We’re not a worksheet kind of family. At all. So when we were offered a month’s free membership with abcteach, I wasn’t excited. I thought it was just some massive, boring worksheet factory. Dutifully I began to explore the site so that I could write a review… and what I found thrilled me. There’s a LOT at abcteach that will work for our family.
When our review membership ran out, we bought a year-long membership. The children wanted it for the crafts, clip art, and border paper. I wanted it, too—for the maps, handwriting sheet generator, French vocabulary word search generator, and more.
Let me tell you more about abcteach. It is a site full of downloadable worksheets, clip art, templates, teaching aids, and activities of all sorts. Here are some examples (I’ve added my comments in brackets):
The abctools Section contains worksheet generator lists and options
- Handwriting (I can input the children’s Bible memory work so they can practice two things at once, rather than using $10 handwriting workbooks with sentences that are irrelevant to their other learning)
- Frequently misspelled words (and I can use my children’s personal lists as well)
- Interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, compound words
- Many French vocabulary topics (very helpful)
Art and Music
- Paper bag puppets with templates for different animals, occupations, holidays
- Art projects (great, including illuminations)
- Art quotes
- Lots of craft projects
- Paper beads (Neat for preschool and kindergarten, which is in our past now. Sigh!)
- Paper roll pals (based on toilet paper tubes) great for making figures of Shakespeare characters to keep them all straight while reading the plays.
- Music: instrument board game, note board game, vocabulary cards
Clip Art (black and white, color, or grayscale)
Barnyard, colors, awards, animals(realistic and comic), flags, fractions, maps, money (including Canadian coins—yippee!)….
Homeschool
- Report cards, trackers,
- Why abcteach is good for homeschool
- field trip forms and evaluations
- book reports
- gardening, bird watching and pet project planners, reports, notes
Middle School/Junior High
- Kipling’s If, and more literature
- Language arts assessment (rubrics for writing)
- reading (how to write poetry)
- book units on many good books
- science (red cabbage indicator experiment, all ages)
- geography (map skills, report planner)
- templates (including Power Point)
- thinking skills
- frequently misspelled words
- writing (composition: how to write, etc; very good)
- writing prompts
- Shakespeare quotation bookmarks
Science
- Great force and motion booklet (under ‘physics’)
- Chemistry: periodic table, excellent section on crystals (We’re going to make a crystal garden like I did when I was a kid. That was so much fun!)
- Electricity
- Human body
- Simple machines
- Solar system diorama, planet bookmarks, and a booklet about the phases of the moon (to go with our Little Misses’ astronomy course)
- Weather graphs
- Labeled and unlabeled diagrams of cells, ants, elephants, wolves, frogs, and much more
Social Studies includes everything from maps and flags to economics, history, and community helpers….
I’m going to stop listing things right here because, really, it’s more efficient for you to go look for yourself; 5000+ of the 35,000+ pages are available on the free site, and you can also see the titles of the member-only pages.
There’s so much that you could spend hours on the site without seeing it all. However, everything is sensibly organized in various categories and cross referenced so it’s easy to find. If you have something specific in mind, the search feature will find it, if abcteach has it. If the site doesn’t have it yet, just ask, and there’s a good chance that what you want will soon available since the company welcomes suggestions for new projects.
This video shows some of the features of the site. Note that there are also abctools to generate worksheets of all sorts across your curriculum, and they come with tutorials. I found the worksheet generators a bit tricky, so the tutorials are very helpful.
A weekly newsletter lists seasonal materials as well as new materials that have been added that week. Here’s a small fraction of the topics that have been added since we got our membership just over a month ago:
- A hundred board and tiles,
- early years rebus writing materials,
- Australian flags,
- bookmarks with quotes from Shakespeare,
- long and short vowel posters,
- a poster with the text of In Flanders Fields,
- report forms,
- Montessori materials.
Our Opinions
I think this site would be valuable to most homeschoolers with children below grade 8. An energetic mom on a budget could use library books and this site to cover all possible subjects (including most math) with as many worksheets, projects, maps, and goodies as her children could use. It does take time to look at the site and learn to use the different tools, but that is time well-spent.
On the other hand, if you already have all the worksheets, maps, spelling information, and so forth that you need, and if no one in your family likes crafts, then this won’t work for you. But I’d check the site before making that decision, if I were you. Recall that I wasn’t at all interested either, until I started to explore.
What does an abcteach membership include? Access to all 35,000+ pages, use of all the abctools, and a weekly newsletter to tell you what new features have been added. All this is available for $40 US a year or $70 US for two years.
To see how much other homeschooling families enjoy this site, please visit the Homeschool Crew blog.
Disclosure Policy: As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, I received a free one month membership in abcteach.