Homeschool Materials

The best free online vocabulary and spelling resources

Free Vocabulary and Spelling Games. Vocabulary and SpellingCity.com has fifteen different learning activities that you can use with your own lists. For the little kids, there's handwriting practice printable worksheets, memory match, and alphabetical order (online, it's a total hoot!). For the middle schoolers, there's sentence and paragraph writing and vocabulary exercises as multiple choice or MatchIt. SpellingCity is being used by 5% of the elementary schools students in the country, particularly the homeschoolers. The price, for most uses, is free!

Learning Analogies
Analogies (as in: A is to B as 1 is to 2) are a ubiquitous staple of standardized tests, begging the question, "Why are they so important to learn?" Quite simply, analogies play a significant role not only in problem solving and decision making, but also in perception and memory as well as communication and reasoning. In fact, even creativity and emotion are closely related to and affected by one's ability to analogize. Analogies can be categorized into many types, including synonym analogies (parody is to satire as rogue is to scoundrel) and part-whole analogies (Eiffel Tower is to France as Great Pyramid is to Egypt). A great way to practice working with analogies is through fun online games.

Online Writing Classes - Do any of these situations sound familiar?

- Teaching several children at different grade levels prevents you from spending the time to thoroughly grade writing assignments and provide constructive and detailed feedback.
- While your children like writing, they have become over-sensitive to feedback from you about their writing.
- You would like help in writing instruction from someone that is a certified writing teacher to make sure that your children learn how to write for success on tests and entrance exams.
- Your child is struggling or resisting writing assignments and you need a way to motivate them and stay engaged so that their writing skills stay at grade level.
- You are looking for an easy to use and affordable writing curriculum and can't afford the cost of a personal writing tutor in your home.
- You have a hesitant or reluctant writer that needs a push to get them going and you haven't found the spark that lights their fire.
- You are looking for a fun-filled way to introduce beginning writing skills to your young writer
- Although your children can write up a storm, they lack the skills needed to review, edit and revise their own work
- College entrance exams are looming and you don't think your high school student's writing skills are good enough to qualify them for much needed scholarships

Just what the homeschool doctor ordered
Time4Writing may be exactly what the homeschool doctor ordered to solve the symptoms described above. Time4Writing is frequently added as a supplement to other homeschool programs that teach language arts, math, social studies and science. Time4Writing provides the hands on writing experience students need to build core writing skills. The convenience of an online homeschool writing curriculum means that class work can be completed on your schedule and grades with feedback are received within one business day of homework submission.

Time4Learning is a convenient, online homeschool curriculum that combines education with interactive fun. Animated lessons, interactive activities, printable worksheets and detailed reporting make the learning system a top selection of the Homeschool.com "Top 100 Educational Websites" list, year after year.
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Todays Learners - Education has changed forever!

Forget the idea that you can send your kids off worry-free to the neighborhood school
Forget trusting the school to teach your children
Forget all your ideas of students being empty eager vessels to fill full of knowledge%u2026.
Why? Because things have changed. Technology, the school systems, the students and the companies that hire them have all changed. Lets start with the students%u2026

I'm talking about the youth of today and also the work force in today's competitive companies. Online education is now mainstream with teachers now choosing between careers in schools, tutoring, or teaching online.Online teaching is hot! Our people are now, as Marc Prensky calls them, "Digital Natives" with skills and a mindset suited to todays technical realities. Learning styles have evolved as have our diagnostic tools and categories of learnig styles and dysfunctions. The skills are different too with keyboarding & web researching moving into mainstream skills. And while public schools still dominate the educational system, homeschooling and virtual schools are the two hottest growth areas in education. They're cost effective and they work!

How different is todays technology- Well, remember that just ten years ago, twenty volume sets of encyclopedias were being sold as a primary information resource. How quaint it seems today.

The amazing internet has started its information revolution and has totally changed the nature of information access and retrieval. And today's companies and schools are different. Entire layers of middle managers are now gone from America 's corporations.

Today, entry level employees receive, and respond, to emails and calls directly from company executives, a level and type of communication that would have been infeasible and unthinkable, just a decade or so ago. Telecommuting has gone from fringe to mainstream. Email, once exotic and unreliable, is increasingly the main internal form of communication. Video conferencing too is shifting into the mainstream. Todays-Learners.com reports on the successful paradigms for today's learners.