the use of dictation exercises I developed to introduce and review the use of high-frequency sight words. Training in the whole-word recognition of sight words is clearly superior to phonics instruction for these words. Learning to recognize these words instantly by sight is essential to developing reading fluency and comprehension.

LISTEN, WRITE AND READ Sentences for Sight Word Dictation is a collection of the specific sentences I used for this instruction, arranged by grade level. A series of five activity books provide students with an illustration of each sentence. The illustrations were designed to have universal appeal to students of all ages.

All five activity books are available free on the website.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Freebie Friday Roundup

FREEBIE FRIDAY ROUNDUP: ASTRONOMY, LEGOS, PHYSICS & 100+ HS EBOOKS

Since our server crash last week killed off our archives, we’ll be re-posting a handfull of past freebies every Friday for the forseeable future. And so is born the “Freebie Friday Roundup!” Here’s this week’s goodies:

AT HOME ASTRONOMY

Want to build a lunar settlement, launch an indoor rocket, make meteor craters and explore our solar system? You can do all that with a little imagination and these fun hands-on science experiments for the entire family, from the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

SHELLY LOVETT’S PRE-SCHOOL TEACHING TIPS LIBRARY

Shelley Lovett’s ChildCareLand page on YouTube offers a HUGE library of short teaching tips and learning activities videos for preschool and kindergarten age students — over 500  practical, helpful ideas, crafts, activities and demonstrations that will enhance any pre-school or kindergarten age learning time. If you’ve got a little learner in your home, check it out!

Click here to go to the video library site on YouTube! Be sure to bookmark it for future reference!

HOMESCHOOLING EBOOKS FROM CREATION MINISTRIES

Creation Ministries has a library of well over 100 homeschool-oriented ebooks and PDF articles on a huge variety of topics. Some of these are creation science oriented, but most of them cover other topics, such as

Language Arts
Math
Reading
Writing
Charlotte Mason topics
Classical homeschooling
Unit Studies and much more.

You’ll definitely want to bookmark this great page of goodies!

Click here to go to the download page!

LAND OF THE LOST LEGO PLANS!

ALL THOSE LOST LEGO PLANS – FOUND FOR YOU! If yours is a Lego household, you have all these Legos blocks and pieces jumbled together in boxes and tubs and drawers, but have likely lost the original instruction guides on how to build the individual projects, right? Not any more. We found them for you!

Here’s a great site that has dowloadable PDFs of practically EVERY Lego kit instruction guide you can think of, and loads more you’ve never even heard of. It’s every frustrated Lego builder’s dream site. Bookmark it and keep for future reference. Happy building!

Click here to go to the site!

PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS YOU CAN DO AT HOME

Physics is primarily the study of motion and energy, but that energy can take many forms: Motion, Heat, Sound, Electricity, Magnetism and Light. Each of these forms of energy is demonstrated and explained with easy to do, fun experiments in this neat little 22 page collection published by Professor Clint Sprott and his associates at the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as part of their Wonders of Physics outreach program. Your kids will really enjoy these. Highly recommended!

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

Language Arts, Math

“Mini Offices” from Practical Pages

A Mini Office is essentially a reference file or folder with all a child’s personal important information right at hand.  This could be reference charts, handwriting charts, number lines, multiplication tables, vocabulary lists, handy facts and any other useful information. It is a handy way of encouraging children to work independently and to provide the necessary assistance without having to put up visual displays.

Nadene at Practical Pages has put together collections of these reference pages for both younger and older students. They are filled with useful, helpful stuff, and you’re gonna want to download ’em both.

The JUNIOR MINI OFFICE includes:

  1. Number Line & Number Chart
  2. Ordinal numbers & Fractions
  3. Tally or scores, finger counting signs, Shapes, Colours, Directions
  4. Number words & Roman Clock and Roman numbers
  5. Multiplication Tables
  6. Seasons & Months & Days of the Week
  7. Days of the week & time of the day
  8. Address & Where am I?
  9. Weather symbols and Rainbow
  10. Sight Word Walls
  11. Phonic Alphabet
  12. Phonic Blends
  13. Family Words
  14. Print Handwriting Chart
  15. Cursive Handwriting Chart

THE SENIOR MINI OFFICE is a 20-page PDF download that covers a lot of Mathematics, and includes:

  1. Number Chart
  2. Number words
  3. Multiplication Table
  4. Keeping score / Tally, Finger counting, Shapes & Colours
  5. Maths Symbols & their meanings & Compass
  6. Ordinal numbers & Roman Clock & Roman numerals
  7. Telling Time , Clock face, Analogue & Digital Clocks
  8. Angles & Fractions
  9. Different types of fractions & Converting fractions
  10. Converting Units & Number Systems
  11. Percentages – Decimals – Fractions
  12. Circles – Definition & Formula
  13. 2D Shapes – Description Circumference & Area formula
  14. 3D Shapes – Description Volume & Outer Area formula
  15. Triangles – Definition & Formula
  16. Weather symbols & Wind direction & speed symbol & Celsius/Fahrenheit
  17. Cursive Handwriting Chart

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Arts & Crafts, Math

Printable Graph Paper & More

Have you ever needed a very specific type of graph paper or grid paper for a project or lesson? If so, you’ll understand the value of this very helpful freebie.

