Good Resource for Compulsory Ed.

Free Homeschooling

International Children's Library

This is an online library which offers children's books in many languages. It is a perfect tool for educating bilingual or multilingual children.

To Get Your Preschooler Ready For Kindergarten:

Do this quiz from the Nick Jr. website. Then it gives you some suggestions about how to get them ready for Kindergarten.

Arabic Numbers Videos

Yummy Free Preschool Worksheets!

TLSbooks.com I am excited with this resource. I want to start my kids with these very soon.

Kids Learning Station

Great shapes and colors worksheets.

Arabic Alphabet

Arabic Alphabet Video

Alif Ba

A Great resource of tools for learning Arabic at a beginners level.

K-12

Here is another K-12 online public school. These I will keep looking for until the day I need to enroll my boys in one.

Connections Academy

Connections Academy is an online public school that teaches K-12. It is only available in some states. I hope we are lucky enough to find such a program in the state we live in when the boys start kindergarten!

Arabic Alphabet Coloring Pages

This is a fairly basic program which provides plain Arabic letters to color. I really wanted some with pictures, but I will keep looking. They will color one Arabic letter and 1 number per week. This website also has some nice coloring pages to teach children their colors in Arabic, they have nice pictures on them. My toddlers will color about one of these per week, and I will also look around for English color-teaching pictures, so that they can learn their colors in both languages simultaneously. There are lots of cool color and alphabet teaching art and craft project ideas, but I do not think my toddlers are really ready for anything more advanced than simply coloring with (washable) crayons. Maybe next year, when they are three, we might try finger painting and other simple things. We'll see. This website also provides some great Arabic writing practice sheets which will be very useful when the time comes to teach the kids at the next level.

PBS Sprout Online

The Sprout channel is a wonderful channel which shows all of the wonderful educational cartoons. Sesame Street is great for teaching letters and numbers, Caillou and the Berenstain bears are great for character education. The sprout online website is a wonderful resource for early preschool activities like English alphabets and numbers to print and color, with some of their favorite cartoon characters on each one. The kids will color each letter, in order, then I will stick them to the wall so they can see them and repeat their names each time they look at them. They will do the same with the numbers from 1 to 20. They will do one letter and one number a week until they are finished with the entire alphabet, and the numbers from 1 to 20.

The Purpose of This Blog

The purpose of this blog is for giving myself a way to keep track of resources I find useful in getting prepared for the challenge of homeschooling my children. I have nothing against public schools or private schools. I just want to keep my children close to me for a little longer, before sending them out into the great big world. I want to find online teaching resources, as well as brainstorm ways to ensure that my children will still have some kind of interaction with other children. Perhaps through sports teams with other homeschoolers, or public library programs for children. We are a mobile family and visit many places, so providing field trips should be fairly easy for us.