Early Learning. Happy Teaching.
Since we’re homeschooling on a budget (like many of you are), we love free homeschooling printables in our family! In last week’s Family Fun Friday, there were plenty of great homeschooling activities, including several great printable activities. Today we’re featuring our favorites!
If you’re a blogger, be sure to link up your posts to this week’s linky. Your posts could be featured next week!
Pooh and I were working on his math lessons using Khan Academy the other day and he ran into a little trouble when it was time to learn polygons. He’s six, after all. 🙂
For our free printable flashcards series this week, I thought I’d whip up a set of Free Printable Flashcards: Polygons! This set includes the eight simple polygons, which makes it easier for little ones to get an introduction to geometry.
These free printable polygon flashcards are awesome for introducing preschoolers and kindergartners to basic shapes, but since they include more complex shapes as well, they’re a good review for elementary students too!
If you enjoy using these printable polygon flashcards in your homeschool, check out some of our other math printables, including Amusement Park Addition Flashcards and our Aquarium Arithmetic Printable Pack!
To use these flashcards, you’ll need the following:
The word “polygon” actually means multi-sided shape. So any shape with “many” sides counts as one. In this set, though, we’re focusing on shapes with three to ten sides.
In the set, you’ll find flashcards for all eight simple polygons:
There’s a set of all eight with words and without for quizzes or playing a game of concentration. Take a few minutes to quiz the kids with the unlabeled cards!
Or have them count the sides of each shape and guess which it is!
Scroll down to get your copy of our free printable polygon flashcards!
For more great polygon resources, try these books and activities!
Make learning about geometry into a hands-on lesson with these fun polygon activities!
Stop by and take a look at some of our other math learning ideas!
Plus, follow my Math Mania board on Pinterest to get more tips for teaching math!
To get your copy of our free printable polygon flashcards, click the image or the link below to visit our Store!
According to the National Fire Prevention Association, some of the most important aspects of fire safety planning are testing the home smoke detector and developing a home fire escape plan. A fire escape plan should include the rooms in your home and the route that the entire family will take to escape in case of fire.
Since fires often break out without warning, it’s critical that families decide on an escape route in advance and practice evacuating the home. In honor of National Fire Safety Week, I’m thrilled to announce the release of our newest printable pack: Fire Safety Smart! With this pack of cut and paste fire safety printables, you can get the kids in on the fire safety planning for your home!
Fire Safety Smart! is designed to help kids learn the layout of their homes and to help develop the best escape route from the house. With the pack, you and your kids can do a walkthrough of the home to identify all of the rooms. Then, you can decide which direction the entire family will go to meet at a safe place outside the home.
Since the pack includes cut and paste cards for common household rooms, you can use it to teach fire safety, practice scissor skills, and basic reading!
Fire Safety Smart! is now available in our store for instant download for just $1.99! Click the image below to visit our store and download your Fire Safety Smart! pack.
For even more fire safety lesson ideas, visit Ready.gov’s page on fire safety or read the following books with your kids!
– Jan & Mike Berenstain
– Leslie McGuire
– Margery Cuyler
– Marc BrownThis post is part of the “Fire Safety for Kids” linkup! Visit our fellow bloggers for more great fire safety ideas for kids!
All Done Monkey – Make a Fire Safety Escape Plan
Creative World of Varya – Fire Safety Theme Park
We’re continuing with our Spanish learning with this pack of free printable flashcards for learning the Spanish days of the week! We’ve already covered days of the week in English, so it’s adelante a español (on to Spanish)!
I love teaching Spanish to my kids. It helps them to converse with others, learn more about another culture, and even broadens their understanding of English! (There are several English terms that are heavily influenced by words from Latin languages, including Spanish, French, and Italian.)
If you enjoy these Spanish days of the week flashcards, don’t miss our other Spanish learning resources, including our Spanish community helpers printable pack and our Spanish alphabet mega-pack!
