As a homeschool mom, I have found that it helps to add a variety of learning tools to our school day. Our regular curriculum is wonderful but the kids love it when I change things up a bit and add something new and different. Rachel especially likes hands-on activities and worksheets.
As a member of the Home School Review Crew, we were given a one year individual membership to their online subscription to review Super Teacher Worksheets in our homeschool. The printable worksheets cover a wide variety of subjects including math, reading, writing, phonics, literature, handwriting, grammar, spelling, science, history, geography and MORE! They also have many worksheets available in Spanish. Rachel is working on the Insect badge for her American Heritage Girls troop. For the requirements, she needed to learn details about one particular insect. She chose to learn about the monarch butterfly. I was excited to see that Super Teacher Worksheets had several nature science items to help her out. In their science section, I found an article that was all about monarch butterflies and it had some wonderful colored pictures as well.
Rachel read aloud the article to me and then completed the corresponding worksheets. Just having the article to print out for her to read was great because I didn't have to go searching all over the internet or make a trip to the library. The worksheets helped to get her thinking about what she had read and served as a good review for her.
I also printed off the Butterfly Life Cycle booklet. Rachel loved this! She colored the pictures, cut out the pages, and stapled the booklet together. She wanted me to make a video of her reading aloud her booklet so here she is...
As you can see, Super Teacher Worksheets is more than just fill in the blank kind of worksheets. They have several cute booklets that kids can make. They also have worksheets that have pieces that the child can cut out and use in matching games. We also found this really fun QR code reader worksheet. Rachel had never seen QR codes before so I explained that she would use the QR code reader on my ipad to scan the code on the worksheet.
The QR code took her to a specific list of three words to choose from to answer the problem on the worksheet. In this case, the worksheet asked her to write the word that is a synonym for the word "fast". When she scanned the QR code, the following list popped up.
Rachel absolutely loved this. She now loves QR codes and she wants all of her work to use them in some way! Over the summer, we studied US states and capitals. There are a lot of games and printables on Super Teacher Worksheets that I used as a review for her. Her favorite one was the "Cootie Catcher". Do you remember playing with these as a child?
She would pick a color then move the paper puzzle back and forth for the number of letters in the name of the color. When she stopped, she could pick a state and she had to name the capital. She picked Idaho and then opened up the pocket to see "Boise". How fun is that for reviewing states and capitals!
We will be going to see the play Mr. Popper's Penguins next week so we are reading the book now. I just realized that the Chapter Book section of Super Teacher Worksheets has lots of great printables for this book. They include bookmarks, vocabulary words, word search, and more all related specifically to Mr. Popper's Penguins. Resources like this make my job as teacher so much easier! Finally, there are also some fun things to find at Super Teacher Worksheets. We played this Halloween Bingo game over and over the other day. I think the addition of candy for game pieces may have made it even more fun.
I have really enjoyed having Super Teacher Worksheets to turn to for supplements in our school day. An individual membership costs only $19.95 for a full year. This gives you complete access to all of their great printables. If you would like to read other Super Teacher Worksheets reviews from other Home School Review Crew members, please just click on the banner below:
I have the McGuffey Eclectic Reader book set. I love the idea behind these books. It is an old fashioned curriculum which I really appreciate but I've struggled with how to actually use it in our homeschool. I was excited to see that the Home School Review Crew was going to be offered the chance to review Eclectic Foundations because it is a Language Arts program that is BASED on the McGuffey Eclectic Readers! You can think of it as McGuffey lesson plans which is exactly what I have been looking for in order to get the most benefit from these wonderful readers. I quickly signed up to try it out with my daughter. She is in second grade so I chose for her to try the Eclectic Foundations Language Arts Level B.
The program includes 144 lessons that are intended to be used 4 days per week over 36 weeks. Language Arts isn't just one subject so with the Eclectic Foundations Language Arts lessons, we have covered reading, phonics, handwriting, poetry, spelling, and grammar. I love that it is all inclusive but also that it is Christian based. Click HERE to view a sample of the first four weeks of Level B. The lessons begin with reading in the McGuffey readers. You can purchase these books on your own or you can find them online for free. As my daughter reads the McGuffey passages, we talk about the words in the story and the accompanying picture. We also review new word cards for the corresponding Eclectic Foundations lesson. Each part of speech is assigned a different. For example, nouns are red, verbs are green, etc. As we review the words and spelling, my daughter colors the Word Cards accordingly. I was surprised how much she likes color coding her cards. She even insists on using the same specific markers each time so she is sure that all of the green cards are the SAME shade of green!
Next we talk about Phonics. My daughter loves to use the laminated Phonics Practice Sheets and a dry erase marker to practice her spelling of the words in the lesson. Just adding a little uniqueness to the lesson by letting her write then wipe off makes it a little more fun for her. Anything that makes school more fun
I love that Eclectic Foundations also includes handwriting and copy work in their curriculum. Rachel had only learned manuscript when we started using this curriculum so she was excited that Eclectic Foundations has handwriting lessons that have taught her how to write in cursive.
The lessons also cover Poetry which includes reading a short poem, identifying rhyming words, patterns, and comprehension. Rachel seems to really enjoy poetry so she always likes this part.
The Eclectic Foundations Language Arts program is a comprehensive language arts curriculum but you don't need to buy a bunch of separate books for each subject covered. You just need the Teacher's Guide ($12), the Student Workbook ($24), and a set of Phonics Practice Sheets and Word Cards (($20). However, you can also purchase all of this in a pdf format for just $30 if you want to print it all yourself.
We have enjoyed the Eclectic Foundations Language Arts program. They currently have three levels. Level A is a Primer for 1st grade, Level B is for 1st-2nd grades. Level C is 3rd-4th grades. Level D will be coming out soon and it will be for 5th-6th grades.
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