Tag Archives: links

Educational Games for PreK-6th Grades

I found this interesting website that has games for a wide variety of ages. You can choose a game from the all games list or look at the games suggested for specific ages/grades.

ABCya

It uses adobe flash, so if your child will access it on a computer, make sure it is enabled on your browser. Because some of the 400 games uses adobe flash, not all of them are available for play on other devices  via the app on their device but still over 300 games are available.

It is free but there are also subscriptions available with added benefits.

I also saw this article on cnet with some educational game suggestions.

I hope this is helpful to you and your children.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Spending Time with Long-Time Friends

Our friends Paul and Stephanie have been here this week. :) Stephanie was my matron of honor when Michael and I got married 33 years ago. Paul and Michael became good friends right away. We introduced them to camping early on and we have enjoyed many camping vacations together.

They moved and then we moved and they moved again. But through the years, we have remained friends. We may not see each other for a couple of years, but when we connect again, it is like we were never apart.

We have had an enjoyable time together this week, even though we haven’t really gone anywhere. We have simply enjoyed being with each. We’ve gone to the lake a few times to walk around–it’s a small lake and very small park–and enjoy getting some fresh air.

Early this week we went and visited with Brian, Lauren, and Liam. We ate at a new restaurant in the area–Eddie’s. It was delicious! Afterwards we went to Brian’s favorite place for boba tea and introduced it to Paul and Stephanie.

I got mine with only 1/4 the boba and it was much better for me than with the whole amount of boba.

After that, Brian showed us around where he works, at Life Church. :)

Brian loves his job and the fact that his day job furthers the kingdom. So proud of him. :)

Stephanie and I have had some art time. She has been doing stamping and card making for many years. I’ve never been very successful at stamping, so I asked her to give me some pointers. :)

She also showed me how to emboss. :) I’ve never used the embosser I got for my birthday last year. So she showed me how to use it. Thankfully, she said I got a good embosser and an excellent deal. :)

She also showed me how to use copic markers, which I have had for several years and never attempted using. I shared about that last Wednesday.

We’ve had a good visit. I hope you have a great weekend.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Early Learning (and older) Freebies

I landed on this page from a link in a homeschool freebie Friday email. I saw the playdough mat and wondered what that was, so I followed the directions and downloaded it.

It is cute but could be a bit of an ink user, if that is a concern for you. It is in color but has things left in white for the child to add to the mat with playdough. One page has an ostrich and its nest and asks the child to put eggs in the nest . . . things like that.

Then I clicked on the Animal Habitat Printables lower on that page, to see what was there. Once there I was drawn to the Tot/Pre-K packet Woodland Animals Themed Printables. So I clicked over on that and was introduced to the wonderful free resources of In All You Do. Now not everything on the site is free but most of the Toddler/Pre-K packs are and they are cute. This is the link on that page to here other TOT packs.

But Wait There’s More ;)

Back on that first link, there are so many more free printables and several I clicked on were black and white, which means inexpensive to print! :) Plus it can be used as for coloring too. ;)

The link to cut and paste animals and plants had some good free printables too. For a little bit older children there are some cool color by code free printables too. I imagine you’d cut the picture apart on the thick solid lines and then have the child color according to the code (think color by number style but reinforcing the concepts being taught) and then the child assembles the picture. So it is a couple of activities in one, as well as reinforcing concepts. It’s really a neat idea.

I encourage you to look around these links . . . surf around . . . and see what you can find that will be helpful to you and your children.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Country Videos and Science

As I was going through my old emails I came across a couple that I thought you might be interested in.

Country Videos

One lady made playlists on a youtube account for a variety of countries so that she could share them with her children in their studies. She graciously shared the link to her playlists with a group I was in.

Well, I checked and the playlists are still there, albeit some of the videos are no longer available. I thought there was enough here to help make your studies a little easier. ;)

Playlists

She has since added a few new playlists that are not country related but the rest are still there.

Science

I was signed up for Krampf’s emails. He sent out so many interesting things. In my email purge I found a link to his website, which is still available today. :) He has a variety of videos with experiments to do in many areas of science.

The Happy Scientist

This page tells how to find videos/experiments that you want to incorporate in whatever area you are studying.

Disclaimer: I do not believe he is a Christian and thus you may have to overlook some things or use them for conversation starters with you children.

I remember there was a show on PBS that my children enjoyed watching. Inevitably it would say something about evolution or the age of the earth or something in most episodes. Rather than disallow the viewing of the show, I just would say “Not True” from the kitchen as I was working in there. It got to the point that the kids would yell it out when they heard it. :D

This carried over into other things we watched too. If a show said a curse word, we’d say, “Bad Word!” :D It made the point and we didn’t feel the need to turn it off immediately because of an infraction or two.

Well, I hope these two blasts from the past will help you in your children’s educational journey. :)

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Revisiting Some OLD Websites with Good Educational Content

I’ve got way too many emails in my inbox! Seriously, thousands and thousands of them. So the other day I was going through and deleting some. But because I’m a packrat, even digitally :D , I couldn’t just blindly delete some things.

I opened some and found some very old links still active. I’ll be sorting through these and deciding what is good to share here and what isn’t. Today I’ve got one that is good, especially for younger children. :)

Learning Treasures is one that I found was still active and still had some working links and cool ideas. There are lots of things to do with younger children and even some for older children. Some links don’t work any longer but there are some good things here. So spend a little time and see what fun you can find.

There are some interesting science ideas as well as some spelling lists and worksheets for grades 1-3. I really liked the parts of the plant salad activity. :) I think the Printables links all work but I haven’t checked every one of them.

