Homeschooling a child demands time, commitment, and preparation.
Fortunately, parents have instant access to a vast catalog of educational resources online — virtually everything you could need for effective homeschooling is available within just a few clicks (or taps).
This includes worksheets, which offer parents and children a number of real, practical, ongoing benefits.
In this post, we’ll explore these benefits in detail and cover five free lesson plans to help you get started!
The benefits of worksheets in homeschooling your child
For a lot of parents, the decision to homeschool is about having greater control over their child’s learning.
So why would you then rely on free, downloadable worksheets to shape your lesson plans?
In truth, there are some worksheets that don’t do a lot for kids — they either don’t push them far enough, or are pitched too high for their current needs. But, if you source your worksheets from a reputable provider, there are many ways that these learning materials can aid your child’s understanding.
Worksheets engage and inspire kids
Research shows nearly 30% of school students are not engaged in their learning — an obvious impediment to their ability to retain the information being delivered.
So as a parent, it’s your job to help make their homeschool lessons as engaging and effective as possible.
And this is where worksheets come in. Worksheets promote active learning and encourage your child to take part in fun activities and exercises — an approach that’s far more likely to get information to stick, versus passively listening to you, or another teacher, read from a book.
Of course, there’s definitely a time and place to turn to textbooks, but worksheets are a simple way to make sure your child applies their learning to solve clear problems.
Quality worksheets are designed to be visually stimulating and engaging for children in the target age range. Exercises and activities are presented in an easy-to-read, accessible way, appropriate to the subject at hand.
You can talk your child through questions and tasks if they struggle to understand what they’re expected to do, but this might be unnecessary.
Worksheets help kids focus
With worksheets, kids can explore and utilize their increasing knowledge independently, as they would in a test — but they can still call upon you for help. This creates a comfortable situation, in which your child has space to independently explore their own capabilities, without facing the pressure of completing the sheet entirely on their own.
On top of this, worksheets can be used again and again to reinforce learning in challenging subjects. Tackling the same or similar worksheets multiple times over a number of days or weeks can test your child’s ability to retain information and call on it when needed.
And you can help your child solve problems and understand how they’ve done it at a comfortable pace, which becomes more difficult in public school classrooms with twenty or thirty other children to support.
With worksheets, parents can shape lessons as they wish
Worksheets help parents create a tighter structure for homeschool lessons. The fixed set of questions, activities, tasks etc., in each make it easier to direct the flow of your class.
You can start by telling your child the outline for the lesson ahead, letting them know what they’ll learn before the end, and how. Multiple related worksheets can be incorporated into a lesson, creating a logical progression from one topic to another. You can spend as much or as little time as your child needs on each sheet.
For kids, this helps lessons make sense, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Again, this ties in with our earlier point about being focused on specific tasks and applying knowledge in a practical way.
As a parent, using worksheets can make you feel more confident in your ability to follow the curriculum effectively and efficiently. You’re not creating entire lessons and activities on your own — instead, you have trustworthy worksheets to guide you.
Worksheets help reveal a kid’s understanding of a subject
Another benefit of adding worksheets to your homeschooling process is the way in which they make assessing your child’s understanding of subjects easier. You might ask them to complete the same worksheet multiple times within a few weeks or months, to measure how well they retain and increase their knowledge over time.
Comparing your child’s worksheets shows how well they have developed, and highlights potential issues — both of which can inform future lesson plans.
You’ll get to know the pace at which your child learns, how effective your teaching has been, and other important insights.
And the beauty of worksheets is their informality. Kids can become stressed when presented with a test, but simply handing them a worksheet allows you to do the same thing without the added pressure.
If your child performs well on a worksheet, this could encourage them to feel more confident in their skills and help them become more engaged by their work in the future.
Parents can access worksheets quickly and easily
Finally, worksheets are fast and simple to find online.
You can browse our extensive catalog of worksheets to find ones in virtually any subject, download them, and print them off to add to your lesson plans. It’s that quick and easy. You can do it all from your own study or living room.
This helps to cut preparation time down and makes focusing on other crucial parts of planning easier.
You’re also safe in the knowledge that the worksheets are available for you anytime you need them, so there’s no need to panic if one goes missing. Just print off another and you’re good to go!
Similarly, if your child has a question related to the current topic being covered, it’s easy to find a supplementary worksheet pack to fill in the knowledge gap.
So, now that we’ve looked at how worksheets can improve the quality of your homeschooling, let’s move on to exploring the free lesson plans you can build with worksheets.
5 free lesson plans you can build with worksheets
In this section, we’ll look at the three core subjects — English, Math, Science — and two others: Geography and Animals.
1. English
Let’s face it: English is one of the most difficult subjects to teach your child.
There’s so much to learn, so many technicalities, so many different ways to express thoughts and feelings… you may start to worry that you’re skipping crucial elements in your English sessions.
But help is at hand!
There are dozens of high-quality worksheets available to help you teach your child English in an accessible way. You’ll find everything you need to plan lessons and engage your child through fun, exciting tasks.
For one: you could build an entire four-week lesson block around verb tenses. After all, the application of past, present, and future can be tricky for kids to get their heads around — when do you say, “I have been eating spaghetti” versus “I had spaghetti to eat”, for example?
