Making Homeschooling Hands-On, Engaging, Meaningful & Memorable! Be inspired by all the possibilities!! Check out our unit studies, packets and printables!
Games for Thinking and Learning / Homeschool Den
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published February 11, 2018
With birthdays coming up, I am often on the look-out for educational activities that might be appealing to my kids. I also grab things from time-to-time that will add some sparkle to our units. This post has a number of educational things I’ve added to our homeschool collection… puzzles, games, geography activities, science tools and more! 🙂 Critical Thinking Challenge! My kids really love this activity called Kanoodle (affiliate link)...
Homeschool Den / Homeschool: Month in Review / Homeschool: Our Homeschool (what our day is like, curriculum choices, etc.) / How to Start Homeschooling
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published January 30, 2018
This semester has been off to a topsy-turvy start. The homeschooling part is going well… when we’re homeschooling that is! Don’t you feel like that some days?!! I thought I would write a post about some of the things we’ve been doing lately. (At the very bottom of this post, I’ll link to other posts that give snippets of our day (or week)… all the way back to when the...
All About Homeschooling! / Homeschool Den / Homeschool High School / Preparing for College
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published January 19, 2018 · Last modified January 17, 2018
I’ve been having long conversations with my Sis about high school (homeschool) transcripts and the college application process. Her family (like ours) has also homeschooled right from the start, but my nieces and nephew are a bit older than my kids. My niece is now a junior in college and over the weekend, my Sis and my nephew were polishing up his college applications to get them submitted. I asked...
Today Sra. Morato and I have some free Spanish Numbers Worksheets — Los Números. There is a Spanish numbers reference page with the numbers 1 through 30. Then it has all the numbers up to 100 – 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100. And finally it has the larger numbers like 1,000; 10,000, 100,000 and a million. There are also two very simple matching pages as well. We hope...
History: Geography Activities / Homeschool Den
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published January 8, 2018 · Last modified March 1, 2024
We do a lot of history units and basic geography in our homeschool, but I also want to cover some other social studies topics. Once every year or so, we add in this World Facts Unit. We go over some basic world facts, as well as geographic terms, landforms, the deserts of the world, some famous world landmarks, topographic maps, and more. We cover… What are the four largest countries? (Russia,...
Freebies / Holiday: Christmas Activities / Homeschool Den
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published December 1, 2017 · Last modified December 5, 2021
Can you believe December has arrived?! Today I want to highlight some of the free Christmas and Holiday Freebies we have tucked away on the blog. There are all kinds of Christmas math worksheets from PreK games and addition/subtraction worksheets to multiplication, division, factoring and beyond! Plus, you’ll find a spelling game (Long I sounds), free music games, and foreign language sheets to practice learning holiday words in Spanish or...
Hi Everyone, Today I want to share the floor with Sra. Morato. Her online classes include elementary Spanish (for Kindergarten through Grade 6), Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 (36-week classes). This past year I have gotten to know her well and she is actually now teaching my girls Spanish (via video lessons and face-to-face meetings)! Let me share the story of how that happened!! It’s a funny story, one day while...
History: Rensaissance and Reformation
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published October 29, 2017 · Last modified December 29, 2018
Many people around the world are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. If you plan to talk about Martin Luther and the Reformation this week, you might want to download our Reformation notebook pages and lapbook. It was October 1517 that Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses (or complaints) to his bishop. According to one account, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church...
Homeschool Den / Science / Science Experiments
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published October 1, 2017 · Last modified November 13, 2020
Last week, I shared that we are doing a weekly science club with some local homeschoolers. Today I’m going to tell you about our second week. We did activities on Earth Science (this week was plate tectonics) and also biology — scientific classification & taxonomy. We are doing work with various organisms this semester. In the second week we observed our mealworms and were introduced to a type of flatworm...
Homeschool Den / Homeschool: Planning and Preparation
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published September 11, 2017
We’ve been in school for a couple of weeks now and creating good routines has been on my mind a lot. I think we all want to harness the energy and excitement we feel these first few weeks of school and keep that going all throughout the year, right?! Coming up with a homeschool routine that works well for your family can be really challenging. Some homeschoolers have a fairly...
This week we are starting back into homeschooling. We’ll be starting slowly with a number of projects and activiteis. I thought I’d share some of things our family is starting out with. 🙂 My kids have loved the math puzzles and challenges. Our favorite book has been Mathematical Circle Diaries, Year 1: Complete Curriculum for Grades 5 to 7 (affiliate link). These were a bit hard for my youngest daughter...
