Frequently Asked Questions
About Me: I’m Liesl and I have been an educator my entire career. Before I had kids, I taught high school (history and German) and college history. Since having kids, I started making and sharing curriculum packets. I love trying to make units engaging and hands on, yet in depth! It’s my passion! We have homeschooled right from the start. You can read more about our homeschool journey here at the About Us page. If you have any questions that have not been answered below, please feel free to email me!
How do I start homeschooling? Homeschooling is both wonderful and scary. You have a LOT of flexibility as to what to teach your kids. Yet, with all the choices and options out there it can be very overwhelming and hard to know where to start. This post offers some starting points: Starting to Homeschool. You might also want to subscribe to our email newsletter. The first 5 emails give some pointers about homeschooling in general and resources we have available (including our free 100-page homeschool planner!)
How do I homeschool kids of multiple ages? Again, every family will tackle this differently. For example, my three kids are two years apart so we did science and history and read alouds together over the years. This post has some of my thoughts on Homeschooling Multiple Ages. It can be hard, but you’ll find what works for your family!
How can I keep my kids engaged and motivated? Our family loves hands-on homeschooling and these pages have dozens of homeschool teaching strategies and hands-on activity ideas: Hands-On Homeschool Ideas or Homeschool Teaching Strategies
Where will I find your units and packets? The best place to start is looking through Our Store. You can also find links to some of our bundles down below. Don’t forget that our German materials (for learning German) are in our German Store. And, our Spanish worksheet materials (for learning Spanish) are located here in our Spanish store.
Other Homeschool/Education Resources: We have also hundreds of free printables on the blog that are not in our store. Many of these are seasonal freebies or small worksheets or packets I’ve made for the kids over the years (grammar, history worksheets, and so forth) There’s a lot to navigate here on our website so be sure to use the SEARCH feature (in the sidebar if you are on a laptop). Two good pages to explore to find some of our freebies are this one and this homeschool resource page. Also this older post: 50 Homeschool Freebies might be helpful. And if you have younger kids, this Preschool Page has a lot of free printables too.
Can I purchase a printed copy of your units? At this time, we only have PDF downloads available.
Are the answers provided? Do I need any special book or text with your packets? Yes, all of the answers are provided in our packets! No, you do not need a particular book or textbook with any of our packets, though we usually borrow a ton of books from the library to supplement. Usually the fill-in-the-blank style student pages are followed directly by full-text (teacher) pages which have the answers. The answers are generally not highlighted, though, in case families want students to read the full-text version instead (and not write the answers). I also provide pictures/photos and explanations of the hands-on activities.
Below is a sample from our Digestive System Unit. You can right click on the picture to see a larger version of this page!
Do the units come with Teacher Answer Guides? I do not have a teacher guide per se (explaining what to do the first day, second day etc.) Most of our units include notebook pages (as I talked about above). I would print out the fill-in-the-blank pages with my kids and then I would print out the full-text version for myself. We would read through these pages together and they would guess the answer (and I would give them the answer from the full-text version). Note: The answers are not highlighted in the full-text version because some families print out the full-text versions for their students to read through instead. We would supplement with books from the library, documentaries and/or other textbooks.
Below is an example of notebook pages from our Ancient China Unit.
Some units have worksheets and/or lapbook-interactive notebook pages. Answers are provided for those as well.
How do I make a purchase: Click on the Add to Cart button of the unit/s or bundle/s you are interested in (from the store or from posts/pages). When you are ready to make a purchase, it will take you to Paypal. Upon receipt of payment you will immediately get a link to download this pdf (or pdfs) in your browser. You will also receive an email from SendOwl Downloads to your PayPal email address which will give you a link to download.
How do I add things to my cart? Click on the add to cart button. You’ll see a SendOwl Shopping Cart pop up. Use your back button to go back to the store to add in anything else you want to purchase. This View Cart button will always allow you to check out what’s in your cart again.
How do I remove something from my cart? It should be as easy as moving the down arrow in the cart. I’ll paste in a picture of the shopping cart after I’ve added a couple things in. (The little arrows next to the number 1) Then you just change the quantity to zero and it should disappear!
What if I don’t have a PayPal account? Remember, you do not have to have a PayPal account to make a payment. Select the 
grey button “Checkout as Guest.” [The grey button might say “Pay with a debit or credit card or PayPal credit” It said Checkout as Guest when I used an incognito window.] That gives you the option of paying with a credit card even if you don’t have an actual PayPal account. Just be sure to provide your email address! Here are even more directions (Click on the picture or this link on How to Pay with a Credit Card.)
Click on Return to Merchant and it should bring up your download link. You will also receive the download link to the email address you provided.
