Homeschooling on the Cheap Part 4: Science & History

My biggest tip for saving on Science & History curriculum is to teach all your children together using the same curriculum.  We love reading living history books and biographies such as Little House on the Prairie, American Girl books, and the Who Was? series.

These books can be borrowed from the library or purchased used from half.com or Amazon.com.  After we read a book, journal in a composition notebook to cement our learning.  We have downloaded lapbooks from homeschoolshare.com, cut out the pieces and added them to our notebooks.

We do the same thing for Science.  We use books from the library or purchased used and then we journal.  We also love Apologia and those can be purchased used for cheap as well.  We are currently reading "Burgess Animal" and journaling about the different animals that we are reading about in the book. This is a free Kindle download!

Coming next is how to get the most out of your public library!

Homeschooling on the Cheap Part 3: Handwriting

This may seem the most obvious thing that you can teach on the cheap, but I'll touch on it just the same.  For pre-writers and very early writers, you can print some of these fun pages from makinglearningfun.com.  I also love this site for fun free preschool printables.
Here are a couple of examples.  The letter K is a play dough mat for the kids to make playdough snakes to place on the letter.  The letter G is  for those car loving kids on which to drive their matchbox cars.

Ready to teach writing?  Here is a site where you can make your own handwriting worksheets.  http://www.handwritingworksheets.com/flash/printdots/index.htm

If you are looking for cursive worksheets, HERE is a great site where you can print different styles of cursive sheets.  The work is already done for you!

Homeschooling on the Cheap Part 2: Reading/Phonics

There are many different ways you can teach reading/phonics very inexpensively.  I like starting off by reading these books and teaching letter sounds.  These books can be borrowed from your library.

Then we move onto teaching blends.  My son absolutely loves Lego so I used that as a way to teach him how to build words using blends.  I used small labels and wrote letters on them.  When he put 2 Lego together, he made a blend!

Once he was proficient at blends, I showed him how to add a consonant to the end of a blend to make a word.

We also used this book which was a great inexpensive resource to practice phonics and reading.
 

As your student progresses, many easy readers can be borrowed from the library to practice reading.

Homeschooling on the Cheap Part 1: Bible

Homeschooling can be expensive and the temptation to buy all the latest and greatest full color pretty curriculum can be too much to resist.  But I'd like to share some of my tips for giving your kids a well rounded education for very little money.   So I'm going to write a series of posts that will hopefully help you find some really great free and cheap resources to guide you in your homeschooling journey.

For this post, I'm going to talk about what we do for Bible class.  There are so many really good Bible curriculum out there but if you are strapped for cash, here are some things that we have done.

1.  Pick a passage of Scripture, read it and discuss what it means.  You can add in an object lesson if you want.

2.  Pick a passage of Scripture to memorize as a family.

3.  Use what lessons your kids have learned at children's church and review it with them.

4.  Choose a Bible story to read and have your kids illustrate it.

Worst Blogger Ever!

I'm the worst most inconsistent blogger, but I have a series of posts coming up that I hope will be an encouragement.

Gold Rush Part 2

Making history come alive!  We arrived in California for the Gold Rush!  Before we can start panning, we need appropriate attire. They raided the dress up bucket for what they thought best for them to wear.   Then they needed supplies,  So they set up a "store."  They decided to make pick axes out of a horseshoe stake and a stick. 

  I put out some gold beads in 2 different places in the yard.

They had to decide where they wanted to stake their claims.

Then they picked up as many gold nuggets they could find.

Now it's time to pan for gold in our "river."

Gold Rush Unit Part 1

We are spending some time digging into the gold rush part of American history.  We started off by reading this book.

We are pretending to go out west to California to find gold.  So we made a list of things we need to bring.

But we have no covered wagon to put all of our things in, so we made one.

Here's how we did it.  We cut off the top of our shoebox and wrapped it in brown craft paper.  Using a compass, we drew circles to use as wheels and drew spokes on them with a brown crayon.  Then we cut them out.

We colored wood slats on the sides of our wagons.

Then we attached the wheels using brass fasteners.

  

We cut strips of cardboard and bent them to put the cover on our wagon.  We hot glued the strips of cardboard to the sides arching the top.

Then we hot glued the fabric to the sides.