Freebies I've actually used this month: may 2016

A few weeks ago, I started this series about the freebies I'm actually using. It can be a bit overwhelming to look at the selection of free resources online, so I wanted to help get the word out for the ones we actually use.

We have been working on a large unit study of continents and animals for a few months. We do most of our study through books, visits to the zoo, Wild Kratts, and documentaries; but I found this sample from Mercedes Merrell to add to our science notebooks. I like the picture part of it well enough. A couple of the amphibians looked a little more like reptiles, but they were close enough. I didn't love some of her wording choices for the characteristics chart, but we made it work. An unexpected benefit of this activity was seeing Zeke step up to help his siblings correctly sort the animals.

Quinn (5) finished working her way through This Reading Mama's Reading the Alphabet this month. When we first started, she did each of the activities, but as she learned more of the sight words, she wanted to move faster. Quinn loved the books, rhyming mats, and syllable cards, so as soon as we completed those activities, she wanted to move on to the next lesson. I did print everything though, because I plan to use the program with my younger kids as their first formal lessons.



After finishing Reading the Alphabet, we moved right into This Reading Mama's Learn to Read. The Learn to Read program isn't entirely free, but she offers enough of it free to suit Quinn's needs. The books are a perfect continuation of the Reading the Alphabet program, but speeds up the pace a little by introducing two new sight words per book. The first three books in each short vowel unit focus on a word family and the forth book is a review. As of writing this post, Quinn has only used the -AT, -AD, and -AN family books. I'm purposely trying to take these slow and really work on each of the word families as we go.
Aside from the activities that come with the books, I'm using these roll and read word family worksheets that I made.

Quinn and I are working on counting to 100. She can count to twenty nine pretty well, but after that her speech delay makes things difficult. We just started using these skip counting by 10s puzzles by Klever Kiddos that should help her solidify the names of the tens places. I also found this "I can" game from One Stop Teacher Shop that has the player filling in the blanks on the number line, but she has not wanted to play yet. 

Last, but not least, we used this Memorial Day emergent reader. It made a good introduction to Memorial Day and why and how we celebrate it. It's interactive, so the kids can personalize it.

Did you use any fabulous freebies this month?