My 10 Best Websites for FREE Homeschool Printables

[photo by tonx]

I'm going to be totally honest, okay? My husband and I have no money. We're on public assistance. Not very conducive to homeschooling, right? Especially when public school is free.

So how do we do it? (Why we do it is another topic entirely.) Well, we spent part of our tax return this year on some curriculum--mostly used, and what we couldn't get used, we bought through Rainbow Resource. We also use the library a lot. But that's only part of what I use to teach The Boy. 

The rest comes from the internet. 

Honestly, I don't know if I'd be able to homeschool if I didn't have internet access. There are so many awesome free resources out there. In fact, when we were doing preschool, all of our materials and ideas came from the internet.

I obviously can't point you to all the free homeschool stuff on the internet. But I want to show you my most-used sites. The Boy really likes worksheets, and he's currently doing schoolwork that's either kindergarten or first-grade level, so this list is biased toward those areas. But a lot of these sites have materials and activities for multiple ages and abilities, and some of them aren't even homeschool sites--they're for educators of all kinds. Awesome, right?

Here they are, full of free resources, with my most-used sites toward the top:

• Education.com--tons of stuff here. I usually go to the "Worksheets" tab or the "Activities" tab, and then do a search or just click on "kindergarten" or "first grade." 
• Lesson Pathways--used to be a paid site, but it's free now. Technically, you can use this site to design a complete curriculum. It doesn't have its own materials; just links to other sites on the web. But it has them organized into different subject "pathways," from K through 5th grade. Again, I usually just do a search for whatever topic I'm looking for.
• Classroom Freebies--SO MUCH STUFF here, from PreK through 12th grade. Put together by classroom teachers, but most of it is adaptable to whatever purpose you want.
• Kids Activities--good for classrooms, homeschool or just family activities. Ranges from PreK to middle school.
• Mr. Printables--if you're going for originality and cuteness, this is the place. They tend toward younger kids. Not a blog, but they seem to update pretty frequently.
• Watch Know Learn--videos! Says for ages 3-18, but they seem to mostly be for older kids. Do a search with the search bar, instead of using the links in the sidebar. I find more interesting stuff that way.
• Homeschool Share--exactly what it sounds like. I don't use this site as often; I tend to forget it's there. But it's full of good printables, especially if you're into lapbooks.
• Homeschool Creations--Jolanthe is pretty much a celebrity in the homeschool blogging world. Her printables are awesome. I really need to use this site more often.
• Confessions of a Homeschooler--another homeschool-blogging rock star. Erica's blog covers all kinds of homeschooling topics; her Teeny-Tiny Tot School ideas are awesome if you have toddlers running around.
• And, last but not least...Pinterest. I'm serious! Just in the last couple weeks, I've used this, this, this, and this. And I'm thinking about doing this. [Note to self: You also have a million homeschool pins that you have not used.]

So, there you have it. Don't forget to enter our Getting Started Giveaway, if you haven't yet. It still has only a few entries, so your chances of winning are very good. And art supplies make really good Christmas gifts for kiddos.  

Dinosaur Bones!

I got this idea from...the internet somewhere.

We learned about dinosaurs a couple weeks ago, and for one of the activities Little Boy and Isaac made "fossils."

We smashed some playdough onto the table to represent mud. The idea was to stick dry pasta--representing dinosaur bones--into the playdough to make a dinosaur shape.

Little Boy started out that way--you can see a head, neck, and arms...and maybe legs...in the photo there. But then he apparently decided that wasn't 3-D enough for him. Oh, well. We weren't really going for accuracy.

Weirdest Science Project Ever

These are normal basil seeds. Notice that they are dry. This will be important later.

I read (in The Mailbox, of course) about a cute little science experiment you can do with basil seeds--stick 'em in a bottle full of water, leave them in a sunny window sill, and they'll sprout in a few days. Cool, because then your little tyke can see the roots and the leaves sticking out of the seeds.

And, yeah, that's what happened. We got roots and sprouts within about four days.

But what the magazine did NOT tell me is what happens when you put basil seeds in water. I was seriously weirded out.

Gross, right? I thought something was horribly wrong with my seeds. They kinda look like frog eggs, which is cool, but that's a completely different science lesson and not what I was going for here.

Anyway, I consulted Dr. Google, and sweet Dr. Google assured me that this is normal. In fact, gelatinous basil seeds are a delicacy in some Asian countries.

I had no idea.

So, there ya go. A bizarre, but really cool, science experiment and a little cultural factoid that you can throw in there if you want. Two for the price of one.

The Rest of Our Homeschool Day

So...I forgot to finish the little series I was doing about our daily homeschool schedule.

Oops.

Anyway, here's how the rest of our homeschool day goes. After we do some reading, we do...everything else. That is, whatever other activities I have planned. The subject and format of the activities changes every day, based on what I have prepared and what I feel like doing.

(Because, y'know, this whole homeschool thing is all about me and what I feel like.)

Anyway. The "other" activities are sometimes games we play on the floor:



Here he's trying to pick up beads with a clothespin. I think we were pretending that the clothespins were bird beaks and the beads were birdseed.




Tracing used to be a regular part of the routine--he was obsessed, kinda--until about a week ago. He won't trace at all now. So we'll start that again when he feels like it.




Or we do an art project or a little science experiment at the table. That's a glittery snowman, with enormous snowflakes falling around it.

Most days, we do two of the above. When we're really lucky, we do all three. Sometimes we also do a little video or game from The Head of the Class. I'm planning on doing a later blog post on The Head of the Class, because it's been a pretty good supplement to the other stuff we're doing.

Unless I totally forget to post about it, like I did with this one.

