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.
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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.
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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!)
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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.