Nature / Outdoor Fun / Science / Science: Astronomy Unit
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published August 21, 2017 · Last modified August 22, 2017
Like so many in the U.S. we got caught up in the eclipse excitement today! We spent the day looking up from sunrise to sunset and everything in between! You’re going to laugh when you see the camera filter I used for this series of photos! Hey, but it worked!! Our family headed to Tennessee to enjoy the eclipse with my sister and her family. A trip all the more amazing...
Homeschool Den / Homeschool High School / Homeschool: Planning and Preparation
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published June 2, 2017
Like so many of you, I have been busy planning for next year. I think I have things mapped out enough to write a post and share our (tentative) plans! 🙂 My oldest, LD, will be in 9th Grade in the fall. SCIENCE: The first big decision for us (for me and LD) was to look at science in the coming years. We want to follow a more traditional model...
German / Homeschool Den / Spanish
by Liesl - Homeschool Den · Published April 27, 2017 · Last modified February 9, 2020
Are you teaching your kids a foreign language in your homeschool? I put together a free checklist of topics and units you might want to cover… no matter which language your student is learning. As I was polishing up the Curriculum Resource Guide for middle school ages (Grades 6-8), I got to the section on foreign languages. I thought it might be useful if I put together a checklist of...
Do you believe education can be exciting, inspiring, and full of joy? We do too!
I love the quote by William Butler Yeats, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." It's about getting the kids involved, engaged, and fired up about learning (while juggling the rest of life too!)
A bit about me: I have my Master's from Brown University. I have more than 20 years of teaching experience. I was a high school teacher for many years both in the U.S. and internationally and also taught for the University of Maryland before leaving to homeschool my 3 wonderful kids.
To read more about us CLICK HERE.
Click on the image to find out more about the units and packets we have available.
This post has links to dozens of posts and resources both for new and veteran homeschoolers for everything from finding homeschool curriculum to general homeschool advice and encouragement.
Click on the image above to see the History Units we covered in our homeschool.
What science topics could I teach my 5-7 year old - Homeschool Science Curriculum
Click on the image above to see the Science Units we covered in our homeschool from elementary through middle school (and beyond!).
A list of the books we've used most in history, science, math, language arts, etc.
Click the image to check out our packets on Earth Science, Rocks and Minerals, the Atmosphere, Weather, Energy and More!
Units are also sold separately.
This is one of our most popular units. It covers the Layers of the Earth, Plate Tectonics, Earthquakes, Volcanoes and More! It is included in the Earth Science Bundle (see the picture/link above).
Click the image to see our Biology Units on Animal and Plant Cells; the Biology Unit on Biomes, Food Chains, Symbiosis; Scientific Classification & Taxonomy (Domain/Kingdom/Phylum/Class, etc.); Botany - Plant Kingdom and Oceans and Oceanography.
Click on the image to see our Animal Bundle - including the Animal Unit, Life Cycles, the Rainforest, Winter (Polar Animals) & Hibernation, Chameleons, Wolves, Cicadas and more!
The Human Body Systems, Skeletal, Digestive, Circulatory, Muscular, Nervous, Endocrine Systems and More (with lots of hands-on activity ideas)! We usually study a different body system each year.
Click on the image to see our units on the States of matter, Properties of Matter, Electricity & Circuits, and the Chemistry Unit (Get to know the Periodic Table in a fun way!)
This is a free checklist I put together of the various science units I hope to cover in the elementary and middle school years.
Do your kids know the 4 largest countries? Which countries have the most people? The longest river? This packet covers basic world and U.S. facts and also covers geographic features and land forms.
Click on the image to check out our 100-page unit on World War I.
We have used AAS for 6 years! AAS is an affiliate link.
Dozens of posts about how to create a homeschool writing workshop.
Click on the image to check out all of our fun K-2 Math Packets.
This is one of the best values we have... more than 20 PDFs with games, activities and worksheets to learn/practice the multiplication facts ($7.00).
Click on the image to discover some of the pages, posts and homeschool resources within our blog that might be the most useful for you including a long list of our freebies!
Click on the image to check out our 100+page Rocks and Minerals Unit.
This is a fun, hands-on unit for early elementary students!
How the body is organized from cells to tissues... organs to body systems
Click on the image to check out some of the Spanish worksheet bundles we have available!
Click on the image above to check out our German worksheets.
Click on the image to find out more about our units and packets.
