Homeschooling Help Booklet - Free Printable

I've been helping out a couple of friends with preparing for their year ahead in the homeschooling world. For those of us that have been doing this for years we know how crazy it can get when trying to make the best possible decisions for your children, your homeschool and your family environment.

It's easy to get caught up in the frenzy of what all your homeschool friends are doing and comparing your list of ideas against theirs. It is always in these moments where we need to come back to us. To our children, to our family and to the things that we hold dear.

To help my friends in a way that is as least overwhelming as possible I put together a very simple Free Homeschooling Help Printable Booklet.

It contains all the important stuff when it comes to thinking about the year ahead. Not only what we will utilise for specific grades but it also covers some of the heart stuff. The things that are truly more often, more important than the subjects and the resources.

The booklet is twenty pages, with a very no frills design. Simply print it off, grab a cuppa and start completing it. If you're anything like me though you'll work on this over quite a few different sittings.

If you have friends that are new to homeschooling or that may be feeling a little overwhelmed please share this blog post with them.

 Download The Free Homeschooling Help Booklet Here

Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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Times Tables Through Copywork

So you all know that it is 'Times Tables Year' for us here. My middle child is completely immersed in all things Multiplication and of course getting those tables down pat is on the priority list.

I recently shared a wide variety of multisensory ways to cover multiplication. This particular child needs as many hands on learning opportunities as possible so we are trying our best to hit as many of those boxes as possible.

I was searching through my files for something or other and stumbled across my original Addition Facts Copywork printable and truly, I had completely forgotten how useful that was for us.

I knew instantly that I needed to create a multiplication version. So a simple straight forward printable sheet, which includes two rows of each fact from one through to twelve.

These are so easy to add in to the routine. I simply printed off a bunch, cut them through the middle and have my child complete one or two each day. They literally only take a couple of minutes. So simple. The download link for these is below.

Pin This So You Don't Forget It!

Download the Times Tables Copywork via my box account.

Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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30 Free E-Books For You!

You all know that I've joined the TOS Homeschool Review Crew this year don't you?

Through the review crew we've been introduced to some fabulous resources and in turn I've shared them all with you.

Missed any of those posts? Go back now and have a little browse at all the great products.

There are many more wonderful things to come so please be sure you are following along with any or all of these options:

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The Old Schoolhouse Store has been ever so generous in providing me with some fabulous homeschool help e-books that I can in turn pass on to you.

Completely Free!

Yes all 30 of them, in fact I think there are actually 32 and they are all free for the month of April for you to enjoy.


Let me show you quickly what I've chosen.

Communicate, Write & Organise Your Way To Homeschool Success:  Learn how to organize your homeschool, overcome writing woes, and teach writing skills all in one amazing e-book bundle. Bring success to your school one skill at a time.

I chose this bundle because let's face it, most of us can all use a little help in at least one of these areas when it comes to homeschooling.

Let's take a quick look at what you are getting for free inside this bundle.

e-Book 1: Just How Important Are Comminication Skills
e-Book 2: Play What You Mean
e-Book 3: Communication Skills & Your Gifted Child
e-Book 4: Growing Authors & Illustrators
e-Book 5: Helping The Reluctant Writer
e-Book 6: Why Does My Child Hate To Write
e-Book 7: Organise Your Homeschool
e-Book 8: Inexpensive Organisation

Get your free bundle here: Communicate, Write & Organise Your Way To Homeschool Success





A Voyage Into Adventure: Are you interested in a learning adventure where light becomes more than

just something to brighten a room? Where bugs become fascinating creatures and not something to merely be screamed at? Download this 20-pack Adventure bundle today!


I chose this bundle because I think we all should add in a little more adventure into our homeschool day.

Let's take a quick look at what you are getting for free inside this download.

e-Book1: A Light Unto My Path
e-Book 2: The “Me Time” Myth
e-Book 3: The Value of Homeschool Conventions
e-Book 4: For the Love of Bugs
e-Book 5: Let There Be Light
e-Book 6: Homeschooling With Young Children
e-Book 7: Light, Color, Optics
e-Book 8: From the Tree to the Table: A Maple Syrup
e-Book 9: Oceanography: Voyage Into a Marvelous
e-Book 10: The Submarine: A Legend Before its Time
e-Book 11: Organize Your Homeschool
e-Book 12: Charlotte Mason and Susan Schaefer Macaulay
e-Book 13: Growing Authors and Illustrators
e-Book 14: The Shocking Truth About Electricity
e-Book 15: Simplifying Classical Education
e-Book 16: Creation vs. Evolution: Interpreting
e-Book 17: Play What You Mean
e-Book 18: Lincoln vs. Darwin: What’s the Difference?
e-Book 19: Time Flies While History is Written
e-Book 20: Nifty Thrifty Summer Fun

Get your free bundle here: A Voyage Into Adventure

High School & Beyond Bundle: How will you help your child discover what he will be best suited to do after he leaves home? What are the most important things to consider when helping your child decide on a career?  Learn suggestions from those who have traveled the same road.

