Curriculum Shopping | Finding the Right Curriculum

With the last school year ended, it is time to start looking and buying next years curriculum. Choosing curriculum can be fun but overwhelming if you aren't sure where to start.

I start by listing what subjects I want to teach this year. Once I have that listed I give myself a budget. It is very easy to over spend when it comes to curriculum. 

I like to include in my list what things I am looking for in each subject. Things like is it Christian based, Secular, or the types of areas I want covered.

I made up a printable that I used to make up my subject list and curriculum I wanted to look into more. You can get it HERE

When I have my budget and list of subjects together it is time to start researching and reading reviews on the different types of curriculum out there. I tend to just go to my search engine and type in things like History Homeschool Curriculum or 6th grade Homeschool Math Curriculum. This usually brings up a mix of reviews and publishers that have what I am looking for. 

Once you have an idea of curriculum you are interested in, it's time to get your hands on it. A couple ways to do this is to go to Homeschool Conventions or in a Store. You can usually find Samples online also.

Now that you have figured out what you are going to use; purchase it. Keep an eye out for sales from the publishers or even used curriculum through Amazon or Facebook groups. 

After it is ordered comes the waiting period, but once it is delivered it feels like Christmas morning when you get to open all of the packages and really dive into each book. 

What's your favorite part about Curriculum Shopping? Any tips for those who may just be starting out with Homeschooling?

Brag Tags

I was looking for ideas to use with my boys as we homeschool for encouragement and recognition when I see them behaving or doing something the way they should besides getting a treat from our treasure box system every time. 

One of the reasons we are homeschooling is to work on the levels of respect our children show and to create a bond between them. 

I feel the brag tags may help with this so I made my own!!

I started by printing the brag tags out and cutting them out. A paper cutter is amazing when it comes to tedious things like this!

I then laminated, cut again, and stuck them in the plastic organizer I found around our house. I think I got it at Hobby Lobby. 

My plan is to punch a hole in each one and string them on a necklace for them to wear once a week! This way they can display what they have earned for the week or month even!

I am sharing them with you all today!!

Included are sayings like:

First Day of School

Monster Mathemetician

Neat Work!

Wild About Learning!

Good Attitude!

I was caught being Respectful!

I read 25, 50, and 100 books!

and many more!

You can get them HERE

Hope you enjoy them and find ways to work them into your learning process!

Reusable Teacher Planner

Since I am in the process of gathering information and buying curriculum for this next year I decided to make my own Teacher Planner. I had a hard time finding one that had everything I wanted in it, so making my own only made since! I wanted one that I could add and pull things out to make it work for me and for others!

So here is my Reusable Teacher Planner! 

It can be used over and over again! It is 8 x 10 in size for plenty of room to write!

I left the months and dates out and you can add them in each year to make it work every year! 

It includes 5 different cover options! 

It has extra pages like supply list, reading list, schedule and curriculum, grading chart, grade tracker, and attendance tracker!

It also includes monthly and weekly pages that are ready to print on front and back of the paper! 

You add the months and dates so that you can reuse it year after year!!

I will forever be using this planner! 

You can check it out at my Teacher Pay Teacher Store!!

Cleaning, Cleaning, Cleaning

Cleaning is absolutely the thing I hate to do most. I also do not like my house to be dirty. So I guess it goes together and must be done! 

I find myself all over the place when it comes to cleaning and sometimes it feels like I make more of a mess than I plan to, because I start in one spot and then I go to another and never finish the spot before.

So a schedule was definitely in my future if you catch my drift. 

My schedule needed to be short enough for each day that I could make it all happen. I added things for certain days on the one I printed. I put mine up on my bulletin  board next to my computer so it would be a reminder.

You can download it HERE. 

It includes the one I made up for myself with designated areas for each day and also a blank copy for you all to make your own cleaning schedule! 

Do you feel that it is easier to have specific things to clean each day or do you just do whatever you see first?

Leave a comment and I may get a Monthly Cleaning Schedule or Challenge (for deep cleaning) going for all of us if I see enough interest. 

Gettin' on Schedule!

One thing I have lacked for awhile is having a weekly routine. I know I have quite a bit of down time but I always feel like I have so much to do each day and no time to do it in. Insert making a schedule!

