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Thanksgiving Math & Literacy, Art, Science & More….

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Do you ever wish someone would just plan out your entire homeschool year for you….then maybe bundle it all up and email it to your inbox on Monday morning?
Yeah….me too.
Well, I don’t have an entire YEAR of curriculum to send you, but I do have something that will make your homeschool planning super easy this November.
SMART: Science, Math, Art, Reading & Take Home activities for Thanksgiving!  This helpful set is filled with a week’s worth of fun, educational math games, hands-on activities, science experiments, art projects, early readers, writing prompts and a Bible memory verse.  Everything you need to add a little holiday fun to your kindergarten classroom this year!
Thanksgiving Science: This set includes five simple science experiments and challenges.  Each thematic activity guides students through a fun, hands-on science exploration with very little prep-work.  Students work their way through the scientific method using the step-by-step science journals.  Each experiment includes a follow-up activity for added learning.
Thanksgiving Math: Each day students will play a fun game or activity then follow up their learning with a lesson sheet to show mastery. Games focus on learning to frame numbers to ten, basic addition, counting to 100, and counting by 10’s.
Thanksgiving ART: We include five stunning autumn art projects that are perfect for Thanksgiving.  Each project comes with a full photo tutorial, printable templates and easy to follow materials list.  Students work with oil pastels, paint, textures, blending and more.  
Thanksgiving Reading (and Writing): This set includes three early readers covering social studies and history.  Each story includes a carefully controlled word list and incorporates key vocabulary for extended learning.  Students are provided narrative and comparison writing prompts that are not only simple to follow, but would make wonderful educational keepsakes. 
Take Home/Review Work: T is for Take Home Review Sheets.  These sheets can be used as review work in the homeschool classroom or as homework in a standard classroom.  Each page features reading, writing, vocabulary, and scripture memorization activities. Character thinking points are available instead of Bible memory for those using this resource in a public school setting.
SMART: Science, Math, Art, Reading & Take Home activities for Thanksgiving!  This helpful set is filled with a week’s worth of fun, educational math games, hands-on activities, science experiments, art projects, early readers, writing prompts and a Bible memory verse.  Everything you need to add a little holiday fun to your kindergarten classroom this year!
 

Printable Early Readers for Kindergarten

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If you have little ones learning to read, you don’t want to miss this opportunity! Last year, we released our 36-week, R.E.A.D. Curriculum Notebook and it’s been an amazing success.  Parents and teachers all over the world have told us how easy, engaging and most of all…FUN our curriculum is for their students.  We’ve been inundated with requests to follow up the series (an idea we are excited to explore) and today we are releasing the very first extension titled, “R.E.A.D. Review Pack.”

 

Our R.E.A.D. Review Pack contains 28 early reader booklets, each designed to compliment our R.E.A.D. Curriculum Notebook.  This new set covers 30+ Word Families and 70 sight words.  With a structured and progressive design, each book contains a controlled list of words, making them excellent for review and building fluency.
When should you use the R.E.A.D. Review Pack?
We suggest using the review weeks outlined in our R.E.A.D. Curriculum Notebook (which cycle every 5 weeks in the curriculum) to introduce the new books. However, this set can be used at the end of the year to promote reading fluency. Additionally, the R.E.A.D. Review Pack can be used on it’s own if your child already has a basic understanding of phonetic sounds, blends and sight words.
 
My own Kindergartner is already near the end of the R.E.A.D. Curriculum Notebook and he is using this set of review books to build reading confidence and fluency. There is also a fun Book Box activity for students to make. Children can store their books and keep them all together for easy access.  My son loves bringing out his ‘Book Box’ to show me all the stories he knows how to read.

How do you assemble the early reader books?
One aspect of these books that we are really excited about, is how easy they are to assemble.  Believe me, with all the years of teaching we collectively have under our belts, we’ve experienced our share of struggles with mini-book assembly.   When designing this series of early readers we wanted to make sure we streamlined the process to save paper, save time and save the headache.  Check out this fun video we made to show you how easy it really is!
How much does the R.E.A.D. Review Pack cost?
As teachers and homeschoolers ourselves, we know how to stick to a budget.  That is precisely why we’ve always priced our curriculum affordably.  We want the majority of families across the world to be able to access and enjoy our teaching resources.
R.E.A.D. Review Pack
$15.00

Reading

ReviewsIMages

Reading Eggs Review

Reading Eggs is an online reading program for children ages 3-13. When you join Reading Eggs you get access to two different levels of their program, Learning to Read, and Reading to Learn:

View Resource

Christian Light Review

Coming soon!

Reading Kingdom Review

The Reading Kingdom is an online subscription website that teaches children to read and write up to a third grade level. The program was developed by Dr. Marion Blank, and incorporates elements of phonics and whole language skills by introducing children to six different reading and writing skills:

View Resource

Can History be Engaging?

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Warning: Soapbox Post Ahead
The printables and Free Curriculum Offers are at the bottom, scroll if you must.

So, what do you think?

CAN History be engaging?

If you would have asked me that 20 years ago,
I would certainly answer that with a big fat,

NO!

In fact,
I can even go further and tell you the specific night
that I decided that I HATED History.

H.A.T.E.D.
I would use a milder word,
but it really wouldn’t convey my actual (10 year old) feelings about History

(and yes, if you do the math that makes me 30)

Ahem…..

So, it was 20 years ago and
I vividly remember sitting in my uncomfortable wooden chair,
with my gigantic 5th grade (public school) History book propped on it’s spine.
The tendons between my thumb and pointer finger ached from holding
this monster of a book upright.
It was massive.

I was tired.
It was late,
Homework was due,
and I had more pages to read then I cared to count.

I tried my best to read. I willed myself to focus.
Self motivation kicked in; “You can do this!”
With heavy eyelids I read a full page.

Great!
Until I realized,
I hadn’t a CLUE what I just read.

(ever done this?)

Giggling at myself,
I started to read again…..this time outloud.

An hour passed, until I just couldn’t stomach any more.
I had no idea who these “historical” people were.
I had no personal frame of reference for where they were at in the world,
or even what period of time they existed in.
There were dates and numbers and facts,
graphs and arrows and lists of accomplishments.
I had no connection to any of it.

My brain was jumbled.

That was the moment I realized my complete hate disregard towards History.
(yes, I was a moody young girl and my feelings quickly swept from hatred to apathy)

I closed my book,
went to bed and
took an incomplete on my lesson the next morning.
No Joke.
Big fat ZERO.

And, now that I’ve written that all out,
It is almost sad to remember how much
I actually loathed History lessons.

I know better now.
I’ve actually become quite fond of History over the past few years,
Mostly from reading His-Story from an entirely different perspective,
but also out of a necessity to teach it to my own children.

I want my children to actually connect with the people and stories they read about.


This is one reason we will be using many living books
from our Heritage History Curriculum.

PSSST…..
If you are making a purchase at Heritage History use
coupon code: valerie7
It will give you the Spanish Empire Library FREE
with any Curriculum CD purchase! Ends 10/31/12Click Here for more details

So mostly I’ll be assigning these living books during independent reading time,
but for some of the titles I’ll be following up the reading time with
actual assignments. It is for those times that I made a set of Notebooking pages:

notebooking living books

And of course I couldn’t wait to share them with you too!
If you use living books or any kind of chapter book as part of your weekly lessons,
you’re going to love this 5 day spread of self-guided notebooking assignments.

You can read all about each daily assignment and print the free notebooking pages here.

TIP: Print up an extra set and keep them in a folder
for one of those “mom is sick, everyone pick a book” moments.

Happy Notebooking!