One of the links on Learning Treasures site goes to another neat site: Kids Kreate. This one has some nice printables and overall cool things. The homemade stickers made with jello is cool. Most of the links on Kids Kreate are active working links. :)

I hope these are helpful to you. It was interesting to find some active links from emails that were soooo old (2012) :D.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Cool Website and Free eBooks

First I have got to share this website that I found recently. It is DIY Homeschooler. There are good units to study, reading lists,  some guides, and even suggestions for each month. It is a really neat website!

Free on Amazon

I also wanted to share how to find free eBooks. You can go to amazon.com and type free books in their search bar. When the results come up, you want to ensure that it does NOT say Kindle Unlimited because that is a subscription thing. But any that just say $0.00 can be gotten for free, as long as that is the price.

If you don’t have a kindle device (the paperwhite is wonderful) you can download the free kindle app to read the books on whatever device you have, be it laptop, desktop, ipad, or phone.

When you type in “free books” you can also specify for kids or for certain ages. (It will put some suggestions for you to choose from.) There are a good supply of free books classics. These change so be sure you click to buy them while the price is still $0.00 and verify it again before clicking. :)

Free on Libby or Overdrive

Many libraries participate in Overdrive, which lets you borrow digital content in the form of ebooks and audio books. You sign in with your library card. It is really a great free service.

I don’t prefer electronic books but am sure glad to have them available when I cannot get to the library. :) There are other resources available for electronic reading that I’ll share another time.

I hope these resources are helpful to you and give you some good reading material. :)

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Links for P.E., Art, and More While Homeschooling and Any Time

This week I saw this link for The Body Coach who is offering free P.E. videos every weekday. They are about 30 minutes long. I watched just a bit of yesterday’s video. My connection to the internet wasn’t that great, so I didn’t check out the rest.

It is a new series he’s started this week. I’m not sure where he lives but I’m pretty sure it’s not the USA, so watching it live streaming would be difficult but you can always watch the recording.

Free Video P.E. Class on YouTube (click here)

Art

I found this webpage that has her favorite dozen of art channels with descriptions of each. There are channels with short videos around 3 minutes long for those with short attention spans, one teaching how to draw without distracting chitchat, and so much more, including calligraphy with crayons and even how to trick the eye. There really is something here for most everyone and she’s already sifted through and found the top ones. :)

12 Free Art Lesson Channels on YouTube (click here)

Online Resources

Now this one is a little bit questionable, but worth looking into, because it is aimed at people in the UK, so there may be some things that aren’t usable here in the USA. But the links were interesting enough I wanted to share them with you today, in case they may be helpful to you.

10 Online Resources to Check Out

Well, that’s what I have for you today. I hope it is helpful. It’s supposed to be in the 90’s here today, which I am not looking forward to. So I’m going to try to keep cool.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Book Suggestions and Printables for Christmas Links

With the holiday season upon us, I thought I’d share a couple links for some Christmas themed printables and book suggestions.

First is the link for some cute Christmas words and pictures for some matching or handwriting practice and the second is a cute printable of the nativity with some handwriting practice pages too. You do have to register your email with them for a free account and these are available for free but I’m not sure how long, so click on over to “Only Passionate Curiosity” quickly. :)

Reading emojiThe other is a very long list of Christmas picture books from Read-Aloud Revival, some I have read and others I have not. I’ll share some of my children’s Christmas books with you next week. :) (I was too tired to take the pictures tonight. :D ) There are also links for Christmas novels and short stories, Audios, and even some bookish gift ideas.

I hope these links are helpful to you and enhance your December reading. :)

Until next time,

Michele ºÜº

Holiday Audio Fun and Surfnetkids

The holidays are quickly approaching. I’m deep into ordering Christmas presents and they are arriving. I’ll start wrapping them soon. :) I love the holidays. Getting my shopping done before Thanksgiving takes so much of the stress out of December and makes it so much more enjoyable.

Homeschool Freebie has their Holiday collection available now. This year they have a professionally done lapbook for Cinnamon Bear included. They also have two games with a Cinnamon Bear theme. One is a racing game and the other is a strategy game, so I’ve read from their site.

And now the set is a download instead of a physical cd sent via snail mail, so you can start right away. Of course, Cinnamon Bear adventures don’t start until after Thanksgiving though, so there’s still time for that. ;) I’m sure I’ll be posting about it again next month. :)


Do you need a little supplemental learning opportunity? Surfnetkids.com has a lot of suggestions/ideas for you. It is centered around either a daily or monthly happening, like National Book Month, National Popcorn Month, a birthday, a death, or some other observance.

Each topic has at least 3 links for more information (and usually something fun to do) for each observance/day.

Check it out, you may find something of interest to your child(ren).

Until next time,

Michele ºÜº

Youtube Channels to Check Out

A couple months ago, when I was trying to figure out Patreon, I ran across a couple of youtube channels that looked interesting. Now, I have not had time to check these out but thought that I’d mention them to you in case they included subjects in which your children are interested.

The first is probably just interesting to those in older grades as it deals with World War 1, I believe. It is called The Great War. From 2014 through 2018 he did a series about what happened that week a hundred years ago, which is interesting.

The other channel is about various points of history and even some videos about video games and gaming. The channel is called Extra Credits. There really is a wide assortment of videos here to check out. You could use either channel along with whatever other resources you are using for the specific historical time and talk about how the information corroborates or differs.

If you check these out, let me know what you think,

Michele ºÜº