Good Sites for Homeschool Kids and Teachers! Good sites for kids, a site for education, learning, school, homeschool, teachers, and parents. Math, maths, science, language arts, reading, writing, art, music, lesson plans, social science, health, nature, history, geography, family friendly.

Homeschool Sites

This page is one small part of Good Sites for Kids!

Now at http://www.goodsitesforkids.com too!

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"The Prairie is My Garden" by Harvey Dunn. You may order a copy from the South Dakota Art Museum by clicking on the picture.

There's quite a bit of home school (or "homeschool") material on the web. For more info, Google "home school". This page is here to support you Homeschooling folks. Also, please have a look at our Teachers and Parents section for even more goodies! If you guys aren't "teachers and parents," who is? Our main site contains our listing of good educational kid sites for you to check out. NOTE: We're going to delete school sites from this section, but they'll still be in School Sites, never fear.

4Kids Games Various good math and language arts games. "4Kids is teaming with Arcademic Skill Builders, who develop online games that offer a fun approach to learning math, language arts, vocabulary and thinking skills. " We found these to be loud, fast, and good.

A to Z Home's Cool Homeschooling A large site worth investigating. Written with a focus on the parent just beginning to home school. Subjects and ideas listed A to Z. Looked good to us when we checked it out.

Activity Village Here's a site from the UK that will help out parents and teachers. "Welcome to Activity Village, where you will find coloring pages, home school resources, educational resources, kids crafts, puzzles, printables, Sudoku for kids and much, much more ... Click on the menu bars above to explore over 3000 pages of activities to help you keep your kids busy!" Tons of coloring pages! The site has a popup to start, x it out or just subscribe.

Afterschool Training Toolkit "Use these research-based practices, sample lessons, video examples, and resources to support academic enrichment in afterschool." Valuable helps for literacy, math, science, arts, technology, homework, AND professional development for anyone doing organized after school programs for kids. From the National Center for Quality Afterschool. WGBH Boston, the revered PBS station, is also involved in this. This is a pretty useful site for grownups.

Alfy is a commercial edutainment site with good ed games and activities, as well as fun timewaster games for when you need to do that. Well known and used by kids and teachers for years.

Apples4theteacher.com - A Primary Website " We are adding more educational resources for teachers and kids (preK-grade 6) every day. Excuse our 'dust' as we move into high gear! Our site includes interactive learning games, quizzes, and worksheet generator tools by subject (creative arts, foreign languages, language arts, math, science, social studies), articles, literacy coloring pages and more."

Arcademic Skill Builders has math and word games ready to play online. You may recognize some games from the '80s and '90s here. Seem to remember playing them on TI99s and Apples, and they are still good for today! Worth your time to look these over.

Artists Helping Children "Children & Art Resources for the Budding Child Artist" Tons and tons of arts and crafts resources for kids! There should be something in here for whatever you have in mind.

BBC Skillwise "Improve your English and maths with Skillswise. Factsheets, worksheets, quizzes and games to help improve your skills." From one central location, you can access all the BBC Schools quizzes! Also has a Tutor Center with lesson plans, tracking sheets, and more. Links to a Games page with 50 MORE math(s) and literacy activities. Thank you, BBC.

Baldwin Project is a large collection of public domain literature for children. This includes everything from about 1880 to 1922. There is some pretty good stuff in here, all online. One example is the original Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Kipling, with the original illustrations, part of the Jungle Book (which is also in here). Thousands of stories and hundreds of books are included. A real treasury! Warning: Please remember, the world 100 years ago was quite different. Better in some ways, worse in others. Some people would now label some of these works as racist, violent, too religious, etc. You are the adult. Read them first. It's still a wonderful collection of "kid lit" and we are happy to include it here.

BooBah from the UK. This site is for preschool folks. Lots of color and sound. Good fine motor skills training, using a mouse. Windows users will need to teach the difference between left and right clicking, though. Educational Freeeware has an excellent writeup on them here, with screenshots.

Busy Teachers' Web site K-12 "This Site is designed: (1) to provide teachers with direct source materials, lesson plans / classroom activities with a minimum of site-to-site linking, and (2) to provide an enjoyable and rewarding experience for the teacher who is learning to use the Internet." With 23 categories and several (or more) sites in each, this site will help teachers and parents.

Cal Ripken. Sr. Foundation This site is a curriculum guide for middle school. It uses baseball and softball based activities/lesson plans to cover health, mathematics, and physics. All activities are PDF file downloads. There is quite a lot of good "stuff" in here! Here is a chance to get your kids up and moving outdoors. Take along a clipboard, stop watch, calculator, etc. and have fun!

