by jimmiehomeschoolmom

Many homeschoolers enjoy making lapbooks. We love them! Lapbooks are a fun way to showcase what your student has learned during a unit study.

The internet is a fantastic place to find free and next-to-free lapbook resources.

Here is a list of ten lapbooking resources:

1. Homeschool Share — Free resource with unit studies, lapbooks, & notebooking (plus a very active Yahoo group)
2. Just Call Me Jamin! - Ideas, pictures, & links
3. Lapbooks on Flickr — One family’s collection of lapbook photographs
4. Paper Dali — Great resource for printable historical paper dolls (a fabulous addition to lapbooks)
5. Homeschool Helper — Free resource with unit studies, lapbooks, & notebooking
6. Lapbook Lessons — A Christian-Run site for Free Lapbooks & Lapbook Video Lessons
7. Cereal Box Lapbook Holders — Now that you have a bunch of lapbooks, you need a frugal way to store them!
8. Enchanted Learning — This site costs $20/year, but has tons of resources and printables that are perfect for lapbooks.
9. Lapbooking 101 — Blog with lots of lapbooking “how to” info
10. Lapbook Lessons — You Tube videos on lapbooking

Does your family enjoy making lapbooks? What are your favorite lapbooking resources? Please join us at the Blissfully Domestic social network and tell us!

When her hands aren’t covered with glue from lapbooking, Angie can be found at Many Little Blessings talking about faith, family, and household management.

image source - PaperNest

Does it seem like there aren’t enough hours in the day to read/find/learn about all the things you want? Let’s face it, moms need another four or five hours added to each day just to get through all the good stuff. Well, no longer!

Welcome to the Homeschool Goodie Bag, a weekly round up of all the cool stuff you might have missed while you were too busy teaching your kids. Each Friday I’ll share a round up of the best homeschool sites, articles, and blog posts I can find just for you.

It’s Friday, grab a cup of coffee and put your feet up. Here’s your goodie bag of fun for the week.

• I hate when good stores close up! Blue Thistle Books is closing shop and having a massive clearance sale. Hurry over there now and grab some great books while you still can. Order $80 or more and you can get free shipping!
• Why is it that nearly every news story on home schooling is negative? Well no longer! CBS has a great news segment on home schoolers that spins it in a positive light.
• What would lead two boys to come up with “School is to the world, like religions are to God?” Read more about Unschooling and find out!
• Does homeschooling require state regulation? Dana tackles this tough question with logic & grace, getting to the root of the real question being asked: Are home schoolers bad parents that need to be monitored at every minute?
• There is a Home School Revolution going on in Virginia and one parent stopped by a recent home school expo to learn more. Read to learn more about why home schooling may be the future of education in Virginia.

Stop back by every Friday for another goodie bag of links you’ll want to see!

When not surfing the web for fun stuff to share Summer is hiding from her kids and blogging about life at Wired For Noise.

How can you introduce your homeschooler to the world community while increasing his/her written and verbal communication skills? There’s only one answer: teach your child to speak and understand a new language.

With a little preparation and the right tools, you don’t need to be fluent in a foreign language to teach it effectively. Here are some simple tips to help you get started:

• Head to your local library to find foreign language picture books with pronunciations. Better yet, ask the audio-visual desk if they have books on tape so that your child can hear a native speaker.
• Check out videos and movies with a bilingual approach… or, for more advanced students, subtitles.
• Look in the newspaper for local events related to holidays around the world. Attending a Cinco de Mayo event for instance, is a great way to learn Mexican songs and activities.
• Watch sports such as soccer on a foreign language television station and try to follow the commentary.
• Plan an activity with a family from another part of the world. Ask that child and his/her parent to speak in their native language for the afternoon.
• If you can’t afford to travel to another country anytime soon, visit the “Chinatown” or “Little Italy” in a nearby American city.
• Use the endless resources on the World Wide Web. For French instruction, visit http://www.parlez-vous.org. For Spanish, try http://www.espanole.org. And there’s a variety at http://www.csun.edu/~hcedu013/eslsp.html.
• Consider inviting a foreign exchange student to live in your home for a summer, six months, or a whole year.

Finally, remember that children will be most excited by language instruction if they can see it in action and put it to use. If you can provide your child with a relaxed environment in which to practice the words and phrases that he/she has learned, your child will gain the confidence necessary to pursue that language to fluency.

What are your favorite ways to incorporate culture & foreign language in your home? Come join in the discussion at the Homeschool Bliss Forum.

These and many more great tips can be found at www.Homeschool.com

Welcome to the next generation of Homeschool Hacks! I’m Katie and I am the new Editor of Homeschool Hacks. Alli is still around, she just got a promotion!

Soon Homeschool Hacks will relaunch under the amazing Blissfully Domestic Publishing umbrella headed by our very own Allison Worthington a.k.a. Mrs. Fussypants.

Homeschool Hacks will remain the fabulous repository of information you have come to expect, but we are going to focus more on our mission. Our goal is to provide you with the tips, tricks, ideas, and solutions to your everyday homeschooling problems in a fast and fun format that will keep pace with you and your busy lives.

We are currently seeking contributors! Please send all your great tips, tricks, & ideas to us (we’ll give you all the credit!) at the email link at the top right. We also want to know what you’re struggling with, what challenges you are facing as a homeschooling family. Send us your homeschooling questions and we’ll track down the hacks to make it all better.

Blessings,

Katie

by Lisa

It comes as no surprise to me that several of the Olympic Athletes are homeschoolers.  It takes a great deal of time and devotion to master a sport to Olympic perfection.

Beverly Hernandez, Homeschooling editor at  About.com interviewed homeschooled Olympic hopefuls earlier in the year.

You can have your own Olympics at home, by following the instructions of Sherri Osborne, About.com’s family crafts editor.

And finally, visit the website of the United States Olympic Committee for free downloadable educational materials for all grade levels.  Learning about the Games is timely and fun.  If only all the worlds problems could be solved through good sportsmanship.  Either way, you’ll enjoy the Unit studies on the Olympic Website.  They don’t call them Unit studies, they are classroom geared, but they’re csorr-curricular.