Thank you!!

I wanted to give a bit shout-out to all my readers, and some free printables as gifts to you – thank you for following along and reading my blog posts this year!

Here’s a quick round-up of the top posts from R.E.A.L.-World Learners from 2017, a collection of several free printables that I’ve created for my readers, and a brief summary of the journey of this blog.

Brief History 🙂

I began blogging about our homeschooling life in July of this past year (2017) using a free version of WordPress under the name “Funschooling Adventures.” I knew that I wanted to make it more than just a story of our daily life, but I wasn’t quite sure what direction I wanted to steer the ship.

Things started clicking for me when I began making learning products for my own kids. I realized I could share these resources with others and my blog could be a platform to do that. I’ve created several printables, hands-on learning activities, and ebooks that guide parents and teachers through discovery-based lessons on fundamental math concepts. I’ve enjoyed creating and sharing these over the past several months, and I have plans for several more in the coming year.

Three months into my blogging journey I decided to level up to a “real blog” so I purchased a domain name and moved my entire blog, piece by piece, over to R.E.A.L.-World Learners (this site). I wrote about my re-branding experience here and here.

Top Posts from 2017 (with several free printables for you!)

Over the past six months, I’ve written 45 posts. I’d like to highlight a few of my personal favorites here. (The lack of consistency in the image style is making my brain a little bit crazy … but this is real life here at Real-World Learners 😉 … I hope to do better this coming year creating cover images for each post.) Many of these posts include free printables for you to use with your own students or children:

1. In the initial phase of this blog, I started a “Math Monday” series where I wrote about our spontaneous math “lessons” and learning adventures that happened throughout the week. Several times a conversation would spur an activity which would inspire me to create a printable worksheet or activity guide. I have a few free printables linked in these posts – feel free to check them out and see if you can find something helpful for your own kids! This is my first post from the series and all the others are linked in this post: Math Monday: Sticker Bar Graphs. I eventually stopped writing weekly Math Monday posts, but a large part of my blog is still focused on hands-on, interactive math activities for kids.
2. We did a fun preschool science experiment (that could be fun for older kids as well) that I wrote about in 2 blog posts with a link to a free printable. You can read more about it here: Science Experiment: Finding Volume.
3. This is one of my personal favorites – it’s a list of our favorite fifteen shows (including Netflix series, dvds, apps, and digital resources). Each of these has played a very happy and helpful part in my kids’ lives this past year and I highly recommend all these resources to parents.
4. I created a “Skeleton and the Human Body Unit Study” with a free printable as part of a homeschooling bloggers’ series on the “Let’s Read and Find Out” Science series.
5. We’ve spent a lot of time doing creative writing activities, so I wrote a 5-part blog post series about some of our activities and recommendations for ways to integrate creative thinking and writing naturally across subjects. This is a link to the final post (5 Reasons to Encourage Your Kids to Tell Stories) which includes links to all the previous posts in the series. I’ve also included a fairly substantial free printable in this series. 🙂 (Go get it!)
6. My most-often downloaded of all my free printables thus far comes from this post on Math with Dice — Addition and Probability. If you haven’t seen this one yet, make sure to grab a copy today – this is a simple, no-prep activity that supplements any math curriculum and reinforces basic math skills. 
7. I’ve created several preschool activities recently to help kids work on number and letter recognition in real world settings. I made a scavenger hunt and wrote about why I created it and how we made use of it, as well as a link to the printable that I made. 
8. And finally, I can’t leave without mentioning the post that skyrocketed past all my others in terms of page views and repins on Pinterest. Based on the success of this post on Coding for Kids, I’ve begun working on a whole series of posts related to more coding activities, resources, and some of my own games and printables to share with my readers. Make sure to subscribe if you’d like to follow along with this series coming out in the first few months of 2018! 🙂

More Good Stuff in 2018!

I obviously haven’t found my groove with consistent branding yet — every time I create an image for a blog post I try a new style or technique. I’m learning a lot in the process, but one of my main blogging goals for 2018 is to pick something and stick with it — so that when I do an end-of-year round-up of my favorite posts next year, the overall look of the blog images will be a lot cleaner! 🙂

Thank you again for following along! I have a lot of good information, inspiration, and resources to share with you this coming year!

Make sure to subscribe if you’d like to follow along! (You can subscribe using the subscription box above, on the side, or below this post.)

Learning Resources for Teachers, Tutors, and Parents

If you’d like to visit my store to see my library of learning resources (focused on Pre-K – 3rd grade Math, Reading, and Writing, and High School Algebra and Geometry), you can check it out here:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Sandra-Balisky

More Resources:

Below are affiliate links for some of the products (or related products) that I mentioned in this post. You can read my full disclosure and privacy policy here.