Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Mike Farris:
This week, I’ve been talking to my daughter Christy Shipe about finding homeschooling resources that are inexpensive, or better yet, free. Christy, what do you do about expendable curriculum, like math or spelling workbooks? Give our listeners some examples of those kind of resources that you use.

Christy Shipe:
There are so many free resources for math online, on the internet. If you have a computer and a printer, you can go to sites like freemathworksheets.com or eduplace.com and get hundreds of downloadable free math work sheets. I love those sites.

For spelling, I’ve also found a lot online. You can find complete spelling lists organized by week for every grade. And then what I do is supplement those lists with a great reference book that was given to me by another homeschool mom, called The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists. And so I just formulate my spelling lists from that, my girls write their weekly lists in a one-dollar notebook, and then I create activities for them to do each day with their words—like categorizing them by grammar rules, or I use free online tools like puzzlemaker.com to create crossword puzzles or word searches. So my spelling costs about one dollar per child, per year.

Mike:
That would be spelled c-h-e-a-p. Thanks so much, Christy. Until next time, I’m Mike Farris.