Traveling with kids
It won’t be long until a lot of families will hit the road for summer vacation trips. There will be some who will drive or pull an RV and stay at campgrounds. Others will drive a family car and stay at a motel or maybe even do some tent camping.
Whichever way you travel with your family, if you have children you already know you’ll be hearing “Are we there yet? How much longer? I’m bored. She touched me. He made a face at me.” Those comments and even more will come ringing out from the back portions of your vehicle as your children get bored with riding in a car or van.
When we traveled, when the children were young, we took along snacks, beverages, and little games the kids could play. Things like Travel Bingo were a big hit. (This was way before there were DVD players in cars.) We also took coloring books and crayons.
We didn’t have a computer back then so free printable travel games didn’t exist for us. However, they do for you. Visit the linked site to find 35 different and entertaining travel games that you can print out for free. File them away until you are making a trip somewhere, even if it’s just a couple of hours worth of riding in the car, and surprise your kids with these fun ways to stay busy while on the road.
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printablesLabels: Free stuff, Printables
Pioneer chores
I forget who showed me to this site, but it’s really pretty awesome. Pioneer Handbooks has tons of free, downloadable pdf books dating back to the 1800s. These little books teach all kinds of neat pioneer stuff such as bread making, building, cooking, gardening, medicine, hunting, and so much more.
Can you tell I’m pretty excited about them? I have downloaded and skimmed through the bread making book, since I love making breads of all kinds. I’m going to be downloading other ones, too.
What has this got to do with homeschooling? Well, just imagine you are studying history. What better way to “make it real” than to attempt some of the chores that are outlined in these handy books, and do them in the pioneer way!
Labels: Free stuff, History
Valentine’s Day ideas
Valentine’s Day is upon us. I’m sure many of you will be creating Valentine’s to give to one another, to friends, and even to really good friends. It’s a lot of fun to do this, of course, but working this romantic holiday in with your regular lessons can prove to be challenging if you only focus on that.
Peruse the Valentine's Day lessons and find some fun and informative lessons and activities that will incorporate art, language arts, computers, math, music, health, science, and social studies. What more could you ask for?
Labels: Free stuff, Lesson plans
Christmas Unit Study revisited
A few years ago I wrote a short Christmas Unit Study. So, I thought now might be a good time to bring this back up as one of my favorites.
I no longer homeschool because all my children are grown and leading their own adult lives. However, I am still keenly interested in homeschooling and hope to keep others interested in it as well. It seems to me that now is a very good time to re-present this free unit study to you, my readers. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did when the children were still young.
Labels: Free stuff, Unit Studies
Advent lesson plan
With Thanksgiving Day over, your focus is naturally shifting to Christmas. Whether it's shopping or baking or crafting gifts, I'm sure you are getting mentally prepared and otherwise prepared to jump into the Christmas season
This is also the time of the year when many families set up an Advent Wreath, and have prayer and Bible study to go along with it. If you have younger children, you may want to look through this Advent Wreath lesson plan and incorporate it into your homeschool curriculum.
It includes a paper template you can print and cut out so your children can color it, what Advent is, and other suggested crafts and activities for Advent Sundays to make this solemn time more meaningful to children.
Labels: Free stuff, Lesson plans
Daylight savings time
Most of the country just passed the day when we switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. It's quite an adjustment, at least for me, to have it be dark by 6 PM now. And, it will only get dark earlier as we go along for a few weeks.
Have you ever wondered about Daylight Savings Time? How it came to be in use? When and who started it, and why? Teacher Planet offers lots of great resource information for learning all about Daylight Savings Time. As a teacher, you can compile your own complete unit study using these resources for your classroom or, if you homeschool, your child or children.
These resources encompass all grades and include the history of DST, the history of time as used by man, and includes games, puzzles, and printables you can use as you build your study based on this theme.
Labels: Free stuff, Unit Studies
Thanksgiving lessons
Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I thought now might be a good time to incorporate some Thanksgiving lessons and activities into your curriculum for social studies This site also gives you unit studies.
Most of the lessons and activities are geared toward younger learners so this could be a way of introducing history to them in a very fun way. There are teacher helps plus coloring and activity pages enough to delight any child. After all, shouldn't learning be delightful?
Labels: Free stuff, Lesson plans, Unit Studies
Renewable energy lesson plans
I'm pretty excited about this. I found Renewable Energy Lesson Plans for elementary, middle, and high school aged kids all on one site. In fact, I might even work through these lessons myself, in order to learn more.
