School's in!

  The summer is over, leaves have started turning yellow and here in Denver the temps are already dipping into the sixties. That can only mean one thing, school's back in!  Parents and caregivers fear not, I have scoured the interwebs for resources to help your little ones with even the most obscure assignment.


I love abcya, there are sections devoted to each grade level and the site is optimized for use on mobile devices which is a big plus.

Starfall has lots of great math activities and they are aligned with Common Core standards. Speaking about said standards, teachers now have to teach math concepts in very different ways. It helps to be able to have a reliable video that can show both parents and caregivers how to work out those sums. This is why I like Khanacademy's early math page.

Coolmath has lots of math and math-based games that provide good extension activities for kids who have mastered their basic math operations and want to move on to pre algebra and so forth.

Do you have a kid who loves to spout random facts all day long? Fear not, I have a site that can satisfy even the most voracious reader-Factmonster.  There are also online quests and handouts for homeschoolers and classroom use.  Infoplease has a trove of information about the US and the links on the top of the page have info on the world at large.

Most readers will recognize the name Scholastic from the many book fairs they put on at schools. Their website also has excellent resources on all sorts of topics.  Time for kids is another one that I highly recommend as well, as it has relevant content and accessible articles on current world events.

World languages are becoming more and more useful and with the ease of global travel it helps to be able to speak a language or two or three. I like to use Noah as he is a funny, well-meaning kid who because of his struggles with Spanish gets into all kind of scrapes. He repeats words and phrases just enough so that they stick. The site has practice activities as well.  Onlinefreespanish is another site that I have used for years and it is fun for younger language learners.  Charlotte Mecklenburg Library's fantastic Storyplace is another good resource for early learning in Spanish.  The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has some excellent resources for a variety of languages for example French and Mandarin.

Learning to work with computer code is a good skill for young ones to have and there are some sites I have used with my young'uns. Code.org's site has several great resources to help kids learn the basics of coding. For those who want something that explains things in more detail try Khan Academy's Hour of Code.

Have a great school year!!