If you’re looking for a free online curriculum for your K-5 child, look no further than Lesson Pathways. The people who set up this site did an excellent job to not only provide quality information, but the site looks great!

To access the content of the site, you must register for a free account. Once signed on, you can register each child to whom you want to assign some work to; this allows you to later check off work as it has been completed.

Each 36-week unit is called a Guided Journey. Once a subject, is selected, you can then select which grade level you wish to assign your child. You can chose from Science, History, Reading and Phonics, Math, Language Arts, Life Skills, and Travel & Field Trips.

A Guided Journey is then divided into individual Pathways, which is a one-week cluster focusing around a specific objective (such as addition facts in grade-1 math, or volcanoes in grade-3 science).

These Pathways are further separated into Stepping Stones, which are individual tasks or resources for 5 days of learning.

Are you constantly seeking out resources online for your children to watch instead of every day television? There is a reletively inexpensive way to watch anything you want.  The girls and I just finished watching a National Geographic episode about the Universe and it still has my girls asking questions.

First of all, you need to have access to a site that hosts large files such as Megavideo. Megavideo is a site that hosts 3-rd party videos (like YouTube) but isn’t designed to be accessed directly. It CAN be free, but if you want the full benefits it has to offer, you need to pay for the subscription. They charge $9.95/month, or $19.95 for 3 months unlimited use.

I don’t have a TV and as such, I believe the low cost is more than worth it as I can view/let my children view specific programming without worrying about undesirable scenes or commercials.

Now that we have a source for watching the documentaries we’d like to see, we need to actually be able to find them. Megavideo does not list it’s own files for the most part. You need a secondary website to do this. TV Shack and Surf the Channel are (as far as I’ve been able to find), the best sites for finding documentary listings. Many hours have been spent in enjoyment of surfind their docs and listening to fascinating lectures.

For all the Hello Kitty fans out there, I’ve found a few gorgeous resources for colouring and activity pages.

Hello Kitty Coloring Pages is a blog that posts high-quality colouring and activity pages.

ColoringBook.info also has a good collection of Hello Kitty pages.

If your children are anything like mine, they LOVE to colour! I thought I’d take some of the effort of finding good colouring pages for them by posting the top 21 of what I consider to be the best colouring pages on the net! And since I’m a proud Canadian, I will refer to colouring pages as coloUring, and not coloring! I chose these sites after looking through dozens of links. While I can’t look through every colouring page on the net, these are the ones I found to be best based on quality, quantity and variety. If you have some good pages to contribute, please live the links in the comment section of this post. Happy colouring!

#21 A few good Winnie the Pooh Images.

#20 Cool-Coloring-Pages.com

#19 Chevron Cars the chevron cars has a nice library of cars to colour for your young car-fanatic

#18 Veggietales coloring pages

#17 Color Your Own has over 300 images for people of all ages to colour.

#16 Kids Korner

#15 The Little Artist, Inc

#14 Castles.org Castles for kids only has a few pages, but they are beautiful and intricatly detailed…great for older children.

#13 123Coloring.com has 100′s of images on almost any subject your child might be interested in!

#12 Mom’s Network Claims to have thousands of coloring pages. While some of them are of questionable quality, most are pretty good.

#11 We all know Fisher Price! They have a nice assortment of quality pages.

#10 Activity Village has lots of other printable activities as well.

#9 Coloring.ws has a nice-sized library of colouring sheets sorted by subject. If you’re looking for something specific (a certain animal, or a rainbow, for example), they should have it.

#8 Coloring-Page.net has  large selection of original colouring pages, as well as links to online colouring books

#7 Need simple pages for your child? Lil-Fingers.com should have what you need.

#6 Coloring.com Awesome site with free membership where you can save your online coloring. To print off a page, place mouse over image, right click ‘open in new tab’ within your web browser, then print your image to colour.

#5 NSSL- national severe storm lab has several educational colouring books available. CLick on a book, and beside the online colouring version, you’ll have a link to download the entire version as a pdf.

#4 DLTK Kids, a British publisher, has a large repetoire, high quality images and an easy site to navigate

#3 Free-Coloring-Pages.com has both printable and online coloring available. Ads are rather annoying, but other than that, they have good quality images and some licensed pictures such as Barney and Sesame Street

#2 Coloring-Book.info Amazing site with images from companies such as Disney and Nickelodeon. If your child is looking to colour images from his favorite movie or tv program, this is the place to go.

#1 Crayola definitely wins the #1 spot with their library of quality printable colouring and activity sheets.

…and in case all this isn’t enough, there are dozens more quality links @ Ivyjoy.com

In an effort to encourage independence in my daughters for their morning routines, I came up with a chart that I laminated and posted in the bathroom. This way, they are gently reminded of what needs to be done when they wake up in the morning.

Do you have other suggestions you’d like to share about how you help your children become independent in this aspect? Please share by leaving a comment.

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