It seems to me that these are the energy systems of the future and we should all become more familiar with them. I have a solar panel, two deep cycle batteries, and a generator in order to set up at least part of my home off-grid. This will reduce my dependence on the power company while saving me some money on utilities.
My TV is fairly low wattage, so I can eliminate my sound system to further reduce the wattage and simply run hdmi video cables from a small DVD player and a game console for movie watching or streaming.
I am switching over to LED lighting, and reducing my electrical needs not only to save money but also to further reduce my carbon footprint on this planet we call home.
Labels: Free stuff, Lesson plans
El Nino Lessons
It has really been a crazy spring and summer, weather-wise. April started with severe weather that included tornadoes and massive flooding. That continued until June, when the weather seemed to flip straight to hot, dry summer.
NOAA provides a comprehensive NOAA El Nino lesson site that may help your child better understand just what's going on. It takes you through various weather related sites and offers a free PDF activity sheet to help guide your child.
Labels: Free stuff, Lesson plans
Great web resources
Wow. It's amazing how many learning websites are available these days. When we were new to homeschooling, our primary source was miningco.com (aka Mining Company) and encyclopedia sites. Real homeschool sites were rare and offered little.
Soon, we discovered sites such as Redwood Academy, RHLschool.com, Donna Young's website, and others that offered free worksheets and short lessons. We began receiving language arts lessons by email, free of course, from dailygrammar.com. Those were very good and they fulfilled everything we needed for grammar, punctuation, and spelling including a weekly quiz.
We used the President's Council on Physical Fitness workbooks and activity suggestions, along with another homeschool family, for our PE one year. We also learned that not every click here led us to exactly what we wanted, but I spent many hours at night browsing the web in search of lesson plans, printables, and free downloads of programs and worksheets we could use.
The fact is, I found so much and got so printer happy that I could have educated a large classroom of children instead of just the two I had at home!
Labels: Free stuff, Lesson plans, Printables
Gardening modules
For now, because spring is quickly approaching, I'm going to skip the next USGS offering and direct your attention to spring gardening. I found a really nice unit on gardening which includes .pdf activity sheets you can download and print, It's called Integrating Horticulture into Elementary School Curriculum.
The course covers
- container gardening
- fun with plants
- garden ecology
- garden pests and problems
- growing fruit
- growing seeds indoors
- help sheets
- herb gardening
- kitchen garbage
- nutrients for plants and people
- windowsill gardening
Using the resources provided, your class can learn about a wide variety of topics including feeding plants, soil, composting, whether lipozene is a soil nutrient, and many more things related to gardening. Having a class or school garden spot reinforces what's being taught in gardening theory, and could even encourage budding gardeners (pardon the pun) to grow more of their how food and be more self-sufficient.
For sure, it teaches children that food doesn't have its genesis at the grocery store!
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gardeningLabels: Free stuff, Lesson plans, Science
Giving games
Christmas may be past, but it's never too late to give or to teach your children to give. Heifer points to a children's site called Molly Moccasins, where your kids can play interactive games, view stories, and overall learn ways they can give to help the hungry people of the world learn to be self-sufficient.
Gifts of this nature help people by supplying them with animals they can raise, breed, sell the offspring, use the animal products, or sell the surplus products. Yarns of all kinds, eggs, milk, cosmetics, wrinkle creams that work, jewelry are just a few of the ways the less fortunate can earn money for buying necessities and education. Won't you help, and teach your children to help, too?
Labels: Free stuff
Free educational site
I know I've touted the site before, but I just can't say enough good things about Free-ed.net. Using this site, anyone can increase their knowledge in particular fields including hospitality, business, management, and even skills trades and basic high school courses.
I am about to embark on the Excel course to boost my computer skills. Eventually, I hope to include other business courses including those on scanner software, marketing, entrepreneurship, and sales. Maybe this way, I can become self-employed and more productive at home.
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coursesLabels: Entrepreneurism, Free stuff
Lessons - auto repair
At some point in time, your child, whether boy or girl, will need Auto Repair lessons. It's a good idea to have these so that he can fix small problems and understand how a vehicle works, from the motor to the brake system, from the electrical system to the drive train.
With these free lessons, your child can begin to have a good idea how it all works and what is entailed when it comes time to repair or replace worn car parts. Having this knowledge can save hundreds of dollars spent at mechanics shops. There will be times when a real mechanic is needed, of course, but with the knowledge of good maintenance habits and minor repairs, those times could be almost eliminated entirely.