Campaign for Real Beauty "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does." Parents: You NEED to see this site! This site seeks to educate you and your daughters about mass media beauty industry brainwashing. Your daughter does not need all these cosmetics. Warning: Adults should watch the "Onslaught" video FIRST, in case you decide it would be too intense for your girls. We think this is a "good site," and that it addresses a serious social problem. You decide if this site is OK for your kids. Please understand, we're not listing this in any "kids" section of our sites. (thanks Kayla)

Childsplay "is a suite of educational games for young children." 14 games in all. We've used these with 5 - 8 year olds and the games are excellent! Free to you (GNU-GPL licensed) and ready to download and install. Another excellent effort from an independent programmer, courtesy of Sourceforge.

Children's Books Online - The Rosetta Project Said to be the largest collection of illustrated antique books online! Oodles of stories indexed by reading level. Click on To the library under the yellow Rosetta wagon.

Classroom Resources from the National Science Foundation. "...a diverse collection of lessons and web resources for classroom teachers, their students, and students’ families. Materials are arranged by subject area to help you quickly find resources in your interest area, and then use them to create lesson plans or at-home activities."

Coloring for kids Free, printable coloring book pages ! You can choose from 1000's of printable coloring pages. Coloring pages for children of all ages with drawings to print and color. A large selection of colorings so your children can find their favorite cartoons . More than 10,000 printable coloring sheets.

Curriki The Global Education & Learning Community. "At Curriki, the sole mission is to educate. By building a world class learning environment that is community developed and supported, and publishing it for free on the Web, Curriki works to ensure that anyone, from anywhere can participate. This is about No Child, Parent or Teacher Held Back. This is about delivering access to free, quality curricula so that kids can go as fast as they can." You truly owe it to yourself to investigate this site.

CPM home page, in case you need it. Teachers and parents should google "CPM" to get a fair and balanced idea of why so many educators and other parents are unimpressed. Our own opinion is that students need a firm grounding in the fundamentals (for example, knowing their math facts/times tables/terminology) before venturing into group learning and constructivism.

Diagramming Sentences Once upon a time, all grade school students were taught this. Like Latin, it's coming back into style in the educational community. Benefits include a better understanding of sentence structure, better parsing, better writing, and better public speaking. This page contains a decent Power Point about diagramming. This site, "Sentence Diagramming" starts at a much lower level and might be easier to understand for younger or less literate students.

Discovery Education from the Discovery Channel. Featuring Kathy Shrock's Guide for Educators, Puzzlemaker for printable crossword puzzles, clip art, Lesson Plan Library, Brain Boosters, Learning Adventures, Science Fair Central, lots more! You need to visit this site if you haven't already.

Drawing for Children is a great, very cool, free download (Windows only) from the Netherlands. It says "drawing" but it has been used in computer labs for language arts, too! You can enter text and load files from Windows Paint. "Drawing for Childen is a free drawing program for children with many nice options. The best way to learn to use it is simply to use it. There is though a document describing the use of the program. For more information, see the readme file."

Educational-freeware Check this site out!! "Welcome to www.educational-freeware.com! This site is dedicated to listings, descriptions and reviews of the best free educational software for kids and adults. Some of the software is web based (see the online section), and some is Windows software that you can download (see the downloadable section). Many of the software titles are multilingual. In order to see what titles run in your language, you can list the software by language."

Hillbilly Housewife has weekly menus, inexpensive recipes, planners, and advice for people on a budget. "The focus here is on low-cost, home-cooking from scratch. The recipes are all tested in a real kitchen. The ingredients are affordable and readily available in most areas. " This is timeless advice for young parents on a budget, and it's free.

Hoagies' Gifted Education Page The "all things gifted" page. This jewel of a site is trying to pull together all sorts of activities, ideas, and resources for gifted kids, parents, and teachers. As we all know, public schools always cut gifted funding first, so a site like this one can help a lot. They've tried to post something for every gifted kid, so there's a huge variety here.

Language Guide Want to learn alphabets and vocabulary words from other languages? "LanguageGuide.org offers free sound integrated resources for learning languages." The site features pictures of various things with written and spoken names in several languages. Words are pronounced by volunteer native speakers. Current languages are English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. Sponsored by Language Guide, a registered non-profit organization, the site is free to use but they do ask for donations. Uses QuickTime.

Lessons In Electric Circuits "A free series of textbooks on the subjects of electricity and electronics." Excellent free learning, just bring a brain and the ability to think and read. Consists of six online books: DC, AC, Semiconductors, Digital, Reference, and Experiments. Volume I starts with static electricitry and ends with explanations of capacitors and inductors. It's free, it's good, and it's on the web.

Enchanted Learning (The ZOOM sites people.) Amazing site! So much to see and do, so much to print off! You could probably run an elementary classroom and fulfill all state standards using this site's online lessons and its printable activities, if not for NCLB demands. Subscribers get tons of even more goodies to use.

