As part of my involvement with the TOS Homeschool Crew, I was given a premium membership to KBTeachers to review. KBTeachers is a website that offers membership for printable resources such as worksheets, instructions for craft projects and clip art to use on your non-commercial website or home projects. There is also a sampling of their content available to use for free if you want to see what kind of resources they offer before committing to a membership. Premium content is displayed but has a large watermark on it if you are not a member. Memberships can be purchased at a cost of $29 for one year or $49 for two years of unlimited downloads. The site accepts both PayPal and credit cards for payment.

Example Math Worksheet from KBTeachers

The content on KBTeachers is for children of all ages, thought the majority of the content seems to be geared towards early elementary students. Most content areas note the appropriate grade level for the worksheets. Some areas allow you to create custom content – like writing worksheets where you can enter the words that you want your child to practice writing. You can also generate custom worksheets for things like addition problems. Many worksheets offer the option of printing either a color or black and white version.

One of my favorite features of the site is the “KB News” button in the top navigation are that gives weekly updates of timely worksheets. It’s nice to be able to check that section when making my plan for the week. There’s also monthly “Webquest” link in the left navigation bar that gives links for events for most days of the month and also lists the birthdays of famous people in history. When you click through the links, you’re taken to worksheet that gives info about the event or person, plus web links for further research.

My least favorite thing about the site is that it doesn’t contain a search facility. This was a intentional decision by the site designers, who state in their FAQs that a user should be able to find anything they need within three clicks without having to search. I didn’t find this to be true. I wanted to find something on why leaves change color in the fall and I wasn’t sure where to look. “Plants and Microbiology” didn’t give me any related documents, nor did the fall content. It would have been nice to be able to search to see if there were related documents. I also noticed that only the current month’s webquest has a link in the left navigation, but if you alter the URL by hand, you can access other months content, so they are there on the site. I really do think that having search capability would be very helpful on this site.

There is a good variety of content on the KBTeachers site. I liked being able to create math worksheets to suit our needs. Tornado Boy enjoyed the “Dino Notebooks” section.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

This week, I’ve done a lot of this:
Planning, planning, planning. It is exhausting. This week I got the finalized plans for Tornado Boy’s enrichment classes for the fall (think parent co-op). I got to visit the class site and meet with some of the parents and teachers. I am really, really excited for the fall. TB will be doing a Lego class, a once a week, multi-age kindergarten class and also studying with Five In A Row at home and with the co-op. I’ve got my volunteer duties arranged with the group as well.

We also went to our first homeschool gym class – LOVED it. It was well run and Tornado Boy had a great time. He seemed to be engaged and involved. There were a lot of kids, but they did a good job breaking into groups and keeping them occupied. Today we went to sign-ups for a local homeschool group. They do so many trips, tours, exchanges and other activities. I was completely amazed at what they had to offer. I finally feel like we’re becoming part of the homeschool community here and I’m really excited for the upcoming year.

I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate my plans for the year with the classes and group activities. One thing that’s become abundantly clear this week is that we are going to be spending a lot of time in the car – probably 3-4 hours per week. I need to figure out how to leverage that time and use it for car schooling time. It actually works well for us because Tornado Boy is strapped in, so he can’t go anywhere. I can play educational videos or audio books. He can also do some lap work, but he’s still prone to dropping things, but he’s getting better about that. I just need to make sure that I can set him up with activities that are independent so that I don’t get distracted. I am trying to figure out how to leverage our existing curriculum into unit studies that we can incorporate car components into. It will be interesting to see how it all goes.

Camp/Science:

Tornado Boy puddle jumping on his way into camp.

Tornado Boy was at science camp this week while I was hard at work with all my planning and errand running. He really enjoyed it and his absolute favorite experiment that they did was the mentos in Diet Coke explosion. He drew this picture of the experiment:
Evidently the top thought bubble says “camp” and the left one is him exclaiming “Ooohhh!”. The exploding bottle has “DC” for Diet coke. He was so cute and animated when he explained the experiment to us. Tornado Dad says that we can re-create the experiment at home this weekend if Tornado Boy is good, but we’ll see. Listening and following directions has been a huge issue this week. It’s been wearing me out.