I chose this bundle because finding information regarding homeschooling through the high schools and beyond isn't always easy to find.

Let's take a look at what you are getting for free with this bundle:

e-Book 1: Career Exploration
e-Book 2: Transcripts, CLEP's and Other Ways
e-Book 3: Career Training, Mentorship & Parenthood
e-Book 4: College Success Begins At Home

Get your free bundle here: High School & Beyond Bundle

As a quick, simple way to say thank you for these generous freebies please jump over to The Old Schoolhouse facebook page and give them a quick like.

Now to access all of your free bundles throughout the month of April you simply need to use my special code at the checkout --->  KR2CREW16

Have fun shopping and downloading all your free goodies!

Happy Homeschooling Friends,
Kylie

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Have Yourself A Radiant Homeschooling Year

As the year comes to an end most of us are moving our thoughts to next year.

Wondering what it will bring, where it will take us and our children.

Will the year ahead provide an abundance of learning opportunities that we embrace with open arms

or will it be a year of stagnation?

During 2016 I will enter my 10th year of educating my children at home. Ten years, did I even just say that Oh M Gee!

We've had so many wonderful, amazing experiences and opportunities during that time. I know how blessed we truly are and I am thankful for that every single day.

There have however also been times of stagnation, times of darkness, times where everything seems as though it is just all too hard and truly regular school would be a good option.

Thankfully we've made it through those times relatively unscathed and have lived to tell the tale. But there is one thing I have learned through all of the ups and downs and that is the importance of taking care of me.

It needs to be number one on my list, oh yes it does. Without that I am simply unable to serve my family and those around me. If my cup is empty then I cannot possibly be a filler of someone else's cup.

I've met a lot of amazing people in our journey over the past years also, some have become my best friends in the entire world, some are friendships that have moved on, some are acquaintances that we mingle with here and there and others are newer friendships that we are building and growing slowly. Whilst others are purely online interactions.

However the one common thread I see through all of these amazing women, is that of wanting to provide the best possible education and home life for their children. Let's face it we all want that for our family!

But at what cost?

Are we running ourselves into the ground to provide this for our children? Are we here sitting silently suffering depression to provide this for our children? Do we battle with ourselves every day to provide this for our children?

I fear that for many of us we do. I hear it in your whispers when we chat. I see it in your eyes  and I can feel it in your hearts. Anyone that knows me personally knows that I am a pretty open person. I am more than happy to chat candidly about our experiences with educating at home. I'm O.K with being vulnerable and for people to see the real me.

In return for my vulnerability I offer a safe place for stories to be shared and told. I am always amazed at the truly generous blessing that I receive again and again of homeschool mums opening up and sharing their stories with me. I don't take that lightly. It is an honor I know.

With each conversation I feel more and more strongly that we need to find more ways to be filling our cups. To be truly connecting with each other in open and honest communications.

I have tossed around so many ideas over the past couple of years on ways in which I can assist in this in some way, my heart continues to pull me into places of service to the community; whilst being aware that whatever it is I am contributing that it isn't emptying my own cup in the process. It's kind of like walking a tightrope at times.

Just a couple of weeks ago I had the thought that not only should I be making plans for the home educating year ahead but that I should also take some time to reflect on the year that has passed.

I am sure that the vast majority of us do this and we do it regularly but how many of us carve out some time purely for reflecting on where we are at with this whole educating our kids at home thing?

So I have put together a little self reflection journal of sorts to help me to truly focus and to get the best out of my reflection time.

The journal is thirty pages long and I would love to share it with you if you think it may be something you would benefit from.

The early pages of the journal are a time for reflecting. It may take more than one attempt to complete these pages, just take your time with them.

Then we move on to forward planning with just a little bit of dreaming thrown for good measure.

As we progress through the journal we come to pages where we can work on things that are really important to us and our home school.

Finally the journal wraps up with goal setting and monthly reflection pages to ensure all of the glorious hard work you did in the early pages of the journal doesn't go to waste.

Get Your FREE Copy!

This is my FREE Gift to you. My wish is that as many home educating mumma's have to access to this as possible so please send any friends you can think of that may benefit from this over here to the blog so they can grab a copy too. All you need to do for your copy is to register for our Newsletter.

We will never spam you and send you truckloads of emails. We will always keep your email address private.