To use these flashcards, you’ll need the following:
In the pack, you’ll find flashcards for each day in both English and Spanish:
Monday – lunes
Tuesday – martes
Wednesday – miércoles
Thursday – jueves
Friday – viernes
Saturday – sábado
Sunday – domingo
Don’t know how to say those words in Spanish? No worries! The flashcard set has a pronunciation guide too. 😉
Stop by Year Round Homeschooling to grab “¡Los Días de la Semana!¨Free Printable Flashcards: Spanish Days of the Week!
And don’t forget to grab our other free Spanish flashcards for learning opposite words and for learning Spanish food words!
Want more awesome resources for teaching Spanish to your kids? Try these posts!
Plus, get more tips for teaching foreign languages to your kids on my Foreign Language for Homeschoolers Pinterest board!
We’re back with yet another set of free printable flashcards for kids! In this edition, we’re focusing on learning the days of the week.
Our boys are working on calendar skills this school year, so we’ve been memorizing the days of the week and the months of year (in order) to help them keep up with the date every morning. I hope that you find our set Free Printable Flashcards Days of the Week Cards to be useful for your young learners as well!
This pack includes flashcards for all seven days of the week, along with their corresponding place in the calendar. The first set features both the name of each day and the calendar image, while the second set features the calendar image only.
Make a game out of the lesson by printing two copies and playing a game of “Go Fish”! If you’d like to add an art activity, print the cards in black and white and let the kids color them.
Want to include even more resources in your calendar unit? Try these books and activities for teaching the days of the week to preschoolers! (Affiliate links are provided here for convenience. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.)
To download your copy of our Free Printable Flashcards: Days of the Week, click the image or the link below to download them!
We’re back with another set of free printable flashcards! Last week, we featured free shape flashcards and this week we’re on to colors with a set of free printable color flashcards!
Little hands just seem to like little objects. It’s only natural. 🙂 So these flashcards are a bit smaller than traditional cards, which makes them perfect for toddlers and preschoolers!
If you enjoy using these, don’t forget to check out our other preschool flashcards, including our Sign Language Alphabet cards and our Snowflake Counting Flashcards! And if you’re introducing your kids to Spanish, our Spanish Color Flashcards are perfecto!
To use these flashcards, you’ll need the following:
In the pack, you’ll find printable colors flashcards for the following colors:
The first set includes both color swatches and words, so you can use them to teach the colors. The second set only features the color swatches, which makes them a good tool for a miniature pop quiz!
If your kids are anything like mine, your flashcards can start to look at bit “weathered” after a few lessons, so you might want to laminate them to make them more durable.
To get your set of Free Printable Flashcards: Colors, click the image or the link below to visit our Store!
If you’d like even more resources for teaching colors to your toddler or preschooler, check out these great suggestions!
Grab more awesome flashcards for little learners below!
And don’t forget to follow my Learning for Little Ones board on Pinterest for more ideas you can use for early childhood education!
We love reading Eric Carle books! One of my kids’ absolute favorites is The Grouchy Ladybug. That’s been a huge hit in our family. (Secretly, I think they like the grouchiness.) But one of the other books we love is Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?
These wild animal notebooking pages are a simple way to introduce kids to these animals as you read the book! Read on to see how to get your copy absolutely free!
Don’t miss our other animal notebooking pages, including our free Polar Animals Notebooking Pages and our Sea Monsters Notebooking Pages!
We’re linking up with iHomeschool Network again today to offer a great set of printable animal notebooking pages! Today several of iHN’s bloggers are sharing activities for Eric Carle books, so we decided to focus on the book Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?
Throughout the book, several kids get to act out the parts of wild animals such as polar bears, walruses, peacocks, and zebras, including making the correct animal sounds. To help our young kids work on identifying wild animals and learning about them, we put together a free set of wild animal notebooking pages called “Animals Gone Wild!”
To use this pack, you’ll need the following:
In this pack, you’ll find notebooking pages for eight animals, including:
Each notebooking page includes spaces for the average lifespan and weight of each animal, as well as their native habitats, diets, and species names. You’ll also find links where you can locate the information for each fact. Younger kids can get in on the action with animal flashcards, including a set of blank cards for them to practice naming each animal.
To download your free copy of “Animals Gone Wild”, click the image or the link below!
