Practical Homeschooling » language

Lesson Pathways: Free Online Curriculum

Laura — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:58:02 +0000

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.

Arabic Between Your Hands

Laura — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:02:43 +0000

For those of you seriously interested in learning Arabic beyond the mere basics, I strongly recommend using “Arabic Between Your Hands”. This 3-volume series was developped by for PhD’s in Saudi Arabia and of all the books I’ve seen to learn Arabic, these are by far the best.

The series assumes that you already know the Arabic alphabet and understand how to read in Arabic. You will need an Arabic-speaker to helo guide you through the lessons. I learned with these books on my own (with a good dictionnary), but occasionally needed the help of a native speaker to answer specific questions or decipher word-forms that might not have been in the dictionary.

The books are available for download here.

Enjoy!

Find Words that Begin With…

Laura — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:12:41 +0000

When your child has learned the alphabet and its sounds, it’s time to beging forming words. This set of worksheets is a great way to indirectly introduce research skills.

Choose a letter and give the corresponding page to the child. Ask the child to find words that start with that letter. He might look through books in the home, a dictionary, online…wherever he fancies to fill up his list with new words. At this stage he doesn’t have to necessarily know how to read them or what they mean–you can do that with him after he fills it in.

Thanks to Flipper for these wonderful sheets! File may be downloaded here.