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Showing posts with label free homeschool printables. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free homeschool printables. Show all posts

Monday, July 6, 2015

How Do You Homeschool or Life-School with Chronic Illness In The Way? #homeschooling #lifeschool #chronicillness

So how do you homeschool your children effectively if you are depressed or chronically ill?
Maybe you have a parent that is sick or your spouse is sick?
Believe it or not those are some of the best reason's on earth to homeschool or "life-school" ,as we call it here at our house, your children.



In 2009 my father passed away from a long battle with 3 different types of cancer, first prostate, then colon, and finally the nasty liver cancer devil took hold and would not let go. I feel blessed that he was able to spend an additional 10 years with us here on earth due to the advances of modern medicine. Homeschooling enabled my 3 children to travel back and forth from NC to SC with me to stay with him anytime we wanted to, even when he was in a hospice house facility, they were right there at his side. Those years we will never get back and will cherish forever. They learned lessons that traditional schools can never teach.




Fast forward to 2013 the unthinkable begins to unfold, our beloved grandmother, my momma starts failing fast with pneumonia that ends up being " lung cancer" that has eaten thru to her ribs. She was so ill and hospitalized after falling at home unconscious due to sepsis. My youngest daughter stayed with me in SC to help care for her until she passed away the first night in hospice ( we still believe my daddy came to get her that night, they are now together in heaven).


My husband and I both have chronic illness's, my husband is now disabled and home all the time now, which has been good for our homeschool actually. He is a great help to me when my kids need some extra motivation (if you know what I mean), especially on Mondays since I work night shift on the weekends as an ER nurse and need my sleep.

The number one thing to share about homeschooling if you or your family have a chronic illness is flexibility! You have to learn how to be flexible and that it is very ok to do things your own way.
We learned a long time ago that a more eclectic style of schooling (using many different styles of homeschooling) worked great for our family, even some un-schooling at times works for us. As long as your children are learning and growing, happy and healthy what else matters.....right!


We use a variety of online sites including Time4Learning and The Khan Academy in addition to You-tube videos to learn. I like to print off worksheets if we are on the road or need some extra practice on a particular topic. You can find many free or cheaper sites to print worksheets, such as TeachersPayTeachers, Educents, ABCTeach, and Enchanted Learning. There are so many more and many are listed here on my blog if you search for my older articles.

No matter what you use, as long as your kids are learning, thriving and growing in knowledge, nothing else matters. Others will try to tell you how to school your children, but you are their parent, you know what is best for each one. Don't let others sway your decisions or sink your ship. You are fabulous and you know it!!


Thursday, August 14, 2014

Lego Homeschooling with Free Printables

Do you use Lego's to teach? I love to incorporate them into our learning at home. They are fun, colorful, creative, mathematical, and cute of course.





If you want to use the LEGO coloring pages to supplement your learning, be sure to check out the other Free LEGO Printables since they coordinate. Homeschool encouragement blog has has a large and growing collection!



Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Back To School Homeschool: Cut Out the Busywork . . . try Notebooking!


Before notebooking, our school days were chocked full of a variety of learning activities and curriculums, but the learning was so dry and dull. By the end of the day, and I mean the-END-of-the-day, the kids were wiped out and so was I. Do you have days like these?
Notebooking will refresh and rejuvenate your homeschooling. It opens the door for meaningful learning while saving you time, money, and those precious hours you currently spend (if you’re like most homeschooling moms) trying to tweak everything that you currently do to make your day better.
Today, I want to help you get started. Notebooking is a very simple tool. Basically, we just want to help our children get what’s in their brain onto paper using both what they can “see” and what they can verbalize. I have been amazed out how effective this has worked with my children. Over the past few years, we have been able to completely eliminate the worksheet/test method from our schooling. We now use notebooking for just about e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!
We have saved time, money, and SO much frustration by using this tool. Now, instead of a trashcan (or tote that gets tucked away in the back of the closet) full of oodles of paperwork that we’ll never look at again, we have beautifully crafted and individualized notebooks full of their best work–their OWN work–their very OWN homemade books! You will pull these notebooks out time and time again throughout the years, just like your old photo albums, to treasure over and over again.
To give you some getting started pointers, I have prepared a detailed description of how to start your first pages and how to gently add notebooking to your day. We still follow these basic principles outlined in this article with our children today: Read more . . .
(Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com)














Visit NotebookingPages.com to learn more about their LIFETIME memberships
and their notebooking (& copywork) web-app, The Notebooking Publisher™

I personally use these Notebooking pages and love them, I even bought the lifetime membership! Because I love my notebooks so much, I wanted to share Debra's website with you too. Start your year off right and print some of the free samples, I bet you will fall in love with these notebooking pages just like I did!