Flash Cards free download game for Windows only. This is a great game. "It's a simple flashcard program that covers addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. You can select any one of the operations to practice on, or have the program mix them up. Though the default is 10, facts up to 100 are selectable. Version 3.0 includes the ability to practice fractions. A timer or a clock runs in the background, and a count of correct/incorrect answers is displayed. This program is freeware. Enjoy."

Free Rice "For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger." Over two BILLION grains donated so far (Nov 15, 2007.) Improves vocabulary! Have one student with a dictionary while another plays.

Game On! The Ultimate Wellness Challenge How to build an around the year program to educate kids in nutrition, health and physical education before, during, and after school. Includes ideas, activities, and how to set up challenges for kids. This is from Action for Healthy Kids of Skokie, Illinois, USA. Their mission statement and program layout explains it all in detail. We need this sort of site. Thanks for another one, Shelly.

Happy Healthy Songs from Sesame Street. "Listen to these great songs about eating healthy foods and keeping your body fit." Five songs (with lyrics) to reinforce the idea of eating healthy.

Homeschool.com "Your virtual home school" has links to many home school resources.

Home School Legal Defense Association Source of information concerning home school legality in different areas of the USA. Good organization to know, especially with that recent court ruling in California.

Horazio's freeware Here is a real potpourri of good download ed games, by a guy from Venice, Italy named Horazio. Among them is TurboFarm, for 5 - 7 year olds, which is an animal names matching game. There are also some excellent interactive map games to help kids learn the names of states or regions. Examples are Liberty Map to teach the names of US states, another for Greater London, one for Italy, etc. There are also games to learn Japanese characters, vector math plotters, calorie counters, and more. Your choice of English, Italian, and Spanish (one game also has Korean.) "Grazie Horazio"

Jon's Homeschool Resources From the site: "a source of neutral, non-commercial home schooling information". Says it is one of the largest and most visited home school sites. Click on Contents to begin.

KidsKnowIt Network From Utah comes this big array of sites covering elementary mathematics, astronomy, biology, dinosaurs, geology, geography, memory builders, spelling, and games. "These free resources were developed by teachers, parents, and experts from various fields to provide free learning opportunities for children all around the world."

KidsOLR Kids Online Resources has lots of online lessons covering various parts of the K-12 curriculum. Their Telling Time activity is already in our Math and Telling Time section. Way too extensive to cover it all here - go check it out.

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators "Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators is a categorized list of sites useful for enhancing curriculum and professional growth. It is updated often to include the best sites for teaching and learning." Subject access, Teacher Helpers, lists of kids sites, more.

Launch Pad: "Where Young Authors and Illustrators Take Off! is a new literary & arts magazine devoted to publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews and artwork by children ages 6-12." This looks pretty good. A place where young artists and writers can show off their work!

Math Worksheet Center "What is Math Worksheet Center? A huge K-12 math worksheets resource! 8,000+ math worksheets. Complete math explanations! Not a plain old worksheet site! We give instructions on all core K-12 math skill areas. Math Worksheets Center is home to over 8,000 K-12 math worksheets, lessons, homework, and quizzes. We also offer over 130 free math teaching and learning articles." These are on their Mathtips page. This looks like an excellent site. You will have to subscribe for a nominal fee to get the most of what they offer.

Meet Me at the Corner, "Virtual Field Trips for Kids, is a dynamic, interactive site, which encourages individual expression and participation through video submissions from children worldwide, featuring their special corner of the world. Through these video pod casts we hope to create a community of children, who learn the art of self-expression and storytelling through video." Great idea and wonderful site!

Mrs. Mitchell's Virtual School is a list of links to good and varied educational and activity sites arranged by subject and grade. We've mainly been using her Oceans links thus far. A nice collection of links to "good sites."

teaching children what to watch out for online with fun, interactive games and activities. Fun safe internet links for kids to Learn about Wizzywigs, Webville outlaws, and internet safety rules.

On-Line Math Worksheet Generator "With The Math Worksheet Site you can create an endless supply of printable math worksheets. The intuitive interface gives you the ability to easily customize each worksheet to target your student's specific needs. Every worksheet is created when you request it, so they are different every time." Free worksheets or you can subscribe for an annual fee and get lots more worksheets. Offered as a service by us with no endorsement implied.

Owl & Mouse Educational Software Great phonics software that reminds us of the old MECC Apple games of the 1980s. Free software for you to download and install, or play online. Their plug: "Help your child learn with games, software and educational activities from Owl & Mouse Educational Software. Early reading software—phonics software, alphabet games, and Dolch sight words in a fairy tale story. All of it FREE! Free online USA maps, world maps, map of Europe, map puzzles of the US, Europe, Africa, Asia, and many more. You can build your own castle and coat of arms—free downloads."