As adults, we can often forget the grammatical rules we learned as children. We simply apply them to our writing as second nature. Here, worksheets on verb tense can really help facilitate how you teach English grammar, and how well your child develops their understanding.
You can move through the worksheets in a verb tense bundle one-by-one, building on each concept as you go. For example:
- Start with simple tenses in one session
- Then move onto continuous tenses
- Then check your child’s understanding by asking them to fill in the gaps in a verb tense table
- And return to any parts of the tense structure they didn’t quite understand
By the time your child has completed the worksheets, they’ll have a solid understanding of verb tenses and how to apply them in both written and spoken communication.
2. Math
Math can be a tricky subject area for many young children. But having the right learning materials can make all the difference.
Our Math section is packed with high-quality worksheets, covering Addition, Numbers, Money, and more. Money, in particular, is crucial for handling cash and finances as an adult, and the sooner children start exploring it, the better.
You could build several lessons around money — including counting money — and a 28-page Counting Money worksheet pack is available on our site, with Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced levels for different age and skill groups.
These worksheets present kids with interesting challenges, placing money in context to specific situations, such as: “Tommy wants to donate 10 dollars to charity. The charity organization is only accepting donations in quarter coins. How many coins will Tommy give so that 10 dollars are donated to charity?”
Counting money worksheets include visual elements to illustrate questions and help young children learn coin values. The Counting Money pack features 12 worksheets, separated equally between Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced — everything you need to plan your math lessons and get your child on the road to solving mathematical problems independently.
3. Science
You may feel daunted at the prospect of teaching your child subjects which you struggle to understand yourself — and science has to be at the top of the list for many of us.
Part of the problem is the sheer breadth of science. It encompasses so much, from biology and astronomy, to weather and gravity.
KidsKonnect’s massive selection of worksheets offers all the resources you need to create informative, fun lessons covering all areas of science. Natural World, Earth Sciences, Chemistry, Physics, and more are all included.
For example, if you were to look at the solar system, there’s a dedicated pack of worksheets to try. It includes 21 worksheets for children between grades 1 and 5, featuring cut-outs, engaging activities, and printables to make your learning active. The solar system is an exciting subject, and learning about it should be too!
The pack includes:
- Solar System Facts
- Constellations Guide & Draw Your Own
- Order of the Planets Flap Book
But why stop there? Your entire science curriculum for the months ahead can be based around these worksheets.
By starting with a more general overview of the solar system — naming the planets, learning their order, understanding constellations — you can then drill down in more detail on each planet in turn.
Once you’ve covered each of the planets in enough detail, you can also cover other celestial topics, such as comets, asteroids and even what the early astronomers thought of space. With dedicated workpacks for each of these topics, your lesson plan will simply build itself!
So work through all these worksheets with your kid, and they’ll be making quantum leaps through the science curriculum in no time at all!
4. Geography
Geography matters. Especially when social media has made our world smaller than ever.
And this is why we picked Geography to be the next of our free lesson plans. You can download worksheets covering everything from Natural Wonders and Landmarks/Sights to Countries.
Want to teach your child about one of the most recognizable American landmarks, Mount Rushmore? Our Mount Rushmore worksheet pack has you covered, with 22 pages to inform your lessons.
The bundle of worksheets includes:
- Mount Rushmore Facts
- Father of Mount Rushmore
- American Presidents
- In Numbers
- American Landmarks
- Avenue of Flags
- Hall of Records
- Building Vocabulary
- Mount Rushmore Webbing
- I Nominate
- Time to Travel
As usual, these worksheets are designed to make learning stimulating and dynamic, with lots of eye-catching visuals and accessible language.
5. Animals
And last but not least: Animals.
Learning about other lifeforms, and the sheer diversity of species on our planet, helps open kids’ eyes to the beauty of the natural world. It also helps lay the foundations for potential careers as veterinarians, zookeepers, biologists, or any number of related areas.
(It may make them more engaged with looking after your household pet, too!)
One of our worksheet packs focuses on the great white shark — a creature which is endlessly fascinating to adults, let alone children! Our Great White Shark worksheets bundle includes 11 worksheets, ideal for creating fun lessons that take the scare-factor out of sharks and reveal what amazing apex predators they are.
Starting with wider themes, then narrowing down to shark-y specifics, the pack covers:
- Great White Shark Facts
- Prehistoric Sharks
- The Largest Shark
- Parts of a Shark
- A Shark’s Life
- Shark Truths
- Under the Sea
- Solving Fast
- The Case of “Jaws”
- Protecting the Sharks
These are packed with fascinating facts on sharks and colorful pictures, to help stimulate your child’s imagination and boost their interest.
Support your child’s homeschool education with free worksheets and a bumper lesson plan from KidsKonnect
As you can see, there are real benefits to introducing worksheets into your child’s learning activities.
Bundles are available for every subject, empowering you with the teaching resources you need to create strong lessons and nurture your child’s growing understanding of their abilities, the world around them, and their confidence to solve everyday problems.
Our extensive library of KidsKonnect worksheets is simple to navigate and downloading is easy. Take the time to work through them with your child and make sure they engage with the material.
With a Basic membership, you’ll have download access to all our quality worksheet samples. But for the next step up, our Premium subscription will save you hours of prep time with at least 10 editable worksheets per pack, designed to flex to your child’s brain while engaging their specific needs.
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