We recently started homeschooling and we are LOVING it. We have done homeschool preschool, but things feel so much more official now that we have a kindergarten student. 

 

Now, before you tell me all the reasons why we SHOULDN’T homeschool, let me just tell you that we prayed about this. Like a LOT. We know, for sure, that this is the right choice for our family right now. Next year, that may not be the case. But right now, this is what we’re supposed to be doing. So, we’re doing it! 

Since starting, I have found a few great resources that I wanted to share with you all! 

1. All In One Homeschool 

I really could just stop after this one. It’s AMAZING. It’s great for preschool age as well. The reading program they have is super simple and it really helped my son get a jump start on reading. 

2. Zearn 

This is a math curriculum. It’s fun for the kids, and is common core based, so if you are planning on putting your kids in school later on, they’ll under stand all the “make ten” stuff. My four and five year old both do this website and like it. 

3. Coding.com 

This is super fun, and it teaches kids how to code! My favorite part is it makes them THINK. It teaches the way computers work, and it teaches logic. 

4. Khan Academy 

This doesn’t have a TON of stuff for young elementary aged kids, but it does have some good math classes, and TONS of stuff for older students. 

5. Teachers Pay Teachers  

This one is great for worksheets and other things like that. I get lots of writing practice pages from this website. Not everything is free, but lots of stuff is free. 

6.Handwriting Worksheets

This is another one that I get handwriting worksheets from. This one is great because it lets you create your own worksheets. I make worksheets with scriptures and things like that using this website. 

7.Armor Your Children

This one is for you LDS mamas. This blog has a year long program set up with a different theme each week and a different scripture for each day. It’s been a great way to start off our day. 

8. Brain Pop, Jr

This one has a different free educational video each week. My kids love it. Most of the site is a paid subscription, but we just watch the one video each week and call it good! 

9. Book Advventure 

This is a great way to motivate kids to read! 

10. Starfall
Full disclosure, we DO have the paid membership to Starfall, but there is LOTS to do without paying anything. My four year old especially loves this one.&nbsp

——-BONUS——-

If you’re really interested in homeschooling and unsure of where to start, I strongly encourage you to research online charter schools in your state. My son is enrolled is Idaho Idea, an online Idaho Public Charter School. They helped us come up with the curriculum and I check in with them once a month. It’s the best of both worlds!

What are you favorite free resources???

The post 10 Free Homeschooling Websites for Elementary School appeared first on A Mouse In My Kitchen.

I bought all this kitchen stuff at the dollar store. I decide instead of getting pretend stuff, I’d let me kids play with the real deal. You can’t hardly beat the price, anyway.

I just bought a bunch of kitchen stuff that I thought my kids would like to play with. There is a spoon, some measuring cups and spoons, some funnels, tongs, and a few other little things. Then, I add a little something each time they play with it. It might be a little flour that I add, or some rice, or just plain water. They have a great time transferring the ingredients from one cup to another or trying to grab things with the tongs. Sometimes we take it all outside and fill a bucket up with water and let them go at it. They end up super wet, but they love it. It’s great because it teaches life skills like pouring and stirring. And the best part is that you won’t have to worry about your kids using YOUR kitchen stuff anymore, because they have their own! We even use this stuff to make real muffins sometimes. That’s a HUGE hit.

The post Teaching Your Kids Life Skills With Dollar Store Tools appeared first on A Mouse In My Kitchen.

My son is almost two and a half years old, and he is SO interested in letters. We probably sing the alphabet song 100 times a day. His favorite puzzle is an alphabet one and whenever he sees a sign, he says “b mommy!” (all letters are “b” to him right now). When we read books he likes me to point to each letter and tell him what it is. 

I have decided to use his interest in letters to my advantage. He will sit and let me show him letters for about 20 minutes, which is a long time for a two year old. I have come up with some different activities, and I especially like using the Letter of the Week program from Confessions of a Homeschooler. She has a lot of different activities to go along with each letter, but sometimes we need to change it up. 

I was really excited to get a pack of Educational Alphabet Flashcards from Educational Toys Planet. These cards are a fun way to help my little guy learn his letters. A little while back, I had a reader tell me how she was teaching her daughter letters by teaching her sounds instead of letter names. It makes sense, because the sound is what the child has to actually know to be able to read, not the name. So we started doing that, using these cards. I show him a letter and we make the sound together. He can now (after just a week) recognize and say the sound of an M, T, O, and A. 

These cards are super durable. They aren’t like your average children’s playing cards. They are thick, which is so nice when you are using them with a toddler. The pack came with a card for each upper and lower case letter, with a word and the letter on one side of each card and a picture on the other side. I like using the picture side right now with my little guy. I think it really helps build his vocabulary to look at each card and talk about what’s in the picture. The pictures are so colorful, too! 

These cards are great for 3, 4, even 5 year olds. In fact, you can find them in the 3 year old, 4 year old, and 5 year old sections on the website. I strongly recommend buying these cards if you are trying to help your toddler get a head start in the reading section. They are great and I think they will last for quite awhile. 

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

The post Teaching Letters With Educational Alphabet Flashcards appeared first on A Mouse In My Kitchen.

Here is what you need:

• mini m&ms
• a plate

So you can see how this works for you and adjust as you go, but here is what I did:

Get out a few m&ms (you don’t need all of them!) and put them in the middle of the plate. The first thing we did was sorting.

I had to help my little guy get the hang of it, but he figured it out pretty quick. He did want to eat them, and occasionally I would let him (I would say you can eat ONE blue one and help him find a blue one). 

Once we had them sorted by color, we did some counting for fun (I think he’s a long way from numbers but it doesn’t hurt to practice!) We did lots of “where’s a green one?” and things like that. 