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auto repairLabels: Free stuff, General learning, Homeschool families
Physical education - weight loss
There are those of us who need to drop a few pounds. Sometimes, even our children would benefit from a good weight management program. This site gives you all the support you need including PowerPoint presentations, student manual, lessons, instructor's guide, facilitator's guide, and fat burner exercises to do.
This plan also teaches about nutrition and offers posters and other support materials to help you be successful. Even if you or your child don't have a weight problem, this could be very useful as a wellness and fitness study for the homeschool family.
Labels: Free stuff, Health
Lessons about law
If you are homeschooling high school students, then you already know there are studies they need that they probably never needed before. They are getting ready to enter the "real world" and as such may need a course in the introduction to law. Moneyinstructor.com offers valuable and free courses about basic knowledge of the law. It won't make your child a lawyer, but it will help her understand some basics. The course includes worksheets and lesson plans. All you have to do is register and login.
Of course, your child may be interested in further studies in this area. Perhaps she wants to become part of a business law firm or pat of the Texas Maritime lawyers. This will give her a small taste of this kind of study and let her know if she'd like to continue it in college.
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lawLabels: Free stuff
Free money skills courses
I wanted to share another money skills course with you. It's the free AFSA Money Skill course. You do have to register and login, but it's a free course for educators and students that covers so many areas of money skills that I believe it can be used as the full curriculum course for economics, income, assets, and other areas of finances your child will deal with when he grows up.
Getting these skills fully trained now will help your child later to make good decisions about money. It is a cross-curriculum as well for social studies and math.Using this course will help your child understand what goes into such things as Outer Banks foreclosures, investments, risks, and personal money management. It includes interactive modules and quizzes, keeps a record of grades and scores, retaking modules where the child has not done so well, and a pre-test to learn what level your child is already.
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financesLabels: Finances, Free stuff, Unit Studies
Using technology for social studies
I stumbled across a new experience with mrdonn.org. They now have powerpoint Social Studies lessons and activities your child can participate in from your computer. These files can be saved and played later or played as soon as you download them -- it's your choice.
After running the slideshow, there are activities your child can participate in to help solidify the lessons learned along with games to be played and clip art you can use in your printed materials.
The illustrations for the slides are charming and the lessons are simply written and easy to understand.
Labels: Free stuff, Geography, History
Free wifi access
Even after the school year begins, you may be planning some trips to historic locations or just fun trips for the family. Homeschoolers have a lot of freedom where this is concerned. On those trips, though, you might want to stay in touch with other homeschoolers, friends, or family via the internet.
It's not always easy to know where you can do that if you don't have internet access service with your laptop or through your phone company. If you're like me, you look for places you can connect for free, and free is always good. In that case, you might want to try the free wifi finder at jwire.com. I learned of this through my AARP newsletter, so I'm sharing it here with you.
They offer other stuff, too, of course. But the free wifi locations are a big bonus. I do a little traveling from time to time and I never know where I can connect, so this is going to be a really useful tool for me to use.
With free wifi, you may be able to continue using educational sites while you're traveling with your children, download free educational software and games, or just log your trip to your blog on a daily basis. It's certainly worth a try!
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internetLabels: Free stuff, Homeschool families
Heroes
I heard some rather bothersome news from a co-worker. Her son is in peewee football and the other night they played a scrimmage game. Her son, and over a dozen other kids, were left benched for that game and told they might as well get used to it because they wouldn't be playing much during the regular season.
Am I wrong, or does this seem grossly out of place for a peewee team? I responded that it's not the NFL and that every child should have some play time at this level. How would a coach know if a kid might have some potential that's just waiting to be brought out? How can he predict that those dozen or so kids can't play at all? I don't think he can.
So, I started thinking about sports legends and other people who made a difference in the world, even after a rocky start in life. These people teach us that heroes aren't heroes until the time comes to be one. They also teach us that perseverance pays off in the end and that being a human is part of the equation.
I looked around the web and found a site that has some great stories about "heroes" and even some lesson plans you can use in your language arts, social studies, art, and media courses. The site is called My Hero, simply enough, and it's full of stories, pictures, and the above-mentioned resources to inspire and encourage children and young people to greater accomplishments.
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heroesLabels: Free stuff, Lesson plans
