Help Your Kids Get Ahead

Have you considered home schooling but didn't know where to get the materials you need to do it? Or you just want to help you kids get more practice with their multiplications or phonics? The internet can be your best friend.

It use to be that when people thought of home schooling it was usually because of religious preferences. Now home schooling is growing in popularity across the nation for a multitude of reasons. Ten years ago I pulled my oldest son out to home school him because of conflicts with a teacher, but when I started looking for materials to teach him all I could find were curriculums created by religious groups. That's all well and good, except that when I received the curriculum it was behind for the grade level and it had a very weak science curriculum. I had to get creative.

Now I'm home schooling my daughter and, thanks to the internet, I'm finding tons of material for free. There are also a wide variety of workbooks available fairly cheap from Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and even Toys-R-Us. These workbooks aren't half baked supplements any longer either, for my daughter they have been useful staples in her education. Brand names like School Zone and Harcourt Family Learning have excellent workbooks that will help you help your child.

The following links are just some of the sites I use to print out worksheets that my daughter and I use for every subject. Home schooling is now for the parent that wants to help their child compete in the world at large. Parents are now taking up the slack where our schools aren't.

http://schoolexpress.com/ http://www.ezschool.com/ http://www.abcteach.com/

http://www.tlsbooks.com/ http://www.softschools.com/

http://www.mathfactcafe.com/

For interactive learning games, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has been promoting one of the bests. http://www.icivics.org/ is an excellent site for kids (and adults!) to learn more about the workings of our government. Here is a list of some other interactive sites.

http://www.kids.gov/ http://quizhub.com/quiz/quizhub.cfm

http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/interactive.htm

http://www.funbrain.com/ http://www.iknowthat.com/com

http://www.gamequarium.com/ http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/learn.jsp

Home schooling doesn't have to be hard, and it certainly doesn't have to be boring. With the right tools at our fingertips, home schooling can be fun for both mother and child. If you have favorite sites, share them! Home schooling moms need to help each other! If you have any questions, comments, or more information to share feel free to use the comment section below, send me a PM, or email me at gayla.tanner@gmail.com