This schedule needed to include time for me to do my online classes, clean house, make sure the boys had time to do their chores, and have plenty of time to spend time with my family. 

As you can see it hangs next to my computer as that is where I spend most of my time whether it be blogging, school, or just me time. It is a constant reminder of what I need to be doing. 

So far it has helped tremendously and I have found plenty of time in the evenings for family time and several hours in the morning that I can sit and play with the boys. 

Now for the fun part! I made a blank version for you all to use also!

Download it HERE.

What types of things would you use this to schedule into your daily life?

Are you ready for some Football??

or

How about a Sale? 

My Store is on Sale for Superbowl Sunday Only!!! 

Use Code SUPER at Checkout to get a Total of 28% off!

Click HERE to go to my Store!

Also while your at my store check out my new Shapes Learning Pack! 

Shapes Covered

Circle, Diamond, Hexagon, Octagon, Oval, Pentagon, Rectangle, Square, Star, Trapezoid, Triangle

Activities Included

Posters

Flashcards

Shape Word Tracing Pages

Blank Shape Tracing Pages

Roll and Graph

Patterns

Shape Review

Enjoy Shopping! 

Hope you find lots of great resources on TPT tomorrow!

Halloween Learning Pack

Since Halloween is next month I felt the need to come up with some fun activities for Dylan! 

So that means some new fun for y'all too!

It includes some items from my Halloween Tot Kit (no longer free) and a lot of new fun activities! 

You can check it out HERE!


Linking up at:

Primer Dolch Sight Word Read, Build, and Write

We are working on sight words in our house with Austin and Dylan. So to make it a little more fun I created another set of Dolch Sight Word Read, Build, and Write cards. 

You can get the first set (Pre-Primer) HERE

And here is the newest set (Primer)

It includes 52 words

all
am
are
at
ate
be
black
brown
but
came
did
do
eat
four
get
good
have
he
into
like
must
new
no
now
on
our
out
please
pretty
ran
ride
saw
say
she
so
soon
that
there
they
this
too
under
want
was
well
went
what
white
who
will
with
yes

You can get it HERE

and it is on sale through Sunday 9/23 for 2.90!

So go pick it up before it goes up in price!

Circle Time Journal

We have started school officially today! 

I wanted to share a little about what we started today with focusing on our Circle Time. 

This is where we start our day. We sing songs, read a book, do Calendar, talk about our focuses of the day such as Letter, Number, Color, and Shape. And we have one focus on a topic, like today's was "What makes you special?" and we talk about it. 

To go along with our Circle Time I wanted something that would help prolong this time just a little bit and to also reiterate on our key points of the week. 

Each day after Circle Time.

He will start with writing his name at the top. 

( I am pretty proud of where he is with this as he has never done this before)

Next we determine what we had just said was the Day of the Week and he colors in the appropriate rectangle. 

Then I write the month as he is not at that point yet and he fills in the number of the date for that day. 

Then we discuss what our letter, number, color, and shape of the week are and he fills them in on each box on the paper. 

Then we discuss what we talked about was the weather outside and he colors in the square that goes with the weather that day. 

Here is the final page from today. 

I have the pages printed and hole punched to fit in a binder with the cover that is in the printable I will share below. 

This will be a daily journal that we can look back on and review with at the end of the year. 

You can get these printables for free HERE or HERE.

I know there are many versions of these printables out there but I needed to make something that went with our Circle Time exactly so I hope you all Enjoy this printable! 

Basic Learning Pack

My first Learning Pack is ready! I have been working very hard at this as I wanted something that covered a lot of the basics but didn't really have a theme. I wanted it to be something that we could use over and over again through out the school year. 

It has 50 pages plus ideas and tips for using it!

Included:

Alphabet match

Flash cards

Word cards

Numbers

Counting

Prewriting Practice

Sorting Colors

Shapes

Size Sorting

Sentence Practice

Addition

Subtraction

Missing Numbers

Count by 2's, 5's, and 10's

Plenty to use during the school year for Preschool, Pre-K, or Kindergarten! 