Science: Colored Celery

Here's a pretty common science experiment. Cut one end off a stalk of celery, and stick the cut end in colored water.

We used A LOT blue food coloring. I wanted to make sure the color would show up.



Leave the celery alone for 24 hours. And then check out what happens!



Ta-da! Blue celery!

I checked the celery after a couple hours, and I could already see a blue tinge. The blue was much darker by the next day.

I have to admit, I have a hard time explaining science experiments to a four-year-old. But this one's good for showing how a plant sucks water up through the stem and leaves.

Science: Salt Melts Ice

Here's yet another idea that I took from The Mailbox.

I filled a couple of Ziploc bags with water, and (carefully) stuck them in my freezer. The idea was to make ice lumps, and there's really not room in my freezer for two bowls of water, so...Ziploc bags had to do. And only one of them leaked!

The next day, I filled two bowls half-full of water, added a lot of salt, and some food coloring. And I unwrapped the ice lumps.

After explaining to Little Boy about how salt melts ice (at a four-year-old's level, of course), and showing him how to use the dropper-thingy, I let him loose.



I think the food coloring is supposed to make the salt water easier to see than if you used clear water or plain salt.

Little Boy had fun with the dropper, but the melting didn't work as well as I'd hoped. It was still hard to see much melting going on.

The salt water did finally melt a hole through a thin part of one of the ice lumps.



So...I don't really recommend this experiment. Unless you can figure out a way to make it work better...maybe use smaller ice lumps?

A Froggy

I don't know what it is with me and tiny animals lately...but last night I posted about baby snails on my personal blog, and now there's this, from my mom's front porch:



I don't think this frog is actually a baby; I've never seen them get much bigger than this. Of course, maybe I just never see the adult frogs.

Anyway, I like pointing out animals to Little Boy in the "wild" (yeah, my mom's front porch is really wild) because, while zoos and aquariums are great, I think it's even better for him to see animals in their natural habitat.

Field Trip: Marine Life Center

We took a second beachy field trip a couple weeks ago--this time to the nearby Marine Life Center. My little sister came along, too.

Imagine the smallest aquarium ever--just one room. Where the biggest specimen is a small octopus. That's the Marine Life Center.


It's right on the water. Lucky for us, it was a gorgeous day.


This is looking down into part of the big tank in the middle of the room. There are three smaller tanks around the sides, and an even smaller touch tank.


That...is an octopus. Octopuses gross me out. I didn't tell Little Boy that, though. No need to taint his relationship with mushy sea creatures.


A rainbow trout. I had no idea rainbow trout lived in saltwater.


That's a flounder. Doesn't look much like Flounder in The Little Mermaid, does it? Just sayin'.


Lots of sea anemones. These ones weren't for touching.


This guy was probably six inches across. He stood there and watched us for several minutes.


My sister holding a hermit crab in the touch tank. The touch tank has starfish, hermit crabs, sea cucumber-y things (I'm not exactly sure what they were), and anemones--you can touch them all, as long as you keep them underwater.


And check that out--Little Boy actually stuck his hand in the freezing-cold water to touch a starfish. He wouldn't touch the underside of it, though--that was "too scary."

Field Trip: The Beach

I have a lot of pictures here, so I'm not going to type much. We'd been learning about the beach, so we took a trip to the nearest one (it's more of a seashore than a beach, I think--you'll see in the pictures).


My baby sister drove--she needs a lot of practice hours before she can get her license.


Little Boy hadn't been to the beach (seashore?) in at least a year.


We had this part of the beach to ourselves. Rocky, huh?


My brother tagged along, too.


Little Boy found a tiny shell--you can't tell in the photo, but the shell is fingernail-sized.


I wouldn't recommend swimming in this water (although some people do). We wear rain boots instead.


We saw barnacles, little crabs, seaweed, gulls, and seashells--all things we'd learned about at home. And Little Boy thought that was kinda cool. But really, all a three-year-old boy wants to do at the beach is throw rocks in the water.

{cross-posted at Teach Me To Walk}

Sink or Float?

We played Sink or Float a few days ago. It was even more successful than I thought it'd be. You'll see why in a second.


Before we started, Little Boy's face clearly said, "Uh...you do know there's water in that bowl, right? " Little Boy has a thing with anything that's wet, or gooey, or sticky. He doesn't like touching stuff like that. I ignored his skeptical face.


Some of our sinkers and floaters, before being sunk or floated.


We kept track of how many sunk and how many floated. I was surprised that more of them didn't float. Heh, shows how much I know.


Now, here's the amazing part. After we tested all of the objects and marked whether they sunk or floated, Little Boy wanted to put all of them in the bowl. Um...okay. And then he wanted to take them all back out. With his hands. And not just once. He put everything in the bowl and took everything back out for almost half an hour. Silly kid.

Learning Time: Science

Little Boy and I have "learning time" every day after breakfast for about half an hour (usually it stretches a little longer, but let's not quibble). Really, it's home-preschooling, but try explaining that to a 3 1/2 year old. So, to him, it's "learning time."

I'm going to break our usual learning time down into a few separate posts, because, really? I'm too tired to write a big, long post right now. And I bet you're too tired to read a big, long post right now. You're welcome.

Anyway, the first thing we do is take a look at the pumpkin seedling Little Boy's been growing. We point out the different parts of the plant, and count the leaves to see if there are any new ones, and water it if it's dry.

[Don't tell Little Boy, but the pumpkin plant is going to be moved to his Grandma's house sometime soon. We do NOT have room for a pumpkin plant on our back porch! And...we'll figure out some other science-y thing to do.]

This is the plant--I thought this picture turned out kinda cool. I have NO IDEA how I did it. I don't understand cameras at all.

Next time: ABCs! Woohoo!