As a home schooling mom for over 10 years now, I have been searching the internet for affordable homeschooling curriculums and programs. I spent hours searching sites and finding both online exercises and printable material, but couldn`t find one site that had it all for a reasonable price.
Most online schools charge hundreds of dollars per course or thousands in yearly or monthly fees. Well I needed to make my life easier, and the children`s homeschooling life more fun, without breaking the bank!
I wanted a daily program that was interesting for the children, that kept them engaged and kept them WANTING to do school every day, but that didn`t demand that I stand beside them and hold their hand through the process. With three homeschooling at the moment, and a toddler demanding my attention too, it just got too difficult.
So I`m putting their daily lessons online to make their life, mine and yours easier! I use mostly free resources from all over the web, and put them into daily lessons. I am starting with grades 2,4 and 7 as those are the grades my children are in. Hopefully during the summer of 2014 I will be able to get other grades done.
All work is based on the Ontario Curriculum. Younger grades start out with 20 minute periods for each subject. As your child moves up in grades, the periods become longer by 5-10 minutes. Eventually in middle school the time period given to each subject is roughly 45 minutes to an hour depending on the difficulty of the material being covered that day. It’s flexible though, so if you really get into learning a subject one day, you can give it more time, and less on another subject to compensate, or omit an easy subject all together if the day has been too demanding. Each grade will do 160 days of school in the year. Here is a sample grade 7-8 timetable that you can review to give you an idea how to schedule your class periods and subjects. A sample timetable for grades 1-6 here. Our school week is only 4 days a week, as we have social/exercise time every Tuesday skating with other homeschoolers in the area. Also you may have music lessons or art lessons etc. that you need to fit in somewhere. Here is a blank timetable sheet that you can print out to use for your children.
Here is a list of supplies that are needed to complete these online lessons:
- Pencils & Erasers
- Standard lined blank exercise books (several for each subject).
- Cardboard Folders for each subject, (for the printable worksheets)
- A pair of good quality headphones (for video/audio playback)
- A subscription to IXL Math Online for all math courses. Their exercises are completely based on the Ontario Math Curriculum, and they’re fun! (Membership to the website is really affordable).
Here is a list of Free Windows programs and extensions that will be needed to view some of the material:
Click on the links below and follow the instructions to install these files. You may have to restart your computer in order to get them working.
- Adobe Reader to view pdf files
- Adobe Flash Player
- Shockwave Flash Player
- Open Office Suite Click on the green download box. Then once downloaded go to your downloads folder and double click to run the installation. Follow the instructions. This is a free open source software bundle that has a Word program for writing essays, A Spreadsheet, a Powerpoint creating program, a Math program for creating graphs and a Draw program for creating almost any kind of Project. Each program you use can also convert anything you create into PDF format for easy viewing by anyone you may wish to email your documents to.