Once you have subscribed and confirmed your subscription you will receive a final email with the download link. Subscribe now for your copy of My Radiant Home Educating Year by clicking here.

Happy Home Educating,
Kylie

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France ~ The Eiffel Tower

 

So I figured it was about time I shared some more details on our recent trip to France. You might remember the Madeline post! This time we visited the Eiffel Tower. One of the most visited and well known structures in the entire world!

As is always the case with our group activities we have a large age range of children, from five up to fourteen years in fact so it can at times be a little tricky putting together something that will work for the entire group.

This time the information presented was pretty much the same for everyone but the output from the various age groups was much more appropriate.

As you can see here we had a simple tracing exercise for the youngest of the children and the middle to upper primary group completed a question and answer sheet after chatting about and watching a short informational video on the Eiffel Tower.

I actually struggled to find a video I was truly happy with, either my searching abilities this time around needed some work or there just isn't much out there in the form of short documentary style videos about the Eiffel Tower.

After watching the video and a having brief discussion the oldest of the group wrote a short informational report about the Eiffel Tower. They were given a list of questions to answer within the report. As a group we worked through all of the topics and discussed as necessary or when various points were raised.

I do enjoy working with older kids for this reason. We generally are not a group of one teacher and several students. I am simply one of them, together in that group all learning what we can, asking questions, sorting through the information and coming up with something that works for each of us.

I have included these Free Eiffel Tower Printable Worksheets as a download at the bottom of this post.


For a bit of fun we all took a ride on the Eiffel Tower Elevator. Well as close as we could get to a ride whilst remaining firmly planted here in the living room.

I love the view you get from this angle though, it is well worth watching.

There are quite few different Eiffel Tower Crafts out there on the web. I knew I needed something simple due to time constraints and the wide variety of ages of kids that I was dealing with.

In the end I went with the Straw Eiffel Tower Craft as it gave some level of flexibility, was simple enough for young ones and the older kids could add their own flair to it.

I googled a template and printed it on light weight card as I knew there would be loads of wet glue being added to these during the process. The template itself is really just to use as a guide so it doesn't need to be too particular.

I just love how even with such a simple activity they all came up with their very own different ideas.

When it came time for the older kids turn I gave them a great deal more choice with materials. There were of course the straws in varying colours, but I also laid out buttons, beads, pretty little paper flowers and other small bits and bobs envisioning them all having a grand old time turning their plain template into a beautiful rendition of the tower.

Alas, they all, but me, chose the straws. Oh well you know what they say about never working with children ;-) hahaha!

And that was our visit to the Eiffel Tower.

Would you like a copy of the Eiffel Tower Worksheets I shared above?  Please use this link to download a copy for your personal use.

Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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Free Printable Letter To Santa Writing Paper

A few years back I created some very simple

Free Printable Letter To Santa Writing Paper

for my kids to use to write Santa Letters. Like most things I pull together I share them with you. Little did I know that the writing paper post would still be one of my most visited posts on the blog. During this time of the year the visits go through the roof. I'm kind of figuring that all your kids really like to write letters to their dearly beloved Santa.

You can still grab the original Santa Letter Paper at this link.

This year I decided to add a few more into the mix, just to brighten things up, add a splash more colour and all that jazz.

There are three new totally different Letter To Santa Papers for you to download for your personal use.

The candy cane border and the silhouette Santa off delivering his gifts are just the cutest aren't they!

For those kids that might like something more traditional we have a simple Christmas Tree, all lit up with a few gifts ready to open on Christmas morning.

I know that most younger children really like to draw something to send to Santa so this letter paper allows that, with a much smaller writing space.

Download the Free Printable Letter To Santa Writing Paper here.

I hope your kids enjoying writing their Letters To Santa with these.

Merry Christmas and Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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France ~ Madeline

We are visiting France with our micro-school friends over the next few weeks so I hope to be able to share a few glimpses of some of what we all get up to.

First off for my group was Madeline with the younger kids.

No visit to France is complete without the reading of Madeline.

I decided to look online for an audio visual as opposed to me reading. In the end I went with this one I found over at You Tube.



I put together a quick and simple sheet for us to chat about the book and for the kids to record some of their thoughts.

You can find the download link for this at the end of the post.

We had some interesting discussions about what life might be like in a boarding school and found it quite funny how Madeline's hospital stay was for ten lengthy days!

I found a cute, simple little paper craft activity to do.

Whilst we coloured our little Madeline's we watched this longer animated version of the book. It's quite cute and pretty funny!


   

We only had an hour having fun with Madeline and could have most definitely spent a great deal more time reading about and watching all of her adventures.

Pin This!

 

Would you like a copy of our reading response sheet? Please use this link to download a copy for your personal use.