Incompetech.com has a great online graph paper generator, that lets you customize pages to your specifications and then download as PDFs so you can print copies as needed. There’s a wonderful variety of designs: Squares, circles, hexagons, brick patterns, etc. — even specialty pages (music notation, accounting ledgers, perspective & more). You’ll find these PDFs extremely useful. Bookmark for use when you need it!

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Language Arts

Freebies from Lit Mama

Lit Mama Homeschool.com has a delightful collection of dozens of homeschool resources, worksheets, mini unit studies, planning pages, and more that may be freely downloaded.

Here’s just a few of them, reflecting Lit Mama’s them of “educating with a fire for literature”:

Poetry Walk Poems /Poetry Tea Time Poem Book for Kids
Treasure Island Pirate Pack
Explore your Neighborhood Pack
Mini Units on Bridge to Terabithia, Tom Sawyer, Watership Down, The Secret Garden, Alice 8n Wonderland,
Blank Maps of the World
Teaching Story Types & Elements of Plot
Book Journaling prompts
Curriculum & project planners…
And lots more.

CLICK HERE to go to the site and browse the collection!

Craziness, News

So this happened.

Hi Friends,

We had a digital meltdown, and the past 10+ years of freebies and resource posts just… poof! Evaporated.

So we are going to start again in just a couple more days.

There’s just a few resources here right now, but there will soon be more. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In the meantime, just looking at these wonderful photos taken last week  from The Atlantic and shared by the Internet Monk makes us happy. Don’t they make you feel better too?

The Erskine Family

Sunflowers in France
Child playing in a waterfall at Yards Park in Washington DC
Tourist taking pictures of a lavender field in France

 

Arts & Crafts, Electives, Language Arts, Math, Uncategorized

Previously…

Here are a few recent freebies we posted in July just before the lights went out:

GREENLEAF GUIDE TO OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY

This “History for the thoughtful child” by Rob & Cyndy Shearer outlines a reading program which will take you through the history of Israel by reading through the historical books from Genesis to Nehemiah chronologically. Old Testament history is divided into 196 Bible readings (approximately 1 chapter each) along with some suggestions of how to cover the material and keep it interesting. For each reading there is a series of questions to help you focus on the significant details. There are also a number of background notes and some suggestions for further study. This book won’t answer all your questions, but it will give you a well thought out program of reading and studying the ancient history of Israel. This is intended as a first history course for the early elementary grades (though many parents are using it with high school students).

The complete ebook is available at this link on Lulu. You’ll need to go through checkout to download it, but it is totally free.

CLICK HERE!

THE BIRDSLEUTH EXPLORER’S GUIDEBOOK!

Here’s a wonderful freebie for your nature studies.  The Cornell Institute of Ornithology offers its 12 page BirdSleuth Explorer’s Guidebook absolutely free to download and print.
The full color 14 page booklet includes lots of great stuff for identifying birds, including some fun activities and worksheets to fill out. This is a great printable to help get kids interested in birds and will teach them lots of the basics of bird watching and bird identification.
Pages include:
• Wake up your ears
• What’s a habitat?
• Habitat scavenger hunt
• Bird search
• Identification clues
• Bird count
• I wonder

CLICK HERE to go to the download page at MagicalChildhood.com. You can find it at the very bottom of the page.

WORLD WAR 2 TWEETS in Real Time

Here’s a unique “living history” twitter account, which livetweets the events of the Second World War as it happened in “real time” on this day in 1940 & for 5 years to come. Events unfold as they happened during the war, with frequent updates throughout each day. It’s filled with amazing period photos and brief commentary — great for students studying WW2.

CLICK HERE to go to this Twitter account!

Emergency “Get-Started Right NOW” HIGH SCHOOL COURSES

Do you know someone who has had to begin homeschooling a high-school age student at the last minute?  Who doesn’t? Well, this resource will be of tremendous help in that situation.

HomeschoolCollegeUSA.com put together this “emergency” page for parents looking for courses they can begin immediately with a student pulled from a public school system, with little or no time to research and prepare for homeschooling, It was put together as one a student can start at any time without a lot of prep work. The courses listed (with the exception of their recommended math courses) are all free and only require internet access, plus paper and pens/pencils for note-taking when needed.

HomeschoolCollegeUSA also offers a four year curriculum for high school students, plus resources that help students to earn college credit via CLEP while still in high school. Check out the whole site… loads of great resources for homeschooling any high school students.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!