After he had all he could take (about ten minutes is all.. I didn’t want to frustrate him too much), we started eating them. I would alternate which color he could eat and he seemed to have a really good time. 

One of the things I think was a key to making this a successful activity was praise (and the fact that my son was eating mini pieces of chocolate). Each time he got the right color, I would get really excited and say something like “yeah! Good job!” I think the praise kept him from getting frustrated and helped him keep going with the activity.

Good luck teaching your little ones colors! Leave me a comment and let me know if you have any awesome suggestions for teaching colors. I’d love to hear them.  

The post Fun Way To Teach Your Toddler Colors and Sorting appeared first on A Mouse In My Kitchen.

I decided to take a break this week from the home maintenance binder (don’t worry, I’ll post another section on it next week!) to join The Squishable Baby’s Homeschool Blog Carnival. The theme for this month’s carnival is my favorite homeschool project. However, since I haven’t actually STARTED homeschooling yet (planning on starting in September!) I am going to share a little about MY project of getting started with homeschooling. 

My son is going to be two and a half in September. I know a lot of people think that’s too young to start any kind of schooling, but I disagree. I took a lot of teaching classes in college. We learned about a lot of different methods of teaching. One of them, the Montessori Method, puts an emphasis on the early years. That school of thought teaches that the early years are a time of great growth. In fact, if you enroll your child in a Montessori School, chances are they will take them as soon as they are potty trained. 

I personally don’t like the idea of sending my barely two and a half year old son off to school for five hours a day. I believe that I have all the skills necessary to teach him every thing he needs to know right here at home. I also believe that preschooling him will be much different than what many people have in mind when they hear the word “school”.

So many people today put a huge emphasis on teaching their children numbers and letters and shapes and colors at a super early age. For what? Then you have a kid that has all these things memorized but can’t do anything with them. I’m not saying to not teach your children these things, or that I’m not going to teach my son these things, but they won’t be the emphasis. 

My plan is to incorporate letters, shapes, colors and numbers into other activities. I am using the curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler to give me a basis of a lot of activities to do that are based around learning letters, but don’t directly teach them. I dont’ want to sit down with my child and say, “look, this is a letter A! What does A say?” Instead I want him to pick up letters, shapes, colors and numbers from every day activities that we do. I want him to learn colors when we are playing with blocks or cars or some other toy. I want him to learn numbers when we are cooking or sorting objects, etc. 

I am only planning on doing about a half an hour a day on structured activity. I believe that children need unstructured time to play and explore on their own and with an adult. I don’t want to overwhelm him with sit-down-now-and-do-your-work kind of stuff. I want him to love learning. 

I plan on utilizing the library. I hope to go there with him once a week to pick out new books. 

I have invited another boy to join us in our preschool. I think one of the things that a public preschool gives to children is social time. I want my son to have the chance to be social. The boy that will be joining us is a little older than my son, and I believe that will be a benefit to my son as well. I am also getting paid to watch him, and plan on using that money for supplies. 

Speaking of money, I don’t plan on spending a lot. There are a lot of free resources out there and I don’t believe that kids need a lot of stuff to learn. That being said, I did spend a little money on a Laminator because I want the pages I use to last. Any time I create something that I think will be used over and over again (tracing pages for example), I laminate and have my son use a dry erase marker, pencil or crayon.

I plan on having realistic expectations. I don’t expect my two year old to read. I don’t expect him to be cooking food by himself. I don’t really want him to be some kind of genius. I want him to learn and grow and explore. I want him to develop a love of learning. I want to use the homeschooling activities as a way to spend time with him while the baby is sleeping. I want to give him one on one attention. I want him to have something to do other than pushing cars around and stacking legos (although I think those things are good!) 

I have found a few really good resources for homeschooling preschoolers. The one I mentioned earlier, Confessions of a Homeschooler, is great. She has a lot of free stuff, or you can buy it for easier downloading. 

Another one I like is Confessions of a Slacker Mom. She has a curriculum that is LDS based (think A is for Adam). It’s completely free. 

In Lieu of Preschool is another great blog. It has tons of crafts and activities to do that promote learning without actually lecturing your poor two year old. 

There’s a few things to get you started. One thing to remember is that you are already homeschooling your child, whether you call it that or not. The home is where SO much learning takes place. If you take just a little time to make it more purposeful learning, your child will benefit SO much. 

As a quick recap, here are the things I’m planning:

• incorporate learning letters, shapes, numbers, and colors into every day activities
• only doing about half an hour a day on structured activity
• utilize the library
• have another child join us
• not spend a lot of money
• have realistic expectations 

Thanks for joining me for this long winded post! If any of you are currently homeschooling a preschooler, I would love your advice! Please leave me a comment and tell me what you do to homeschool your little one. 

Visit The Squishable Baby to see how you can participate in the next Homeschool Blogging Carnival where we will be talking about online gaming and curriculum.

Please take the time to read the submissions by other Carnival participants:

• Keisha at Unschooling Momma will talk about a few of the writing projects she has done with her children, including a son who absolutely despises to write anything.

• Lisa at The Squishable Baby Will talk about homeschooling is more than math and science – it’s about learning how to be a better person.

• Tani at Normal Education shares how her Children learned about the election process – and got insight into its corrupt nature.

• Tati at AllMoms4Jesus shares how she takes her homeschool project well beyond pencil/paper and out into the community.

• Aida at Girlfriends With Goals will share how she brings her lessons alive with real life experiences.

• Markell Corpus will talk about the Dos and don’ts about homeschooling during the preschool years.

• Cecy Fencer will be discussing the homeschool projects that she enjoys the most.

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