Printables for Your Homeschool - Super Teacher Worksheets Review

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:

Big IQ Kids Review

I haven't used any type of educational computer work with Nicholas' homeschool curriculum so far. However, we recently had the opportunity to try out BigIQKids and we are both pretty excited about it.

BigIQKids is an award-winning program for grades K-8 that is affordable and easy to use. It is an online site that offers FREE lessons in spelling, vocabulary, math, and U.S. geography lessons. Premium accounts are also available for math and geography. There is an easy chart available to help you see the difference in free vs. premium access.

I am most excited about the ability to customize lesson plans to control the difficulty and length of Nicholas' lessons. It's not just a cookie-cutter, one size fits all kind of program.

Each lesson has it's own little tutor that goes over the directions for the lesson and helps the student navigate the program.

Nicholas sits down at the table and uses my laptop for about 10-15 minutes of BigIQKids lessons each day. Some of the work is new to him like the U.S. geography program. It teaches state location, spelling, capitals, and abbreviations. Other lessons like math will be used more as a review.

As Nicholas completes a lesson, he gets rewarded with a game coin. He can then go to the game page where there are over 75 games to choose from, each costing 1-2 coins to play. There are lots of fun games like Krazy Kart, Cupcake Frenzy, Pirates Game, and Dress Up, just to name a few. Nicholas said, "The games are fun. It makes me WANT to work on school work!".

When Nicholas completes a lesson, BigIQKids sends me an email to let me know how he did. I can go online and check out his Progess Report which gives detailed information like how he scored on a particular lesson and other specifics such as average time to complete math problems for a particular lesson.

Since the lessons are customizable, it can grow with Nicholas and his skill level. There are even lessons that we can use years from now on Vocabulary Prep for the SAT which includes a spelling bee, synonyms, antonyms, and sentence completion exercises.

I can also see a benefit in having BigIQKids for Nicholas to work on so that I can grab a few minutes of one-on-one school time with my younger child.

But best of all, BigIQKids is offering a once a year bundle package right now where you can get access to all of the premium benefits offered for just $89.99/year.

For more information, please visit the BigIQKids website. You can also follow BigIQKids on Twitter.

Savor The Days was granted premium account access in order to write this review. There was no compensation for my time and the comments made here are entirely my own (and Nicholas'). Please check out what others on the TOS Homeschool Crew have to say about this great program.