Free Printable Worksheets~ A Guest Post by Christy Gould

 Today's guest post is from my friend Christy Gould.  She is the mom to 4 boys under 6.  I asked her what she was into lately and she told me about her wonderful worksheet resources.  I am thrilled she has compiled them all for us!  Enjoy. 

I have four boys, two of them school-age, plus a toddler and a baby. You’d expect my house to be a noisy, messy place with constant running and tackling – and sometimes, especially around the dinner hour, you’d be right.

For the most part, though, my quieter-than-average oldest boys are very content to sit at the kitchen table and write, draw, and color. And they love worksheets. Easy mazes, word searches, dot-to-dots, DO-a-dots, matching . . . you name it, they love it. It defies everything I ever heard about raising and schooling boys!

I’ve spent the past three years or so amassing quite the collection, and I have a few favorite sites for free printables that I want to share with you today:

Mommy School at Oopsey Daisy Blog. These are arranged by letter (A is for Apples, etc.). She doesn’t have the entire alphabet completed, but the packets that are there have been a hit in our house.

Adding dots to a ladybug so the wings match.

Homeschool Creations. We’ve used her materials to enrich favorite stories, from old Corduroy to  The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear.

Matching rhyming words from a Blueberries for Sal printable.

Royal Baloo, 3 Dinosaurs, and This Reading Mama. These three sites are fairly similar in content, and they often work together to make whole units, such as the ocean month we did last summer. They also teamed up to do sets of worksheets for the ever-popular BOB books, which were a huge success. (For about six months in the middle of this school year, he’d do anything as long as it used a Do-a-Dot marker!)

Using a Do-a-Dot marker to complete a “word path.”

Last but not least, I’ve gotten tons of thematic material from Gift of Curiosity. Her printables require e-mail subscription (unlike the others listed here, which you can print directly from the website), but they’re worth it. Most of the packets are enormous (100+ pages), geared to a wider range of ages (usually 2-7). She also has whole packs of themed Do-a-Dot pages, much to my children’s delight!

So, you might be asking yourself, how do you find all of these when you need them? The answer: I get daily e-mails from Free Homeschool Deals and Money Saving Mom (and, now, Gift of Curiosity, in order to have access to her printables). Whenever anything looks like it might be something I might ever use, I grab it. For example, I’ve known for some time that my kids would be studying botany this spring, so I’ve been downloading every freebie on plants I’ve seen. I plan to do a unit on the armor of God this summer, so when some free castle-themed coloring pages showed up on the Free Homeschool Deals e-mail, I downloaded it. You get the picture.

And now you’re probably asking yourself, what do you do with hundreds of pages of worksheets?! The answer: I have very intentional document storage on my computer. Within “My Documents,” I have a folder called “Homeschooling.” Within “Homeschooling,” there are many, many folders. I started out saving by age range (tot, preschool, pre-K, etc.). But when some of the packets ended up being for multiple ages, I switched to subject: holidays, science, transportation, phonics, math and numbers, handwriting, etc.

Are worksheets for everyone? Probably not. My current almost-three-year-old is much less interested in working at the table than the older two were at his age, and that’s fine. But for kids who love to learn on paper, let me assure you that it can be done for free!

Christy Gould is the wife of a pastor and a homeschooling stay-at-home mom to four boys under six. When she’s not refereeing little-boy disputes, you can find her in the kitchen, whipping up real-food meals and toiletries in equal measure. She chronicles her adventures in homeschooling and life at www.workbepraise.blogspot.com.