If you love these printables, don’t miss these other posts!
And get even more awesome printables from my Homeschool Printables board on Pinterest!
This post is part of the “Homeschooling with Eric Carle” linkup from iHomeschool Network! Click on over to find out what activities our fellow bloggers are sharing today!
Let’s face it: Kids will always love to watch TV. There’s nothing we can do about it. But we can turn TV into a way to learn and that’s why we put together a fun The Aristocats unit study! This is a neat way to weave learning into movie watching, especially if kids are obsessed with classic Disney movies (like mine are).
Since The Aristocats takes place in France, you can talk about geography. But you can also learn about pedigree cats, art, and much more! Read on to see what kinds of activities we did to go along with this children’s movie!
If you enjoy this lesson, try some of our other unit studies, including our Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs unit study!
This post contains affiliate links. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.
Naturally, we got started by watching The Aristocats. It was our first time seeing it, so we let the kids get comfy on the sofa.
That’s the life, isn’t it?
We watched it on Netflix, but if you don’t have Netflix, you can rent it from Amazon for just $2.99.
The kids loved it, but we wanted to make watching the movie into a learning experience. So we decided to spend some time learning about pedigree cats and the city of Paris!
We created a set of notebooking pages featuring several pedigree cat breeds, including the Siamese Cat, the Persian Cat, and the Japanese Bobtail Cat. If you want to use it with your kids, feel free to download our Pedigree Cats notebooking pages by clicking the image or link below!
To do our research, we made liberal use of the Internet. About a month ago, we bought an HDMI cable for our television and now we do most of our online research in the living room using the TV. It’s much better than trying to crowd everyone around the computer screen.
As we looked up the basic information about our cat breeds, Tigger wrote down the vital statistics on the notebooking pages. By the way, all of the facts in the notebooking pages can be found on Wikipedia.
It must be pretty nice to have school in your robe.
After we finished our research into the world of pedigree cats, we decided to take a virtual tour of Paris. A lot of the iconic sights of Paris appear in The Aristocats, including the Eiffel Tower, the River Seine, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
We watched a playlist of Paris travel videos from Rick Steves to learn more about these and other sights of Paris.
After that, it was time to make our own pretend “Plaster of Paris”! We used a great recipe for foam dough. And the kids loved playing with it!
We all loved learning with the movie “The Aristocats”! We had a great time learning about cats, the city of Paris, and how to make foam dough!
Ready to try some other homeschool unit studies?
Plus, see more fun thematic units on my Unit Studies Pinterest board!
This post is part of the Movie and a Big Idea linkup from iHomeschool Network! Click over to read more fun movie-themed homeschool lessons you can use!
Hey everyone! We’re back from a short break this week with a free set of homeschool printables that are perfect for winter learning!
Tigger’s had her struggles with math over the years, so we’ve had to add a little fun to our math work to help her stay focused. This month, we decided to tackle multiplication factors with set of free snowflake math factor printables! Read on to see how to get your copy!
If you like these, don’t miss our ideas on how to use them for a fun snowflake math factor craft!
To use these printables, you’ll need the following: (Affiliate links are included in this post. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.)
We designed the activity so that the snowflake arms all show numbers that are factors of the larger number in the center. They work on a diagonal, so there are three numbers already given and the kids have to find the other number that makes a factor pair.
Example: On the sheet above, the center number is 36, so all of the numbers on the snowflake are factors of 36. Kids will need to find the missing number in each factor pair: 18 x ? = 36; 9 x ? = 36; 3 x ? = 36, and so on.
To give Tigger a helping hand, we walked her through the first one. We’ve covered multiplication with her in the past and found that the circles and dots method seems to work best for her.
We decided to let her try the next one on her own.
She did great! She counted up the numbers and filled in the spots pretty easily.
We added some larger numbers in the pack as well to help kids test their multiplication facts, but a full answer key is provided at the back.
Don’t miss our other winter learning ideas!
Get more tips for teaching math on my Math Mania Pinterest board!
To get your free Snowflake Math Factor Printables, sign up for our email newsletter! You’ll receive these and other educational resources in our exclusive Subscriber Library!
