I’ve been messing around with some ideas for this free homeschool planner. I put together a new look, and I thought I’d share it with you. Right now, it has a cover, a weekly planner page, and 4 unit planning pages. I may add to it as I get time, so if there’s anything you’d like to see, email me or leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.
Click here to download the free homeschool planner. Feel free to share, but I’d appreciate if you link to my blog as the source. Thanks, and enjoy!
I’ve been updating my cleaning routines and charts to organize myself for the new year and co-ordinate everything to my new theme. Beauty inspires me, at least for the first four or five months of the year. So having a fresh, new look helps me to be more inclined to look at my routine and DO IT!
And since I spent the time to make it, I wanted to share it with you. It’s a free printable. Click on the image to download. Then, hang it in a frame to make a dry-erase chart, laminate it, or just pin it to your fridge—whatever fits your style.
The way I want this to work is that my ultimate goal would be to get everything done each day. Most of time, that’s not going to happen. (Let’s be real, right?) So, I’ve bolded the items that I’d like to be my “bare minimum” goals. Since the other tasks are being repeated everyday, chances are they’ll stay somewhat maintained within the week. Ultimately, I may get behind within the week, but I’m trying my best to not get behind from one week to another. In other words, I’ll live if my floor doesn’t get swept in 2 or 3 days; but I don’t want the bathroom to go more than a week without a cleaning.
I’ve also included my “rewards” for working hard: a cup of tea, some blogging time, arts and crafts, etc.; and I’ve left the bottom open to write in big to-dos, appointments, or menu plans.
Enjoy, and happy cleaning!
We are gearing up for our first unit celebration of the year, and I’ve been busy plotting our fun. Last year, we made some very special memories playing “Daddy vs. the kids” using the flashcard facts the kids had been working on. I wanted to continue that tradition this year, with a few changes.
After much thought and tons of prayer, I’m excited about out new Board Game Review (Boring name, I know. I’m taking suggestions.) Here’s how our game works. I have our flashcard facts written on 3×5 cards to use as playing cards in a stack turned face down.
1. Roll the dice.
2. Draw a card and answer the question.
3. If answered correctly, move the number of spaces on the dice.
4. Write down the points for the space you landed on.
5. Progress to the end, repeating steps 1-4, and tally point totals.
Let me illustrate for you. Player 1 rolls a 3 and answers the question correctly. He moves 3 spaces and gets 3 points. On his next turn, he rolls a 1 and answers correctly. He only moves one space, but this time he earns 4 points (because he landed on the 4). On his next turn, he rolls a 6 and answers correctly. He moves 6 spaces to the space marked with a “10” and earns 10 more points.
I’m really hopeful about this version of our game because the point totals are not in direct correlation to the questions themselves. Plus, each player gets 100 points just for finishing!
Want to play your own version? Here’s your board game printable. Just make up your own cards, borrow some pawn game pieces from another board game, and roll your dice!
I scoured the internet looking for notebooking pages to help Oldest with adding suffixes to root words. In the end, it probably would have been faster to just make my own, especially since that’s what I ended up having to do anyway.
We’ve been learning how to add suffixes to root words, which has not come easily for Oldest. And though this helped to enforce his lesson, we’re far from finished learning this.
After cutting out our mini-books to go on our notebooking page, I worked with him to make new words from the word bank that followed the rules on his mini-books. He added those example words to the inside of the mini-books. Then, he had fun glueing his mini-books to the page.
It was nice to get away from the work sheets for a little while and review this a little differently.
What other fun ideas do you have for teaching this concept?
I’ve been working a lot with Middlest on “glueing” and un-glueing” the sounds in her words to help her with her reading. As a part of that process, I made up these little letter tiles that I thought I would share with you as a free printable.
The tiles two of each of the consonants as well as three sets of vowels. Right now, I have marked the vowels in each set to help us with long, short, and silent vowels. For instance, one set of vowels, I marked as short vowels; one set I marked as long vowels; and the last set I marked with a slash to show silent letters.
Really, I’m currently using only the short vowels and the long vowels with silent e. If we are struggling with a word in her reader, I’ll let her build the word by selecting the correct vowel from our sets. She’ll then sound out and read what she has built. I’ve also had fun using the tiles with the “Read-Build-Write” sheets from Homeschool Creations.
I laminated my tiles and am currently using them just like that; however, it would be easy enough to add a piece of adhesive magnet tape to have magnetic tiles or a piece of adhesive felt to use with a small felt board.
It’s been a fun, hands-on/visual activity to reinforce sounding out, spelling, and reading words.
