Tracy's Treasury: November 2009

Friday, November 13, 2009

Fonts

BV Fonts... offers a selection of free fonts available for download (including handwriting fonts)
DaFont... offers LOTS of free fonts of ALL kinds (content warning: some fonts are inappropriate)

Clip Art

Homeschooling doesn't have to break the bank. Here are some of my favorite money-saving teacher tools!

Free Pre-School Curriculum:

Brightly Beaming Resources - Letter of the Week Pre-school Curriculum
First School - Preschool materials, themes, activities & crafts
No Time for Flash Cards - another letter of the week curriculum, with hands-on activities & crafts.

Free and Nearly Free K-12 Complete Curriculum:

Easy Peasy All-In-One- Homeschool - This is a complete, free online Christian homeschool curriculum! It uses only free material found online, so it's a great choice for those stationed overseas with limited book choices. If you're in the states, you can join Facebook groups to find other families using it in your state. There are also Facebook groups for questions and support. This is probably the easiest-to-use, free choice. (This one does include math but I'd feel best using Khan Academy for that subject)
Old Fashioned Education Christian HS Curriculum - This is a free curriculum available online for you to print off, containing a full 40 week schedule for Bible, math, science, social studies, language arts, literature and history for grades K - 12. It's written by a home school mom using free public domain texts available on the internet. If you need a low cost complete curriculum, check this out! You can read a thorough description about it here.

(The links listed above are also accessible at the top right of every page on my blog.)

Websites to bookmark

Shepphard Software is a GREAT site to let kids play on with ALL SORTS of educational games.
Merriam-Webster an online dictionary and thesaurus with audio pronunciation and photos to illustrate. (SO handy for answering kids' questions!)
Paper Back Swap!! You can "swap" your books that you no longer want, for books you do want! You can swap paperback or hardcover, even audio books, but they must all be in good condition. This is a great way to get a lot of books for your family! They also have two sister sites for swapping CD's and DVD's, and you can transfer your credits between the various sites. If you do sign up, I'd appreciate it if you tell them I referred you (put "spunkytigrr" in the referral box)! Thanks! :)
Simply Charlotte Mason is probably my favorite homeschooling site. They have a great blog, curriculum guide, free e-books, a message board, free book-finder, and some of my favorite homeschool materials have been purchased from them as well!

Supplies

Rainbow Resource Center has loads of great stuff for sale, including many curriculums if you want to buy them from one place to save on shipping.
Home School Buyer's Co Op for getting some great bargains. Just be sure to read the fine print, because sometimes you're not getting a discount until the number of people involved in "group buys" gets to a certain level.
Library & Educational Services Discounted to home schoolers

Faaaabulous Planners & Printables:

Sked Track - This is a handy, free, online scheduler/planner that allows you to enter in the year's assignments and plans, or enter them in as you go if you like to wing it. It automatically schedules them to a calendar for you (based on the days you choose to do school) and when life happens and you miss a day, it bumps the remaining assignments back a day. You can also print your plans out based on date or subject if you'd like. It even calculates grades, and generates a printable transcript. It makes a great way to safely store your records too. And did I mention, it's FREE? (*Update: I now prefer my DIY Planner, but that's simply a preference of having it on paper rather than online. If you want one online this is still a good one that's free!)
Donna Young... She has printables for just about anything under the sun. If you prefer to do your planning on paper rather than online (w/ Skedtrack), Donna has printable calendars, planners, lesson plans transcripts, attendance, grade forms, certificates, etc. She also has printables organized by school subject.