Thursday, June 27, 2013

4th of July Printable Pack For Your Patriotic Lessons #homeschool #4thofJuly

Visit this link to download the pack: 


Below is a full list of activities included in the pack:
Shapes and Sizes
  • Shadow Matching v.1
  • Shadow Matching v.2
  • Patriotic Shape Matching
  • Shape Trail v.1
  • Shape Trail v.2
  • Shape Trail v.3

Colors
  • Star Color Activity v.1
  • Star Color Activity v.2
  • Color by Numbers

Same vs. Different
  • Match the Patriotic Kids
  • Which One is Different? v.1
  • Which One is Different? v.2

Sorting / Categorizing
  • Patriotic Hat Size Sorting
  • Flag Size Sequencing
  • 4th of July Sorting Activity

Sequencing
  • 4th of July Patterning Activity ABAB
  • 4th of July Patterning Activity AABB
  • 4th of July Patterning Activity AABAAB
  • Make Your Own Patterns Activity

Puzzles
  • 4th of July Puzzle v.1
  • 4th of July Puzzle v.2
  • 4th of July Puzzle v.3
  • 4th of July Puzzle v.4

Mazes
  • Help the Girl Find the Flag v.1
  • Help the Girl Find the Flag v.2
  • Help the Girl Find the Flag v.3

Fine Motor
  • 4th of July BBQ Pre-Writing Practice
  • Trace the Flag v.1
  • Trace the Flag v.2
  • Trace the Flag v.3
  • Cutting Practice v.1
  • Cutting Practice v.2

Math
  • Star One-to-One Correspondence v.1
  • Star One-to-One Correspondence v.2
  • Flag Grid Game v.1
  • Flag Grid Game v.2
  • Star Race
  • Follow the 4 Number Trail
  • Stars Number Matching
  • 1-20 Number Trail
  • Connect the Dots by Number
  • 4th of July Counting v.1
  • 4th of July Counting v.2
  • 4th of July Graphing
  • Fireworks Dice Game
  • Patriotic Hat Addition v.1
  • Patriotic Hat Addition v.2

Literacy
  • Patriotic Uppercase Alphabet Trail
  • Patriotic Lowercase Alphabet Trail
  • F is for Flag Letter Trail
  • ABC Letter Trail
  • Connect the Dots by Letter
  • Find the Flag Uppercase Alphabet Activity
  • Find the Flag Lowercase Alphabet Activity
  • 4th of July Word Search v.1
  • 4th of July Word Search v.2
  • 4th of July Word Identification Activity





Friday, May 10, 2013

Explore, Discover, & Create . . . with Notebooking!