Site Security — Is it safe to make a purchase? You will not be entering any payment or credit card details here on our website, homeschoolden.com. I use PayPal (which is a secure site) to process payments. Then, I use SendOwl (an automatic delivery service) to send you the download link. Of course, if you have any questions or trouble with your order, you can contact me (Liesl) by email here.
What if I don’t get an email with my download link? You can email me if it doesn’t come within a few mintues! I use an automatic email delivery system called SendOwl. Every now and then (especially if you have a school generated email) the emails seem to be filtered out. It could be in your spam folder. But, I keep a pretty close eye on email (you know, within reason while I homeschooling the kids and stuff!) and can get that link to you fairly quickly.
Link Expired: Help! What do I do if I get a Link Expired message? Sometimes when people have a slow internet connection, the download stops. If you ever get this message, just email me and I will reset the number of downloads for you or send you the PDF directly! You can contact me (Liesl) by email here.
I lost my download link! Can you help? Of course! Just email me with your name and/or PayPal email address and I will get that link for you!
Can I share this packet with other classroom teachers? No, you have to purchase a multi-classroom license. You cannot share these packets with other educators. You would have to purchase an additional multi-classroom license to share a unit with other teachers. A multi-classroom license is 90% of the product price. So if you purchase one unit for $10 that can be used by a single teacher and all of that one teacher’s students. For a multi-classroom license that covers all the 3 teachers in your school grade the total would be $19. (Full price + 90%). You would need to contact me to make arrangements for that.
I need an invoice for my school. What do I do? You will receive an automatic order receipt from SendOwl (the delivery service I use) which includes the date, order ID, customer name, products purchased, prices and total. If you need something slightly different feel free to contact me.
Will I get any updates to your units or bundles? Yes! You will NOT have to purchase the unit or bundle again! You will get any updates that I make to the packets (and any additional packets I add to the bundles). You will get an email from SendOwl (to your PayPal email address). I’ll let you know what was added. That email will also include your download link again.
More homeschool questions:
What do I teach my kindergartner or my 8-year old or my 6th grader or high schooler? Each family is completely different, but I’ve created some free curriculum resource guides to share what our family has done over the years. These are 30-pages or so and share the kinds of things we covered in each grade. Remember that I have three kids and we did some subjects together, so I would adapt the material to fit both my youngest and my oldest (which is why are packets work well for homeschooling families or for teachers with students of different abilities.) You will find these free guides at this page:
New to Our Blog? Start here! Scroll down and you’ll see the section 
Creating Your Own Homeschool Curriculum You will be able to download any (or all) of the free homeschool resource guides for K-1, Grades 2-3, 4-5, 6-8 (middle school) or high school.
- If you are wondering in general what science topics/units to cover, this is a free checklist of the units we hoped to cover K-8 Homeschool Science Unit Checklist for Elementary and Middle School (free printable)
What other packets do you have available? You can check out Our Store for details about our other packets. Some of our other Bundles include the Human Body Bundle, Earth Science Bundles, Chemistry Bundle, Biology Bundle of 5 (upper elementary & middle School), Big Animal Bundle (for early elementary), K-2 Math Bundle, Multiplication/Division Bundle, and Spelling Bundle.
Earth Science Bundles,
Chemistry Bundle
Biology Bundle of 5 (for upper elementary or middle school)
Big Animal Bundle (for early elementary)
Multiplication/Division Bundle
A few close-ups of what is included:
And of course, you’ll find many other packets in Our Store
World War I Unit (a upper middle school or high school unit): see this post for details:
World War II Unit (a upper middle school or high school unit): see this post for details:
Here are a couple other resources that might be helpful:
- What science topics should/could I teach my 5 to 7 year old?
- Free Homeschool Planning Pages– These are some free Homeschool Planning Pages that I use as I try to figure out our long-range homeschooling goals. This post shares share the process I go through… and also will share the planning pages that I’ve been using the past few years. I like having colorful planning pages to work on.
See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter. You might also want to check out some of our resources pages above (such as our Science, Language Arts, or History Units Resource Pages) which have links to dozens of posts. You might want to join our free Homeschool Den Chat Facebook group. Don’t forget to check out Our Store as well. 
Again, if you are interested in joining our Homeschool Den Newsletter, feel free to subscribe here.
The Welcome Series includes 5 packed emails… with tips on homeschooling, keeping motivated, finding various resources and freebies tucked away on the blog and more!
Plus, you’ll be the first to hear about new packets (generally offered at a discount when they are first released), seasonal resources and more!
Happy Homeschooling! ~Liesl
P.S. If you have any other questions, please feel free to email me!