Geography:
At home, Tornado Boy continued to be interested in learning more about the United States. We used this neat PowerPoint presentation that I found on ABC Teach. If you’re a member, you can find it here. The interactive map allows you to click on the question mark to reveal the name of the state and capital city. TB enjoyed this activity and was able to name about a quarter of the states and capitals based on knowing the outline and location of the state. For the ones that he didn’t know, I would give him clues – either the name of the capital city, something that the state was known for (i.e. potatoes for Idaho) or something like the state starts with ‘O’ and has 4 letters for Ohio and then he would take a guess. I like that this document could easily be used independently by the child, if desired. Good stuff!

Language Arts:
We did some work on identifying parts of speech this week. We talked about nouns, verbs and adjectives. We used the demo for Destination Reading, Course II to reinforce some of the concepts. We also used a Venn Diagram for the first time to talk about adjectives. We read a story and then Tornado Boy used the Venn Diagram to place adjectives that described two different characters in the story. I found a nice resource for some graphic organizers. They’re in pdf format and you can type directly on to them if you choose. On a technical note, if you use Firefox with the “Download Them All” add-on, you can download them all at once – it’s a huge time saver.

Physical:
Our fun activity of the week was bowling. Trying to get a picture of Tornado Boy bowling was close to impossible. Talk about always in motion! I think that this was the first time that he’s gone “big ball” bowling. We did candlepin last year when we went to New England, but we haven’t been since. They had gutter guards up, so he did okay when he wasn’t totally lobbing the ball. We had fun, so we hope to go again soon.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Are you looking for a great way to get your home AND homeschool ready for the upcoming year? Do you have tons of great ideas rolling around in your head with no “special place” to write them down? If so, take a look at the 2010 Schoolhouse Planner. When I think of a planner, I think of a calendar. This is a calendar and so much more. You get calendars, recipes, grade sheets, lesson ideas, bible study guides, and many more charts and forms. There are four main sections in the planner:

• Monthly Features – things like tips, study ideas, resource links and recipes for each month of the year. I was really thrilled to see that the planner includes 12 gluten-free recipes. I love to be able to try new things with Tornado Boy!
• Calendars – annual, 2-page monthly and blank versions.
• Homeschool Forms for things like curriculum tracking, attendance, planning and grading.
• Household Forms for things like addresses, budgets, meal planning, and home inventory.

You can purchase an electronic copy of the planner from The Old Schoolhouse Store for $39.00. The planner is over 600 pages long, so if you’re on dial-up Internet access, you may want to consider purchasing the CD version for $44. Thankfully all of those pages are linked in the table of contents, so you can jump directly to the page that you want.

My very favorite thing about the planner is that you can type directly onto the planner pages using the free Adobe Reader software. I’m an electronic girl, so not having to resort to putting pen to paper is a big deal for me. My handwriting is pretty much like chicken scratch, so a neatly typed page really helps me. Of course, if you want to, you can print all or part of the blank planner if you choose.

One of the areas that I’m most excited to use is the one for menu planning. This is an area that I am totally committed to improving in our home for this year and the planner has several great forms to help me out with that goal:

Still not convinced? Be sure to download a free peek here. You’ll see about 1/10th of what is included in the planner, including the full table of contents so that you can get an idea of the broad range of content in the planner.

For today (August 15th) only, you can receive a free add-on of last years supplement modules with your purchase. Each of the 12 modules is filled with great unit study information that you can use in your homeschool.

Happy Planning!

I am a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, an independent contractor with The Old Schoolhouse magazine. I received a copy of the 2010 Schoolhouse Planner and have used the Planner in order to write this advertisement. This is not a review, but an entry in an ad-writing contest.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Last week I started writing a weekly review post for Homeschool Creations Preschool Corner Friday meme. It really struck me after I’d gotten my pictures together that we really don’t fit well with that group any longer. I’ve always enjoyed reading the posts, but I’ve felt a little out of step with the group for some time, even after Jolanthe added the Pre-K element to it. I know that part of the feeling for me is that Tornado Boy turned 5 this weekend. The other part is that he is starting his official homeschool journey in the next month, essentially as a 1st grader. I’m not sure if there is an existing weekly wrap-up for early elementary kids or not. If anyone knows of one, I’d love a link.