Pete's PowerPoint Station ("FREE Presentations in PowerPoint format & Free Interactive Activities for Kids") looks like a little homemade site for kids but it's HUGE inside! This site is set up with a model railroad theme. Pete's Presentations (Themes and Topics is the page title) lists 838 (yes, eight hundred thirty-eight) education topics, from ABC's to Zoo! Each Topic has links to that subject area, sometimes dozens of links. Not only PowerPoints (lots of them) but games and links to "good sites." Greta's Games has mostly academic games organized by subject. Often a dozen or more links per subject. Hannah's Homework Help Station has PowerPoints about doing research, and links to various research sites. You could spend a week looking in here! Anything you need for K-8, and some for higher schooling as well.

Saxon Homeschool Saxon is on this list because we have used Saxon material and seen it used by others. Saxon has a deserved reputation for good, straightforward 3-R stuff that works. Definitely worth a look. Also see Saxon Math online drills in our Math section.

Scavenger Hunts for Kids "Free, printable treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, and fun
games for children." These are in Word format (.doc), not pdf. The ones we looked at were nice printable sheets with instructions. These are all downloads, nothing interactive or online. Going in Homeschool and in Teachers & Parents.

Sebran's ABC - Free Software For Kids "It's never too early for your child to become familiar with letters and numbers. Sebran's ABC's colorful pictures, pleasant music, and gentle games teach letters, numbers, simple math, and rudiments of reading." Free to you under GNU license. Reviews are posted on the site. We've "field tested" Sebran with 5 - 10 year olds. The games are good, they work. Kids like them, too. Thank you to Marianne Wartoft of Uppsala, Sweden, who wrote this fine software! You can fine various good places to download Sebran, just Google Sebran.

Secular Homeschooling This is the online part of a new print magazine by the same name. Two good articles: A More Perfect Union about the trials of convincing a public college in California to enroll a homeschooled student, and The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List, about a mom who is tired of people asking rude questions. "This magazine is for any homeschooler, religious or not, who is interested in good solid writing about homeschooling and homeschoolers."

Sesame Street Still helping little ones, since the 1960s. Their site has oodles of activities about letters, numbers, coloring, music, eating healthy, and much more. Let kids click and explore! Some activities require Java or Flash. Others may be slow on Firefox.

Social Skills for Elementary Students Laura Candler's advice on teaching social skills to elementary kids basically walks you through the steps of teaching these skills. Well worth trying.

Spiders! This is a nice spider unit for lower elementary kids, with lesson plans ready to go.

StarFall A neat, phonics-intensive site for pre-k through second grade. Stories, movies, and games! Progressive levels let kids read or be read to. Every time we go to this site with K-2 kids, we find something new and great! This site WILL keep those busy little brains going for a whole computer lab session! Thanks, Tia.

Talented and Gifted - The Best Resources for Parents & Educators. Provided by the Madison, Wisconsin school district. List of links for parents and teachers of TAG students. Many school systems in America are neglecting their best and brightest students, so these links may be of some help.

Teaching Ideas for Primary Teachers Wow! "Teaching Ideas for Primary Teachers" is a big site from the UK that has lots of written out activities, lesson plans, worksheets, pdf files, etc, for the elementary curriculum. It's broken down by subject. There is great "stuff" in here. We were all impresssed by their easy prime numbers activity. Better yet, you can rate activities and leave comments - very nice for busy teachers!

Tellin' Time free download game for Windows only. "I put this together for my kids to practice reading the time off of an analog clock. It's based on a flashcard type game where an analog (12 hour) clock face displays a random time. The child is then expected to enter the "digital equivalent". A four minute timer runs in the background, and a count of correct/incorrect answers is displayed. This program is freeware. Enjoy."

Timez Attack "The Ultimate Multiplication Tables Video Game" This game is wonderful, and the base (2s-12s) version is a free download. Everything Big Brainz says is true, kids love this game. Now with a new upgraded free version!

Visual Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online Why go to Google or Wikipedia for all your info? "The Visual Dictionary Online is an interactive dictionary with an innovative approach. From the image to the word and its definition, the Visual Dictionary Online is an all-in-one reference. Search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents. Explore the Visual Dictionary Online and enrich your mind. Perfect for home, school or work. Discover a visual world of information!"

Waterford Games & Activities "Download hundreds of free games, activities, and quizzes from our website! Subject areas include animals, plants, weather, astronomy, geology, and miscellany... Simply copy materials to your desktop and print out as needed. It's that easy!"

Webster's Online Dictionary with Multilingual Thesaurus Translation "Earth's largest dictionary with 90 modern and 10 ancestral languages."

Whatcom Community College Online Math Center Twenty-one links to free math courses, more links to resources, too. Algebra, calculus, fractals, more. Mostly this is for parents, teachers, and secondary students.