At the end of each school year, are you finding yourself swimming through mounds of worksheets, quizzes, tests, and half-finished workbooks wondering just what to do with it all? Where does the organization begin? What do you keep? Where will you keep it? How much should you, dare I say, throw away? As you begin to tackle this heap, your brain recalls the many hours that went into creating this voluminous collection. You may start to wonder just how well spent those hours really were. You remember the great ambitions with which you started the school year and the many good intentions that fell to the wayside in order to finish this massive collection you are now faced with sorting. Finally, you conclude that if most, or perhaps all, of your children’s work is going to get tucked away somewhere never to be seen again, how much value can it possibly hold? Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it doesn't have to anymore!
Our family has been introduced to an ageless tool of learning that keeps us from creating these questionable mounds of paper throughout the year. There is nothing left to sort. There is nothing left to pack away. There is nothing to throw away. Instead, another volume (or two or three or more) of our children’s prized work gets added to their personal library at the end of each year. No more busywork. No more second-guessing if our time has been well spent. As a matter of fact, this tool has freed me from the seemingly never-ending search for the perfect curriculum! It can literally transform the way you approach your children’s education and set afire a love of learning within each child. Spend your precious hours exploring, discovering, and capturing the knowledge that awaits you and your children each day. Make learning a journey instead of a list to be checked off at the end of the day and a pile to be sorted at the end of the year. How do you do this? Let me introduce you to the tool that has breathed new life into our homeschooling. It’s called . . . notebooking!
Notebooking is the coined term for what one may refer to as educational journaling or scrapbooking. Essentially, the idea is to take your planned school subjects and activities as well as the areas of your child’s interests and create notebooks, compilations of created pages collected in binders. Your child will fill his notebooks throughout the year with what he has learned about these topics. Written narrations, drawings, maps, and photographs are just a few of the items he may include. The pages of his notebooks will capture both the new knowledge he has discovered as well as his own personal reflections of what he has learned. Through the process of creating a notebook, you will likely watch him become a storyteller, a teacher, and most undoubtedly, an expert in some of the topics he studies.
Unlike some of the more traditional tools of learning, like worksheets and tests, notebooking allows your child to develop a deeper relationship with what he is learning. Instead of finding out what he doesn’t know about a topic or study, which is what a worksheet or test usually reveals, he is given an opportunity to express everything he does know. By cutting out the busywork that is involved in some of these more traditional methods, you open a window of time and opportunity for your children to dig deeper into topics, to really get to know the people, the places, the events, the concepts, the ideas, and so on of what they are studying. Then, they take this information, digest it, and produce a notebook that tells all about what they have learned. After following this process, there will not be that sudden “unlearning” phenomena that usually takes place after the traditional chapter or unit test. The knowledge that your child gains during his notebooking experience will stick! Most importantly this process fuels a love of learning as your child begins to discover how exciting and fun it is to learn with notebooking!
As your children become more experienced with notebooking, you will begin to see the evident benefits of this great tool. The richness of what they are learning will be apparent as their notebooks become filled to the brim with stories, pictures, maps, quotes, and photographs of the people, places, and events encountered. The depth of what they are learning will be told as new layers are added each year to certain notebooks, such as their language arts and math notebooks. The process of learning they have experienced will be unveiled as you note the ways they organize and choose the material they include for their notebooks. You will begin to see certain notebooks take on your children’s personalities as they learn to express themselves in the variety of ways they have been gifted. It is an amazing joy to sit down with your child while they lovingly and passionately share all that they have learned through the process of creating their notebook. Their hearts and hard work have been poured into this notebook and they beam with confidence at the turn of each page. Each year, as you take time to look back through the increasing volumes of notebooks being added to the shelves, you will see that notebooking has become an amazing “living” record of your children’s journey of learning. Instead of tossing the year’s work into a box in the back of the closet, you’ll be looking for ways to add more bookshelves to house these treasures!
So how do you begin notebooking with your family? Start simple. Start with one topic or one study for each child or for the whole family. Perhaps the easiest way to start is to let each child begin a notebook of one of their favorite hobbies or passions. Do you have a child that loves dinosaurs? I do! My youngest son would find spare moments throughout the day to notebook his knowledge of dinosaurs. His head would be stuck in any number of books from the library trying to gather information. That’s where it began for him! Today, he is our leading expert when it comes to dinosaurs.
Perhaps the easiest place to start notebooking with the entire family is with any history or science topic because there are so many ways to dig into these subjects. You could start very simply by asking your children to give a short narration of what was read on a particular day either during your read aloud time or their independent reading time. If they give you a blank stare, ask them what they found to be most important or interesting about what was studied and encourage them to write about that. If you have younger children, you may need to write down their narrations for them until they are more proficient with the physical skill of writing. For children who are accustomed to giving short fill-in-the-blank type answers to questions, narration will take some practice to develop. I highly suggest researching the topic of narration for more help in this area. Narration is an invaluable skill that will prove most beneficial in their notebooking studies.
As your family or child continues to dig deeper, add new material to the notebook. The notebook may include any number of pages and collections including, but definitely not limited to:
  • written narrations from material studied in books they have read or real life experiences
  • collections of quotes from philosophers, experts, missionaries, statesman, etc.
  • photographs, ticket stubs, and information from field trips
  • maps of places and events studied
  • timelines
  • drawings from your child’s imagination that express his ideas about the particular topic
  • sketches of objects, animals, famous art, or places being studied
  • collections of items such as leaves, pressed flowers, and seeds for a study like botany
  • pictures from hands-on activities or experiments completed during the study
  • nature photos, sketches, and journaled thoughts
  • your child’s handwritten copies of favorite scripture, poetry or selections from favorite literature
Ready to get started? Grab a few essential supplies: binders (or a binding tool), paper, your favorite arts and crafts supplies and a selection of writing utensils and dig in! You may also want to invest in some notebooking templates. These templates made notebooking a reality for my family, especially in the early days of our notebooking experiences. Notebooking templates are pages that have been designed with a variety of preprinted lines, frames, borders, and clipart that provide a quickstart to the notebooking process. Use the preprinted lines for your children’s narrations, copywork and other written work. Use the empty frames to add maps, drawings, pictures, and other items. I became so hooked on using the templates that I began creating my own. Then, after realizing how helpful these templates were to my children, I began to share them with others online. You can now visit our website, www.NotebookingPages.com, to find our growing collection of free and affordable sets of notebooking templates available for a variety of subjects, studies, and activities.
Ready to make learning a more memorable and meaningful experience for your family? Get started with notebooking today! Visit us at NotebookingPages.com for more notebooking information, freebies, products, articles, and tips, as well as for a variety of other free homeschooling charts and printables.
(Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com)



Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Thanksgiving Pages for Kids!


