Learning ideas, games, activities, books, and suggestions for the kindergarten through fourth grade learner, ideal for home learner or school student.
Despite my best intentions, when I teach my year-long overview of American history, it is simply not possible to cover all the thousands of cultural groups that lived in America before the arrival of European explorers. It would take a year of study on its own! As a result, when I introduce my young kindergartner
Before we jump in to our lessons about American history, I wanted to make sure my daughter had a general understanding of the geography of the USA. The United States of America would be nothing without the land. Before we study the people who live here, we need to understand where “here” is! Our introduction to U.S.
I first wrote the booklet about early Native American homes because I could not find something simple for a brief introduction to Native Americans for my son. I wanted him to understand that there was a variety of cultures living on the American continent before Europeans arrived. I wanted him to understand that the vastness
Do you know about the wonderful free font that helps you create writing papers for your kids? It is called Penmanship Print font. Use this to create blank lines for your early writers that need primary-grade lines for writing! If you don’t have time to make your own, consider buying my already prepared sets.How Do You
It is time to start thinking about Back to School. For those of us who homeschool, by August it sometimes actually is back to homeschool time! Are you getting overwhelmed at the thought of homeschooling kindergarten? Are you homeschooling for the first time? It’s not that bad. Below are some of my thoughts on my
In Tia Isa Wants a Car and A Chair for My Mother, kids work towards earning money for a goal. Although they are very different stories, the goals of the main characters make them perfect for a lesson in comparing and contrasting. The ultimate goal setting lesson from these books is also a great character
To begin my hands-on American History class at my homeschool co-op, I decided to introduce the world explorers by playing our Guess Who?-inspired game: Guess the World Explorer! Not all of the kids knew details about the various world explorers, so we revisited the information cards to learn as we played.Setting up the World Explorers
In my third-grade daily school journal, pretty much every entry ends with “I like Mrs. Gray” (my teacher) and “I hate math.” Some journal entries were just a simple “I hate math.” We must have written in our journals right after math? At any rate, I’ve always disliked it. I remember the reason too: multiplication. The
As a toddler, my daughter was obsessed with ducks. She called herself “Baby Duck” and if I did not call her that, she corrected me. I was, of course, “Mama Duck.” So it was a perfect time for finding all the books we can find about ducks. Below I’ve included a huge list of books. Some
The Red Book by Barbara Lehman is a wordless picture book, so it may not be the first to come to mind when considering a book to “read aloud” to a class. However, because the illustrations tell the story, The Red Book can be an ideal book to use as students practice outlining and retelling
It’s never easy to get a my resistant child to practice speaking in a foreign language, so one thing I like to do is move Spanish-language speaking into our familiar, daily use with getting in the habit of using certain words and phrases. Learning to pray in Spanish is one way we can put that
To prepare for Earth Day and Arbor Day, we learned about conserving trees by recycling paper in our kitchen. Reading The Great Paper Caper, a silly mystery story, prompted this fun, hands-on science lesson. A Conservation Story in The Great Paper CaperBefore we made our paper, we read a fun story about trees, the need for conservation,
