Inexpensive Ways To Teach Your Children At Home

Free (or inexpensive) ways to teach your child at home.

Whether you are homeschooling your child or simply interested in working with your child at home to help get him or her ready to start school, the internet is a wonderful resources of free (or inexpensive) materials.

1) The most cost-effective way to help your child learn at home is by taking advantage of the sheer quantity of free printable worksheets available on-line.  For the cost of blank paper and printer ink, you can print an endless supply of worksheets on a variety of topics all tailored to meet your child’s exact skill level and ability.

The challenge is finding the good worksheets, which can feel like hunting for a needle in a haystack. For example, lots of worksheets seem educational at first glance, especially with headlines that sound educational like “Handwriting practice” or “Learn colors.”  However, once you look at them, you will discover they are more like coloring pages than true learning worksheets.

When looking for free printable worksheets to print for your child, start with narrowly tailored searches.  For example, the search “free worksheets” will return thousands of results.  However, 95% of those results will be totally irrelevant for you, either because they are geared towards children older or younger than your child or because they focus on a topic that you are not interested in working on with your child.  Instead try searching for “visual discrimination worksheets for kindergarten” or “third grade math practice.”  The more you are able to tailor your search, the more relevant the results will be for you and your family.

Once your find a site with printable worksheets that are appropriate for your child’s age and skill level, bookmark it!  If you liked one set of worksheets the site offered, chances are you will like other worksheets that site has too.  And bookmarking it when you see it will save you the trouble of trying to remember the website’s address.

2) Find the free game sites.  The internet is jam-packed with “game” sites.  For most parents, helping your child learn to play Tetris or Freecell is not high on your to-do list.  But, there are a handful of sites that offer free educational games that will help your child learn important information like the letters of alphabet, introductory spelling, visual discrimination, and many others.

Some of my favorite sites for quality educational materials, games and worksheets are www.starfall.com, www.schoolsparks.com, and www.pbskids.org.  Each site offers free, age-appropriate games and activities for any school-aged child.  Starfall and PBSKids do offer a fee-based program on their site in addition to the free areas, but they offer plenty of free games to keep you and your child interested.

3) Shop Amazon like a pro.  When I first started teaching (in the 1970, gasp!) specialty teacher stores were the only place a teacher could find appropriate materials like ergonomic pencil grips, child-sized scissors, magnetic letters, and other common teaching tools.  Today, all of these materials are available on Amazon for a fraction of the price I used to pay at teacher’s stores!

For example, a quality pair of child-sized scissors is less than $4 or an ergonomic pencil grip (my favorite is called “the claw”) is $5.  For younger children, “crayon rocks” are a wonderful way to help children learn the proper pencil grip and you can buy an entire bag for around $5.50.

Helping your child prepare for school can be fun.  And doing it without breaking the bank is even better!

Renee Abramovitz is a retired preschool and kindergarten teacher.  After retiring in 2008, Renee launched www.schoolsparks.com.  The website is devoted to the idea that all children can start school prepared to succeed.  On the site, Renee offers a free kindergarten readiness test parents can take to see if their kids are ready to start preschool or kindergarten, hundreds of free printable kindergarten worksheets to help children develop critical skills, and countless activity suggestions for simple games and activities parents can do at home with their children.