                                          Source: kidsactivitiesblog.com via Cathy on Pinterest




Lets be so thankful for sites like this one at http://kidsactivitiesblog.com/thanksgiving-coloring-pages/ that
will keep those kiddos busy this week and out of mom's hair as she cleans and prepares the house for Thanksgiving.


Printable Coloring Pages (all credit to Kids Activities Blog)

Download the free coloring pages:
  1. Thanksgiving Placemat:  This black and white version of our Thanksgiving Placemat {see number 4 below for the color border version}.  It is sized to print onto legal-sized paper.  Click here to print:  Thanksgiving Black/White Placemat
  2. Thanksgiving Placecards:  These cute placecards can be colored ahead of time for the adult table or used as entertainment to decorate at the kids’ table.  This is sized for standard paper size.  Click here to print:  Thanksgiving Placecard Printable
  3. Thanksgiving Napkin Rings:  Color, cut and tape/glue these Thanksgiving napkin rings for table decor.  This is also sized for standard paper size.  Click here to print:  Thanksgiving Napkin Ring Printable
  4. Thanksgiving Placemat with Color Border:  This is the version that is seen in the first picture of this post.  it is sized to print onto legal-sized paper.  Click here to print:  Thanksgiving Color Border Placemat
Happy creating!! 

Monday, August 27, 2012

Life as a Homeschool Mom


Worth a re-share, homeschool moms would mostly agree with her.I know I do, happy healthy homeschool kids are all that matters at our house! It is not an easy task, never fault yourself for your choice, just keep going one day at a time and you will be amazed at the results!

Life as a Homeschool Mom



Author: Heather from UnionCountyMommies "The Mommies Network"
Original Post April 15, 2011 
If I were to meet you on the street today, I would introduce myself as Heather, stay-at-home/homeschooling mom of my daughters who are six and three. You would ask me my thoughts on the public school system and about my choice to keep them home, then about my method of teaching, and the curriculum I use. I would smile and say all the right things. I would tell you just how much I love it, how passionate I am about being their teacher, and how confident I am that this is the right choice for my family.
But that wouldn't really be the truth.
You see, more often than not I have no idea what I am doing. I second guess every decision. Homeschooling was never something I imagined myself doing, so I wonder how I got to this point, and what I was thinking. And some days I allow myself to dream about that big yellow bus pulling up in front of my house and taking my children away for the next six hours.
I love my girls dearly, of course. But the days are long, and the weeks are hectic. And I rarely get a few minutes to think, let alone have a conversation with another adult. We have days that we wake up early, get dressed and into our school room right away. And then we have others where I realize we are still in our pajamas at noon and I haven't even opened a workbook, or answered a single question.
Guilt and fear are par for the course in motherhood, but in my life they are exacerbated by being primarily responsible for my children's education. I believe that right now they learn so much through play, and have a natural curiosity to explore the world around them. But secretly, I worry that I am not smart enough to teach them all they need to know. I question whether my methods really are the best. And I'm afraid that I am doing them a huge disservice by not exposing them to a more structured learning environment.
As I start asking myself questions, I become riddled with the fear that while homeschooling is what I want for my girls, I might not be cut out for it. But then...something miraculous happens.
My youngest daughter will count to twenty, correctly read the letters off a sign as we pass by, and ask for her mountain of books at bedtime. My oldest daughter will flawlessly name the planets, sound out letters, and proudly find Italy on the world map. They will ask for more rhyming games, and sight words. They will demand just one more sheet of school work. They will run to their dad when he walks through the door, eager to tell them what they learned about that day. And they will beg to have school on Saturdays, Sundays, and Holidays.
And in those moments, I realize that something is working!
So a more accurate representation of the truth is that I am a stay-at-home/homeschooling mom of two. It is harder than I expected it to be. I don't know if I am making the right choices all the time. But my children are learning! And they are loving it!! And that hunger for knowledge is exactly what I wanted to instill in them all along.

Amen sister!


Friday, February 24, 2012

St Patty's Day Mini- Unit fun

How about some fun for St Patrick's Day upcoming, a cute little mini-unit that you can do with all ages Clipart and/or fonts copyright Diane J. Hook. Used with permission by djinkers.com
Found this on the site  http://whattheteacherwants.blogspot.com/2011/03/st-patricks-day-activities.html

Here are some of the cute items in the mini- kit you can download on the What the Teacher wants blog 


 More to download and have fun with, so go to it, your kiddos will have a blast with these activities, I know mine will.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Amore' ~~Amazing Valentines Printables


Such a wonderful list of Valentines printables that are free to download from a absolutely fabulous blog I found today while surfing the Pinterest site ~~  http://www.kindovermatter.com/ , I love her site, such inspiring information there and ideas galore! Have to share!







And for you girls on a budget last years theme was Valentines on a budget here


Hugs and Kisses
Valentines day is near


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