Way past worksheets: Website offers free educational games, projects and more

Ellen McHenry's Basement Workshop is a gold mine find for homeschoolers and other educators.  This fantastic web site offers freebies in nearly any subject you can think of, and they're wonderfully creative and fun.

Site owner Ellen McHenry offers curricula for sale via download on the site, including "The Brain," "The Elements," and "Mapping the World with Art," among others.  She also allows parents to download the entire first chapter of each curriculum for free to see if it will be a good fit.

Past this, however, she offers an incredible assortment of freebies in the form of games, patterns, printouts and more.

Some of the projects include:

• Tree Leaf Bingo
• Bites and Pieces (a game about sharks)
• Virus models to cut and assemble
• Organic Molecules Card Game
• Pop-up Barnacle
• "The Nutshell History of Ancient Greece" (music/video)
• Photosynthesis Relay Race
• The Rumination Game
• Chicken Egg Development Wheel
• Insect activity pages for Pre-K (dot-to-dots, mazes, etc.)
• Glow-in-the-dark Sea Fish Art Activity
• Streaming Chloroplasts Flip Book
• "Make Five" (a game where kids learn about the chemical formulas of minerals)
• Periodic Table Pillowcase Pattern
• "Viking Voyages" (a board game about Viking trades routes)

...and many more board games, readers' theater scripts, coloring pages and so on.

Subjects include:

LIFE SCIENCES

EARTH SCIENCES

CHEMISTRY

ENERGY/MACHINES

HISTORY/SOCIAL STUDIES

BIBLE HISTORY

GEOGRAPHY/MAPS

MATH

ART

LATIN

LANGUAGE ARTS (English)

DRAMA

And even resources in French!

This is a site to bookmark and visit often for wonderful ways to round out all sorts of studies.