Tomorrow we are off Thanksgiving break. This is the time of year where, “Get it done” too often comes to mind when I think of the rest of our home school year. I can tend to get rushed and cut corners and neglect some of the great tools I used earlier in the year. Instead, this year, I hope to come back from this break with renewed vision and keep it fun. I thought I’d share some of the computer resources we’ve enjoyed using this year in the hopes to inspire someone who needs a little extra oomph at this stage in the school year.
One of our very first home school initiatives was the “Google It” list that we made when my oldest child was 5 years old. She has a beautiful inquisitive mind and my husband and I got a little tired of answering every question with, “I don’t know.” So, besides teaching her to read and doing some simple math, we would write down her questions and things she wanted to learn about on a list and take time to look it all up. That first year was one of our favorite years of home schooling.
Since then, we’ve learned primarily from books and nature, but this year we’ve gotten back to the internet for a few subjects.
Our part time science teacher, as I like to call him, is The Happy Scientist. I can’t say enough wonderful things about him! The kids love doing his experiments and learning from him. He loves science and really gets the kids engaged in it. A good portion of his website is free videos and experiments but I paid $20 for a year’s access to more. It has been totally worth it so far. (Not affiliated by the way… I’m not affiliated with anyone. Haha.) I also love that all of his experiments use stuff that I have already so it’s really easy on the budget and planning. Instead of using expensive special paper to make sun prints, for example, he uses plain construction paper. And instead of just making sun prints, (which is pretty cool in and of itself) he shows kids exactly why it all works. We’ve made a model of the water cycle with his plans. We all have a quite thorough understanding of how food webs work now. The kids beg for more of The Happy Scientist. And frequently it points us back outside into my happy place. He’s brilliant.
I said before that we use Khan Academy for math. It is another free online resource. It also covers some science and other subjects. I also mentioned XtraMath before. It’s free and takes only a few minutes a day to drill math facts in a game-like way.
Spelling City is what we have used for practicing spelling and taking spelling tests. There is a great free section of it that has been more than sufficient for us. I highly recommend it.
The computer has been especially helpful to free up my divided time now that I have two kids at two different levels to educate. If you have some fun free resources, I’d love to hear about more! So if you have something to add, please leave me a comment. Thanks!