Happy Homeschooling
Kylie

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The Truth About Sugar - FREE Notebooking Pages

The BBC documentary 'The Truth About Sugar' aired here the other night, hubby and I sat down to watch and I really felt it would be a good one for the kids and I to spend some time on. They are used to mum nagging about too much sugar so I figured hearing it from experts can never hurt in any way.

Their jaws were gaping hearing and seeing some of the information, especially the daily sugar intake of most people, against what the World Health Organisation recommends.

I whipped up a few different notebooking pages for them to be able to record some of what they took in from the documentary.

They really enjoyed working on these, especially my youngest. He has drawn bad sugary foods on the left showing a sick sad man with heart disease and on the right he has added fruit with a very happy healthy man. Love it!


If you missed seeing it on television you can view the documentary via you tube.

If you would like a copy of the "Truth About Sugar" notebooking pages please visit this link to download them.

I would really love to see how these are used by your kids so please be sure to let me know if you do use them.


Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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My Australia Notebook

I've started pulling together an Australian Notebook for the kids to create in, add to and build on whenever we do something relating to this country of ours!

So basically along the same lines as their Animal Notebooks, these will be added to on a continual basis, and will grow into a notebook full of memories all about Australia.

For now I simply have the cover sheet and divider pages for our states. Various notebooking pages to go inside will hopefully happen some time soon. But I also know that we can begin on this today and so can you, just download, print and enjoy!

>>>> Download My Australia Notebook page dividers here.

>>>> Check my Australian Themed board over at Pinterest

This post is linked to:

Our Animal Kingdom Notebooks With Printable Materials

You may recall me mentioning that we've been working on an Animal Kingdom Notebook over the past few weeks. This is not being completed as one big giant unit. The plan is that we will add to it slowly, little by little, as we come across an animal that fascinates us or as it relates to other units of work we are doing.

For example when my youngest worked on activities for the picture book Caps For Sale, the older two chose a monkey each to research. We recently spent some time with Owls, so they have featured in the Animal Kingdom Notebook also.

Currently we are looking at Ocean Life and everyone is trying to decide which sea animals are 'notebook worthy'. After all there is such an abundance of sea life we can't possibly notebook all of them.

However, with our notebooks set up the way they are, in simple 2 ring binders, we can continue to add to these for years to come. Each child building their very own researched Animal Kingdom Reference binder. This gives each of them the freedom to add any animal they wish whenever they wish, along with anything we all do together.

I am really looking forward to watching this project grow and develop with the children.

I've kept it simple, the cover page above slides into the front clear cover of the 2 ring binder. Inside it is broken into two main categories, that of Vertebrates and Invertebrates.

These are the divider sheets for the Vertebrate section of the binder,

along with divider pages for the Invertebrate section.

Currently I have prepared two 'Animal Notebooking Pages', one with less detail for a younger child and the other covers classification and allows more space for research.

At some point I will probably need to add to these again as the children enter their high school years. I have been tossing around a simple way to do this with our preschooler also. If I do come up with something I'm happy with I'll be sure to share with you though.

If you'd like to begin an Animal Notebook Binder with your children you can download the full colour binder pages by clicking here.

You can also download the blank Animal Notebooking page by clicking here. The notebooking page for younger children can be found at this link.

If your children keep or begin an Animal Notebook I'd love to see it!

Linking this to:

M is for Monkey - Printable Notebooking Pages

I display our monkey related items on a shelf for easy access.

With our recent time spent on the story Caps For Sale I took the opportunity to extend the learning a little. Lego Lover 11, was far too old for the activities that went along with Caps For Sale. So he did some monkey research instead.

Animal Note Booking Page

Some time back I created Animal Notebooking pages, Lego Lover chose Gorillas to do some further research on. He used the books we had here on hand and then headed over to wikipedia and this great site was perfect.

Junior Animal Note Booking Page

When I first put these together last year some time I was concerned that the younger members of the household would be overwhelmed with some of the information and the level of writing required. So I put together a Junior version of the Animal Note Booking page.

This will be added to their Animal Kingdom notebooks, a classification project I've been working on for them.

The link to download these note booking pages is at the end of the post.

We collaged a colouring page found online.

Little Surfer Dude collaged a colouring page I found online. He wasn't as in to this as I thought he would've been though. I saw the idea over here.

We made an M is for Monkey.

He really enjoyed putting together this M is for Monkey though, he giggled his way through it and made certain he had plenty of hair!! The idea for this little guy came from over here.

Our Caps For Sale Row

To see what other monkey related goodies we got up to check out our Caps For Sale fun.

The blank note booking pages.

Download the Animal Note Booking Pages here.