It’s another school year again! The kids will now be in Grade 8 and Grade 2, and they’re excited. Like last year, we’re still enrolled with Peniel Integrated Christian Academy of Rizal (PICAR) under the homeschool program. This year, though, they have another name for the program with online lectures: “Online Program Teacher and Parent Led”. Basically homeschooling still with online lectures but I think there will be more teacher involvement compared to last year. I probably would learn more of the difference after the orientation.
But anyhoo, it’s another adventure for me. We’re on our third year of homeschooling, technically, and I’m still learning the ropes. It’s good that somehow, there’s a support group especially for the young learners. And parents can talk to the teachers as well.
And as we go along our homeschooling, we find resources that could help them with their lessons. These have been very useful for us for the past years when we needed some worksheets or activities, or just to reinforce learning. I know there are a lot of homeschool resources out there (some of them I’m trying to recall as of this writing) but here are the ones that are top-of-mind for me as a homeschooling parent:
- Canva – Who doesn’t LOVE Canva? Ever since I discovered the site, I’ve done a lot of creatives — for my blog and socmed pubmats — and now the kids make presentations and performance tasks with it. Actually, they’ve done a lot of not-school-related artworks with Canva, especially Bunso. What can I say, we just absolutely adore it. I even got a premium account so that we can have more flexibility in creating.
- Twinkl – Worksheets? Games? Powerpoint presentations? Twinkl has them. What’s great is that there are resources for older kids like my then-Grade 7 kid. Most of the worksheets I got were for her Values (coping with stress, etc.) and Math. Helpful. You can try it out or I can give you a free 30-day premium trial, just send me your email. *wink*
- Liveworksheets – Bunso’s Science teacher last year used Liveworksheets quite extensively for their seatworks. I also used this site extensively when we started homeschooling a couple of years ago. And I also learned that you can actually make your own worksheet here. But you have to really check out the resources there because it’s like the Wikipedia of worksheets — they’re made by actual users. Nevertheless, still helpful.
- ABCYa – We used this website for gamified lessons particularly for Bunso. They also have printables. Among the good homeschool resources for kids up to Grade 6.
- YouTube – Eldest is a visual and auditory learner, and Bunso likes those sing-song videos, so I leaned on the site for some lesson reinforcements. Some of the channels we found useful were:
- Math Antics – for elementary and high school math subjects (super helpful in fractions and geometry)
- The Organic Chemistry Tutor – we watched their video on binary numbers (since I needed a refresher, too, haha)
- The Singing Walrus – for some kiddie action songs. So catchy, I mean, I can still remember the song for 3D shapes, LOL!
- Super Simple Songs – this channel also has nice songs for kids. Though I distinctly remember their Bedtime Songs playlist, hehe!
- Netflix – Sure, we also watch kiddie movies there. But we also watched these programs with Bunso:
- Alphablocks – We first discovered this on YouTube when Eldest was still a toddler. This show helped her pronounce words as it teaches them letter sounds.
- Numberblocks – Basically the sibling of Alphablocks, this one is about, well, numbers. Cardinal, ordinal, fractions — haven’t really finished all the seasons but they’re good for the young ones.
These are some of the homeschool resources we’re using and have used before. Pretty sure I’ll be adding more as we go along the schoolyear. And if I remember some of the ones we’ve used before. 😛 But I hope these are useful for you, too.
If you have more resources that you use for your lessons, let me know through the comments so others can see as well. 🙂
