6 Back To Homeschool Hacks To Make Life Easier

It's almost 'Back to Homeschool' time and I wanted to share six tips to make your transition from summer life to school life easier for your family.  If you're looking for a post about how to choose curriculum, see our post here.

1) Set A Loose Schedule for your day.  

I already talked about how to make a flexible homeschool schedule here.  Setting a rigid school-like schedule has never worked out well for us.  Instead we have a routine that can flex and bend depending on what we have to do outside of the house that day (things like sports, field trips, homeschool gatherings etc).

Sometimes the start of school is around 9:00 and sometimes 9:30 or even 10.  We don't keep a strict school schedule and we don't always do our subjects in the same order each day.  We eat lunch around noon or one and if there is still school left to complete after lunch, we finish it up.  Because we don't worry about keeping to a strict time table, it's less stressful and helps us ease back into school after summer.

Freebie Friday - Fun Addition and Multiplication Drills

Who says math has to be boring?  Today I have another freebie for you.  This time it's addition and multiplication drills.  You can print the PDF HERE.  

The idea is simple, print the page you want to practice, write the operation being practiced in the square box in the center (addition or multiplication), and then have the child perform the operation on the number in the center of the flower with one of it's petals and write the answer in the outer petal.

In the PDF there is a title page, an instructional page with examples and tips and tricks to make this exercise fun and interesting, and four pages of flower drills.  In the center of the flowers the numbers go from 1-12 and there are two flowers per number.  For each center number (1-12) there are the numbers 0-13 to practice with in the petals, with special emphasis on the numbers 7 and 9 which students often have trouble with.

Freebie Friday - Trace Worksheets

It's Friday the 13th, but instead of something awful happening I thought I'd give you a freebie to brighten your day!  Check it out.  I'd made a PDF some time ago of tracer worksheets (letters, numbers, words) for my Kindergartener to trace.  The great thing about these is that you can either print them out and they can use crayon, pencil or marker, OR you can laminate them and use them with a dry erase marker as we did.  I suggest if you laminate them to use a thicker paper when you print, print double sided, and then you have a two sided worksheet and get to save on paper and space.