You can get it HERE 

It is on sale for $4.50 for 8/29-8/31 

(sale price shows on page of product)

 Returns to $6.00 September 1st! 

It will go great with my Alphabet and Number Tracing Pages!

Enjoy! 

Hey Diddle Diddle Nursery Rhyme Preschool Pack

It has been awhile since I have made a preschool pack. This pack is not near as big as my usual ones as we are only using it as a mini-unit this year. I am introducing nursery rhymes to Dylan one a month or so as he memorizes them. Our first one is Hey Diddle Diddle. So I figured a nice set of printables would go great with it to help with his memory and to keep the key parts fresh to him.

The pack contains nine pages.

Included:

Nursery Rhyme Page

Alphabet Letters

Numbers

Prewriting Practice

Patterns

Tracing Letters C and D

Which One is Different?

You Can Download it HERE or over at Teachers Pay Teachers for Free

Enjoy!

Back to School

It is officially the first day of school here at our house. Austin has headed to school and Dylan has started school at home for this year.

Austin is in 1st grade and Dylan is in Pre-K.

Each year we take a back to school picture and this year I wanted a sign that showed what grade they were in.

So I made some up!

And now I am sharing them with you all!

You can download them HERE

Enjoy!

When do you all start school?

Linking up at:

Alphabet and Number Poster

As I have said in the past few posts I am working on redoing our school room before we start in the middle of August. So as I create things for our classroom I am sharing them here for anyone that wants to use them. 

This week I worked on a couple of posters or what some will call pictures. I had seen huge walls of alphabet letters which was my inspiration but since I don't have that much room I went with a simple poster instead. 

Download the posters HERE

The posters are 8x10 so you can print them at home or like I am going to do have them printed at our local Walmart. Then I will frame them to go on our school room wall! You will see them in our classroom preview in just a few weeks! 

Hope you enjoy them! 

Classroom Center Labels

Since so many of you liked my Classroom Labels at the beginning of the week. I decided to make some Center Labels that can be used in your home school or public school classroom! 

Here is a preview of a few that I made up.

To see them all check them out HERE

The download includes eight pages. Seven pages with writing on them and one that is blank.

Enjoy!

Classroom Labels

As you can see there has been a little makeover on the blog! The colors are from the classroom decor that I am using this year in our home school classroom. It is called Dots on Turquoise from Creative Teaching Press. I hope you all like it as much as I do!

To keep with the color scheme for my classroom I made up some Classroom Labels that went with the color scheme. 

You can download them HERE

Enjoy!

Weekly Lesson Planner

I know it has been forever since I have shared any type of home school printable with y'all. Since I am working on planning for next year I wanted a nice new planner that matched and was pretty. So I made my own. I hope y'all like it! I made the Cover separate from the pages as I figured y'all would want to have the simplicity of printing the pages several times and not having to worry about the Cover. 

Click images below for pdf page.

Binder Cover Sheet

Weekly Planner (10 pages)

I am going to start working on some new Tot Kits, too. I realized I have missed designing stuff for y'all!

Color of the Week: Yellow

Here is our 2nd color of the week worksheets!

This weeks color is Yellow!

 

 (click image)

Enjoy!

Color of the Week: Red

I am going to start including some Kindergarten themed worksheets. So to start that I am going to do a color of the week each week. I will also be posting other worksheets each week that go with different parts of Kindergarten. These worksheets can be used with younger kids as well, just use your own judgment on what will work for your child.

Our first color of the week is Red. 

Click image to download

( Sorry its still at 4shared as I am experiencing a few issues with using my site so far, hope to have it fixed to make downloads easier soon)

Enjoy!

Number's 11 - 20 Tracing Papers

Can now be bought in a set with numbers 1-20 HERE

This set contains number 11-20 tracing papers only! 

If you are looking for Numbers 1-10 you can find them HERE

Enjoy!

Number Mats 11-20

I was asked if I had any printables that were for numbers 11- 20. So I had been meaning to get these done! Here is the 2nd set of my number mats that cover 11-20.

(click image to download)

This set only has 5 pages as I love to conserve paper in any way I can. So just print them and cut in half.

If you are looking for Numbers 1-10 Number Mats you can find them HERE

Enjoy!