5 Favorite Homeschool Resources-
Throughout our homeschool journey there are different resources that you can use to add to your homeschooling experience. I enjoy finding resources that make homeschooling more interesting or hands-on for my kids. I will take a subject like Math and then find ways to do hands-on activities or projects with the concepts that we are learning. These are 5 resources that I visit quite often to help me throughout my year.
- NotebookingPages.com
I love this resource! Notebookpages.com has hundreds of options for different notebook pages. For example, if you are having your child read a story or biography for school, you can print off a notebook page that they made for book reports and have your kids fill it out at the end of reading the book. They have notebook pages for about every subject that you would teach. They even have alphabet and preschool type notebook pages you can print for your little ones. I do not like worksheets and this is a creative way to avoid the worksheet boredom. Instead of filling out a worksheet on the book they read, they are illustrating and writing a summary of what the book was about. They also have a Notebooking Publisher App, so that you can create your Notebook Pages if you don’t see the notebook page you want. You can use their notebook pages as a free member with limited access or you can join their lifetime membership and have access to all their note booking pages. Try it for free and see if you like it!
2. HomeschoolShare.com
This is a great resource for homeschoolers. Homeschoolshare.com is a site where homeschoolers create lap books and unit studies for free. You can download any of their lap books or unit studies and use them for your schooling. I recently needed to find a small unit study on Volcanoes for my 7 year old and I found it on homeschoolshare.com. This is a wonderful way to add to your curriculum if your child wanted to learn more about a subject. Sometimes during our school year, I just have my kids tell me a subject or topic that they are interested in and we go to the library for books on that topic and then look online for resources that would teach about that topic. This site can have those resources already created for you from other homeschoolers. Brilliant idea!
3. TeachersPayTeachers.com
This is a site a created curriculum created by teachers. You can join Teacherspayteachers.com for free and have access to all these amazing resources for teaching various subjects. Some of the products created are free and many of them are for a small fee. For example, I was wanting to teach a science unit on weather to my son and I found this amazing weather unit study that had all the different notebook pages and experiments I would need to teach about weather for $6. Especially in the elementary years, you can ask your kids what they want to learn more about and then search for it on this website. There are tons of teachers that have contributed to this site. This site is created for any teacher whether you are homeschooling, private or public. This means that not all the resources created will work for homeschoolers but I found that many of them did work, so its worth checking out!
4. Discovery Education Streaming Plus
I found this resource a few years ago and I use it frequently in my homeschooling. It’s a membership that you sign up for that has short videos on every subject imaginable. This is a great way to add a visual illustration of whatever your teaching. For example we were studying the Lewis and Clark Expedition in history and used Discovery Education Streaming Plus to watch a video on the subject. When I put the grade of my kids and the subject, a bunch of videos that fit in that category popped up for me to choose from. They had every type of video on Lewis and Clark including cartoons and documentaries. This resource can be expensive. The normal price for a year membership is $365 dollars for the year. The best and most economical way to buy it is from Homeschoolerbuyersco-op.org. They have many people buy it at the same time so you can get it for 60% off right now on their site. We use it often enough in our homeschool that its worth the price but you would want to think about how often you would use it and whether it worth the investment for your homeschool. If you click on Homeschoolerbuyersco-op.org above, I have linked it to the Discovery Education Streaming Plus deal that they are having right now. They will also allow you to try it for a 30 day trial for free! So you can try it for free to see even if you would use it.
5. Peggy Kaye “Games” Series
Peggy Kaye has written a series on different games to incorporate in various subjects. Her 3 main books that we have are “Games for Reading”, “Games for Math” and “Games for Writing”. These books are excellent resources for adding some hands-on activities to your normal everyday subjects. We have used the “Games for Writing” the most because of my reluctant writers. I was able to get my reluctant writers to have fun with writing because it was in the form of a game. Peggy Kaye’s books have always had a spot somewhere in our library of books that we continually use. If your kids are having trouble seeing the value or fun in reading, writing or math, check these books out. You can find her books on Amazon for around $15.
These are just a few of favorite resources that I am using or have been using in my homeschool. Hopefully you can find one or more of them helpful to you in your homeschooling. Enjoy!
Living the Adventure 