I’ve been surprised by many little things that Tornado Boy has done over the past couple of weeks. A lot of these little things are really making me question my plans for the fall. Some of the things that have happened:

• He read sdrawkcaB as backwards without flinching.
• He jumped on his trampoline and skip counted by 10 to 500 without anyone asking him to. I’d never heard him go higher than 100 before.
• He’s figured out that multiplication is adding the same number to itself many times and he is verbally playing around with the concept a lot.
• He’s starting to ask me words in Spanish that aren’t in the Little Pim videos. We’re using an online English-Spanish dictionary with audio entries to help answer the questions.
• He’s asked to learn French and Chinese.
• He’s asking to listen to specific classical music pieces by name and composer. I know that part of this is coming from Little Einsteins, but it’s interesting that he can name pieces that I can’t.

We’ve already covered more than a standard Kindergarten curriculum in the past year. Since we have the luxury of time, I’m really wondering if I shouldn’t just pitch the curriculum that I had picked out (with the exception of Five in a Row) and really let Tornado Boy lead this year and see where it takes us. I really also should consider finding a foreign language class of some sort for him – that is so not my forté.

I feel like no matter what I plan for the school year, I have no idea where TB is going to be developmentally even six months from now. So anyway, I’m feeling a tiny bit lost at the moment, but we’ll work through it!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I’m at that place where I seem to find myself about every six weeks or so. My blog reader is beyond overflowing with things to read. My own posts have been sparse and I’m feeling way behind in real life. Once I finally got healthy, Tornado Boy was sick for a few days. Between the two of us, we really sent productivity into a massive lurch.

Tornado Boy seems none the worse for wear. Besides missing out on a few days of camp, he’s as happy as a clam. His birthday is coming up and he is beyond excited. This is the first year that we’re doing a “friend” party for him – we’ve always done family parties in the past. He is beside himself with excitement and I think he wants to invite everyone that he might ever have spoken with. It’s really fun to watch him be so excited and checking out the “countdown” that I made for him with great excitement each day. It’ll be birthday central here for a few weeks as Tornado Dad, myself, TB’s Great Grandmother and my brother all have birthdays in the next six weeks.

I’m also working behind the scenes on my first two reviews for the TOS Homeschool Crew. The first one is on a travel e-book and will be published next week. The second is on a handwriting program. I’ve just gotten the software and am trying to formulate a plan for using it over the next six weeks. I’m rather excited about it because it’s a much more physical approach to handwriting than we’ve used in the past. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out for us.

I sent my Notice of Intent to Homeschool in a couple of weeks ago and I received my return receipt in the mail. I’m not sure how long it will be before we get an actual response from the county; but it is rather nice to feel somewhat “official”. I am really struggling with trying to figure out how structured I want our time to be in the fall. I’m trying to formulate some goals for us and most of the ones that are rolling around in my head aren’t very academic in nature. When I think about the things that I really want to work on with Tornado Boy, I keep coming back to things like:

• Living the Golden Rule – treat others the way that you want to be treated.
• Developing good listening skills – the first time!
• Developing better fine motor skills – working on cutting, pasting, creating, writing.
• Getting more involved in the local homeschool community.
• Developing more stamina for working on tasks and projects.

Honestly, not much of that stuff falls into the curriculum realm. Tornado Boy is entering Kindergarten doing work in most areas at about a 1st to 2nd grade level. I figure that I’ll never have a better opportunity to work on the “soft skills” than I do now. I just can’t quite figure out what I want to make our priority or exactly how to implement it. LOL It’d be so much easier to just say that we’re going to do reading / writing / arithmetic / art / Spanish / science / gym time and call it a day.

If anyone has any thoughts on character education that isn’t overly religious in nature, I’d sure like to hear them.

If it’s quiet over here, I’m just buried in party planning and pondering our upcoming year. Tornado Boy will be close-by and surrounded by Legos – thank goodness for eBay!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.