Home schooling can be expensive and difficult to implement, especially on a tight budget. If money is tight, homeschool worksheets that you can get for free can take the place of a textbook. The worksheet will be able to teach pretty much the same things that a textbook will, and yet you wont have to spend hundreds of dollars on books. Although some worksheet resources charge a small fee, you will be able to access thousands of printable worksheets that you can use for homeschooling. Different worksheets are available for different areas of study at home. If you know what your child will be learning for the year, you can already find worksheets for homeschooling on that particular topic.
It is amazing the difference in effort you will get from worksheet to worksheet. Granted the amount of effort may vary immensely from year to year depending on the group of students you have. However for the most part, when a worksheet is needed to help drill down a procedure, standard, or lesson, its effectiveness can and will vary. Therefore it is our job as the teacher to make sure that when we need to utilize a worksheet, we provide the students with one that is as inspiring as can be. Times are different these days. Kids are growing up in a world of microwaves, fast food chains, Nintendo, Wifi, iPads, along with a ton of other technical marvels. When I was growing up we didnt have home computers let alone PlayStation to entertain ourselves. Handheld camcorders were barely coming to the retail market by the time I was in 8th grade, but still a long ways away from the YouTube and Facebook arena we now see today. Times were extremely different back then and so was school.
However, caution must be taken into account when review is repeatedly covered in your classroom. You do not want your students to become bored or frustrated with the repetition. Another important point I keep in mind is that I never want this regular math review time to take up and hour of class time. I want it to be quick but effective. This is not instructional time, but time for the students to review material they have already learned. In my 5th grade classroom, we use a math review series thats engaging and entertaining at the same time. In essence they are simply halfpage handouts with ten standards based math problems woven into a special picture or exciting scene. Remember, I want to keep the math review time quick, but effective.
