Homeschooling Language Arts on the Web

Homeschool Reading and Book Sites

Starfall
A very well-designed, colorful interactive children's reading course online...all free! Great for 4- to 7- year olds!

Scholastic Kids
Games, downloads, and activities for children's literature.

All Info About Reading Education
Lesson plans, activities, worksheets, and other helps for teaching young and beginning adult readers.

Book Adventure
A free site that gives children points and prizes for answering questions about the books they've read! They can earn enough points to get a subscription to Highlights for Children magazine, books, candy, temporary tattoos...Parental permission required, but the site is quite legitimate!

Book Hive
A searchable list of kid's books, with games, coloring pages, quizzes, You can search by subject, genre, reading level, etc. Each book is reviewed , and you may add your own review, Some have advisory notes for parents. A really fine resource!!

All Info About Teen Reading
Features reviews of good books, parent helps, worksheets, and much more!

Homeschool Writing Sites

Free Worksheets
Printable story starters.

Alphadictionary
A site for kids ages 7 to 13. If your child signs up (with parental permission, they will  e-mail her a vocabulary-building kids word-of-the day, called the Goodword Junior, five days a week along with tips and tricks to help her remember correct spelling and pronunciation. There are also games, puzzles, and other fun things to do here. A really great site!!

Family Education Printables
A wide assortment of pages with topics ranging from puzzles about classic kids' books to parts of speech to paragraph writing. This can be very valuable for that end-of-the-year portfolio, and the kids may really like some of the puzzles!

MLA Style Guide
Practice writing college-level reports.

Homeschool Grammar, Spelling and Other Sites

Learning Page
Free membership, and many free printables, including alphabet and handwriting pages in several styles, story ideas, etc.

Kids Page Archive
Many worksheets for kids ages 5 to 12. Vocabulary, rhyming, spelling, grammar, stories, etc.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves
The punctuation game...

Proofread!!!
An article about editing...with a great photo!

Mad Libs on the Web
By far the easiest and most fun way to learn the parts of speech!! Add words to stories...and read the silly results!!

Fun Brain
Online games to improve vocabulary, spelling, plurals, and other writing skills.

I Know That!
More online games, like Punctuation Paintball and Scrambled Stories.

Anagram Server
Play with your words!!

Don't Buy It!
A site about media propaganda and wise consumerism for teens. Eye-catching and fun!

Free Science Lessons-Physics

How Stuff Works

All ages. How do computers work? How do malaria drugs work? What if I tried to drive my car underwater? A great site for the bored kid...and a great resource for the Eternal Questioner.

Fizzics Fizzle

All ages. A Thinkquest site which gives a very good introduction to physics. There are games and animations that reinforce the information presented. A great reference, introduction or refresher.

Reeko's Mad Scientist Lab

7 and up. A fun site with many experiments and good explanations of the results. Also has games and puzzles!


MadSci Network

For all ages. Another great site for the bored child. "represents a collective cranium of scientists providing answers to your questions. For good measure we provide a variety of oddities as well." Really fun, and has an 'Ask a Scientist' program!

NASA Beginner Guide to Rockets

Ages 11 and up. Look at various types of rockets - from bottle and stomp rockets to full-scale boosters. Find out how the work.

Life, the Universe, and the Electron

For teens. An exhibit about atomic structure.

Teach Engineering

Lessons all ages.

Glencoe Physical Science

Has quizzes and web resources for ninth-grade textbook in physical science. Can be useful.

Optics For Kids

Ages 10 and up. Learn about light, lenses, and lasers.


The Atoms Family

11 and up. Basic physics in a fun and memorable way!

Physics Life

11 and up. A look at the physics pf things in our everyday world. Nice interactivity.

Antimatter: Mirror of the Universe

8 and up. A look at the CERN particle accelerator and the quest for antimatter. Good for the teen who likes mysterious subjects. There is a kids' section!

Science Hobbyist

8 and up. Fun and useful articles and experiments. Includes the famous resource, Is Your Child's Science Textbook Wrong?

The Particle Adventure

8 and up. Activity sheets, graphics, animations..all explaining the subatomic world.

PHet Simulations

All kinds of Java physics demonstrations! Colorful and insightful!

EdHeads Simple Machines

Ages 6 to 12. Activities, animations, etc. all explaining how simple  machines work.

Science with me

A cheery, colorful website with games, animations, worksheets and coloring pages for preschool to about age 10. Subscription required, but it's free!

For Fun!

Physics Behind Four Amazing Demonstrations

10 and up. I can walk on burning coals...can you? Here's how we all can...

Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments

All ages...but watch out!!  What would happen to this if I put it in the microwave??


Physics of Superheroes

All ages. A Youtube lecture on the way things DON"T work in the world of comic book heroes! Really funny, and informative. Good for adult as well as kid enthusiasts, and for anyone who's ever watched a cartoon and marveled at how they are a bit different from real life!


Amusement Park Physics

7 and up.  Design your own roller coaster, and see how gravity and friction affect your choices.

Skateboard Science

7 and up. Your future Tony Hawk will enjoy knowing how the tricks are done, and how to improve his or her own skating.

A Beautiful Day At Battelle Darby Creek Park

Pictures by Charlie....

 

 

Make your own Christmas Unit Study

Christmas Around the World Unit Study

...an easy and fun homeschool unit study for a very busy season!

This study is fast and easy to put together, and it is a fun break between the holidays. The kids will learn without knowing it!

Gather your basic supplies.
Look through your books at home, check the library, or check on Amazon or your favorite stores for Christmas in other countries.
Gather books about Christmas crafts for kids.
Find and bookmark websites that look promising. A few ideas:



* About.com has a nice selection of activities and printables
* Online Advent Calendar made by Junior High School students
* A nice summary of customs in several countries
* Another good summary, with different pages for each country. Has links to songs and recipes.
* Yahoo! Christmas around the world, a treasure trove of sites for various countries
* Links to lessons and sites for teachers


Begin linking the ideas.

Pick out which countries you wish to study
Look through your country books and check for any craft or recipe ideas
Pick out sites that correlate to each country you choose to study. You may choose one a day, or one every few days, or one a week, or go wild and have a 'Christmas in ____ ' holiday!


Make a general plan for each country, possibly something like this:


Introduce the country of the day or week. Show where it is on an map or globe, and read a bit about it on the 'net or in one of your books.
Do a chosen craft or two.
Read a bit more, and ask someone to find the country on the map.
Color a picture or do a puzzle about the country or about Christmas in general. Dover Books makes some very cute 'Stained glass' coloring books that are excellent!
Make something to eat for each...or make a whole meal!
Read a bit more.
Check out a website about the celebration.
Finish the book.



On Christmas Eve, be sure to follow Santa's trip with the NORAD Santa Tracker. They present geography facts in their periodic updates on Santa's whereabouts in several languages!

The Elephant in the Playroom

When my oldest son Evan was about three, he was zipping around the nursery at a fair pace when an older woman said, "Is he hyperactive?" I didn't think about it much at the time: I just said, "No, he just takes a few minutes to settle down, then he's fine." Evan would cruise a new place for a while, then settle down and (usually) pay attention.

All three of my sons were like that: they seemed to need a bit to survey their surroundings, and they also needed a warning before changes ensued, be they moving to a new room or leaving for an outing.

A friend had a child who was like my boys, only more extreme. He reacted to nearly any change with tantrums. He had a hard time handling social situations. Sometimes it seemed that he wanted nothing more to be left to himself in a corner.

He and his family were nearly chased from the homeschooling group by other parents who had decided that the boy's parents were 'too easy on him', and that he would corrupt their own, more perfect children.



My friend's child was belatedly diagnosed with mild autism. All the difficult behaviors that his mom had been blamed for were due to neurological problems that she and her husband had no real control over.

I was reminded of all this by a book that came my way recently, The Elephant in the Playroom, by Denise Brody. This book deals with the joys and trials of bringing up 'special needs' kids from personal experience. It is full of stories and anecdotes written by parents of kids who are not 'neurotypical'. It's not about finding the right doctor, choosing the best curriculum or making sure of the diagnosis: it's about realizing that we're all in this together, even those of us whose kids don't have any of the challenges in the book.

The Elephant in the Playroom will give moral support to parents who are neck-deep in trials, but it will also explain the difficulties of these trials to people who only see a bit from the outside. The stories explain the frustration, the sleeplessness, the chaos, the anger, while reveling in the love, care, and joy. It might even give parents of 'normal' kids a few clues to their behavior, as it did when I saw shades of my own boys in some of the children with mildly Asperger's/sensory integration disorder. Neurological makeup is, after all, a continuum.

Maybe, just maybe, reading this book will help parents not judge each other (or themselves) so harshly, since we may not know exactly what the other person is dealing with.

The Elephant in the Playroom

Denise Brody

* Hardcover: 256 pages
* Publisher: Hudson Street Press (April 19, 2007)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1594630356
* ISBN-13: 978-1594630354