Out of all my amazing homeschool finds over the years, my favorite resource for math that I have stumbled upon is North Carolina's Week by Week Essentials for math. I have used them on and off over the years and they have been such a blessing. They are great as a math supplement and, in desperate times, they have served as my main math curriculum.
The main resource of the Week by Week Essentials are the 36 weeks of supplemental math activities.
Each of the 36 weeks contains the following:
- For younger grades, a printable math game (they are really simple, but can be a lot of fun)
- A weekly Keeping Skills Sharp review sheet. I like these because as you can see, each week, they cover multiple strands (numeration, geometry, measurement, etc).
- A mental math activity
- Approximately 5-6 real life/application type problems
But there's more.
For each grade, there is a Classroom Strategies download which gives you activities and games for teaching various standards.
Grade 1 example:
Grade 6 Example:
Then there are black line masters that you can print out and use for the activities:
And then if you are into assessment instruments, there is an indicators list that you can use to assess mastery of concepts:
And a profile assessment where you can track the mastery of concepts.
As you can see, there's quite a lot of resources here, for grades K-8.
Now, where can you get all this great stuff? Here are two options:
1. You can visit the NC site and download all of these items. A drawback is that you have to download all of the different components separately for each grade. But you can mosey over there and select whatever you want, if you don't want/need everything.
If you are pressed for time, try option 2.
2. Download ALL the materials for each grade in their own PDF file (one file per grade). As I said, I've used these for years and through all our moves, I would lose my floppy disk or CD (yikes, old right?) and would have to return and redownload everything. So one year, I took the time to compile all the materials for each grade into their own PDF files.
Now each download is over 400+ so here's a little tip for navigating through them. I was able to add bookmarks, so you can skip to whatever you need (the 36 weekly packets or say the classroom strategies). When you open up the document, you should see a list of bookmarks in a left panel as shown. They usually come up, but if they don't, click on the little blue bookmark (shown by a red arrow) and then you see the list of bookmarks.
I cannot stress how much these resources have helped us over the years. You can use them as a supplement (they also work great for over the summer to help combat the "Summer Slide") or, if you find that you have a student that doesn't take well to math textbook work, you could try it out as your main math curriculum (you may feel a little uneasy if you yourself are used to textbooks, but I've often found for some of my boys, using these can engage them a little more than sitting them down to a textbook full of problems).
So I'm done singing their glorious praises. I hope you check them out and benefit from them as much as we have.