Remember the first time you read the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Or the first time you saw the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Those were basically life-changing experiences for me. So when it was time to introduce our kids to Charlie Bucket, Willy Wonka, Veruca Salt, and all the others, I wanted to make it memorable for them too.
And that’s why we put together this Charlie and the Chocolate Factory unit study! There are crafts, printables, and activities here that relate to both the story and the movie. If you love this one, don’t miss our other homeschool unit studies, including our Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs unit!
This post contains affiliate links. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.
We began by reading the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. We split the reading up into three chapters per school day and both Jay and I took turns reading it aloud. The kids were fascinated with it right from the beginning. Probably because of all the talk about candy. 🙂
Tigger looked up some of the unusual vocabulary words along the way and she completed a character map all about Charlie – what kind of personality he had, his family’s living situation, and the way he looked. Charlie is probably one of the most sympathetic characters in all of children’s literature. You really root for him through the whole book.
These free chocolate notebooking pages are a fun way to help kids keep track of their vocabulary words through the book! To get your copy, just click the image or the link below.
Once we finished the book, we did a Willy Wonka toilet paper roll craft using a circusmaster toilet roll craft from DLTK Crafts.
We just printed out three copies – one for each child.
Then we cut out the pieces and slowly began assembling them. I liked this project because there weren’t a lot of pieces and the kids only had to glue a few of them together.
We also found out that liquid glue is much better for this than glue sticks. Just so you know.
Three Wonkas!
We decided to finish the unit by watching the original movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Of course, we couldn’t enter the factory without finding a golden ticket in a Wonka bar.
The problem is that we couldn’t find any Wonka bars for sale. (I remember seeing them when I was younger, but I guess they stopped making them.) Amazon.com to the rescue!
We bought a super cute Willy Wonka Chocolate Bar wrapper with a copy of the Golden Ticket and used a regular 4.3 ounce chocolate bar as the candy.
The golden ticket actually uses the exact wording from the story. Awww…
We wrapped the chocolate bar and placed the golden ticket inside. Then we opened it as a family and shared the chocolate. The kids don’t eat a lot of candy, so that was a real treat for them.
Time to watch the movie! We rented it through Amazon Instant Video. Took about 30 seconds.
I literally get nostalgic whenever I see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I watched it along with my third grade class and it just instantly transports me back to my childhood when imagination was truly the most important thing I had.
And be sure to try some of these super Charlie and the Chocolate Factory activities to round out your unit!
Don’t miss these other fun unit studies for children!
Plus, see more awesome unit studies for homeschoolers on my Unit Studies Pinterest board!
This post is part of the Movie and a Big Idea linkup from iHomeschool Network! Click over to read more great movie-themed learning ideas for kids!
Something interesting happens to my husband and I around mid-March. We go just a little bit crazy. But what would the NCAA college basketball tournament be if we didn’t go a little mad about it? I mean, we’re talking about almost three straight weeks of college basketball with over 60 teams from all the conferences!
This year, we’re going to get the kids involved by adding a few educational activities. And I’m sharingthese free college basketball worksheets for kids with you!
Read on to see how to get your set free! And for more fun with hoops, check out our free basketball skip counting flashcards and our easy coffee filter basketball craft too!
To use these worksheets, you’ll need the following: (This post contains affiliate links. For details, see our Disclosure Policy.)
This pack includes three different worksheets.
There’s no specified grade level for these, but they would work best for elementary-aged students.
A history of basketball worksheet features questions about the first college basketball tournament. (The kids can find the answers here.)
Use the college basketball geography worksheet to help kids learn about the cities where the tournament regional finals will be held this year. (Find the list of region locations here.)
Plus, there’s a college basketball math worksheet that helps kids practice skip-counting in reverse from 68 down to 2 – just like the tournament! (Our basketball skip counting flashcards would be helpful here.)
Scroll on down to grab your free college basketball worksheets for kids!
Don’t miss these other fun posts!
To get your free college basketball worksheets for kids, sign up for our email newsletter! You’ll get these printables, plus lots more, FREE in our exclusive Subscriber Library!
