discovery k12 today's assignments

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Engaging Fall STEM Fun: Build a String Telephone and Create Leaf Prints!

As part of this week’s STEM exploration, we’re diving into the science of sound with a fun and interactive project—building a string telephone! This activity is part of our 36 Weeks of STEM course, designed to engage young learners with hands-on experiments that make learning both fun and educational. You can find the full list of STEM projects here .

Make Your Own String Telephone Explore the basics of sound waves with a string telephone! It’s an engaging way to understand how vibrations travel and how communication works over a simple device. All you need are two paper cups and string!

DIY Fall Leaf Prints Let’s get creative! Use autumn leaves to create beautiful prints, all while learning about nature’s seasonal changes. Gather your materials, paint the leaves, and press them onto paper to explore the patterns and colors of fall.

Extend the Learning! Take your leaf hunt outside! Encourage children to collect different shapes, sizes, and colors of leaves, and explore the unique characteristics of each. You can also pair this with a creative writing exercise where they describe their outdoor adventure. Did they notice anything new about the leaves? What changes do they see in nature?

Best regards, The DK12 Team

DIY Nature Scavenger Hunt: Homeschool Fun for Fall!

Homeschooling offers the perfect opportunity to take learning beyond the books—and what better way to do that than with a DIY Nature Scavenger Hunt? This activity is a fantastic way to incorporate outdoor exploration into your homeschool curriculum while embracing the beauty of fall.

Head to your yard, a local park, or any outdoor space and collect autumn treasures like colorful leaves, acorns, and pinecones. Once your child has gathered their finds, encourage them to write a short story or description about their adventure. How did the leaves feel? What colors did they spot? Was there a favorite item?

This activity encourages creativity, exploration, and a love for nature—all while helping to build writing & creative skills!

P.S. Share your family’s outdoor learning experiences and scavenger hunt discoveries! @discoveryk12

Enhancing Student Engagement and Exciting Curriculum Updates for Fall 2024

As the school year progresses, we’re excited to bring new learning opportunities for our students and families:

STEM Maker Activities: Our 36-week STEM program is filled with hands-on projects that spark curiosity and creativity, from building simple machines to conducting scientific experiments.

Home Economics Course: This course introduces essential life skills, such as cooking and financial literacy, ensuring students gain practical knowledge.

System Updates: We’ve been working hard to ensure smoother system performance, with faster load times and optimized resources to enhance your learning experience.

We’re committed to making this year both engaging and fun for all students. Stay tuned for more exciting updates coming soon!

P.S. We love seeing your homeschooling adventures. Keep sharing with us! @discoveryk12

Exciting Activities to Spark Learning! + Server Updates

Dear Parents,

You’ve done an outstanding job navigating the first couple of days! It’s been wonderful to see so many students and parents diving into this year’s learning. Whether you’re following along with the DK12 schedule or working at your own pace, keep up the great work! We’re continuing to make improvements to enhance system performance. While the system may still be running a bit slower than usual, rest assured that all student progress is being properly tracked . Remember, short breaks throughout the day can help your students recharge and stay focused.

To keep the creativity flowing, here are some fun and educational after-school activities your kids can enjoy:

Thank you for your patience, and let’s make tomorrow another successful day of learning!

Mark Your Calendars, School Starts September 3rd

Ready to start your child’s educational journey? From kindergarten to 12th grade, Discovery K12’s free online homeschool curriculum is here to support your child’s growth.

Our kindergarten program is filled with engaging lessons in art, science, reading, and more, designed to make learning exciting and memorable. Start their adventure today and watch them thrive from day one!

Discovery K12

Free online homeschool.

Discovery K12 Tips and Reminders

What to Expect, Tips & Reminders

Below is information on what to expect, tips, and reminders.

What to Expect On the first official day of the school year, when students login, the Today’s Assignments page will show Day #1 assignments, and that page will change to the next day’s assignments according to the Calendar schedule under the Help menu. The Today’s Assignments page will change each day at approximately 4:30 PM Pacific Time. If your student misses a day, they can always access the missed day using the Daily Assignments page to do their lessons. Those going by their own schedule, may do so using the Daily Assignments page, accessing each Day # needed.

Tips & Reminders ONE: It’s important to read through everything under the Help menu before starting.

TWO: The weekly spelling quiz for K-12 will have audio to hear the words. If your browser does not support the audio, you will need to call out the spelling words for your student to administer the quiz, and the words are in the SAME order as shown on the assignment pages.

THREE: Save ALL student work. While most states do not require you to save student work, we highly recommend saving all work for your files. One never knows if someone may ask to see it and validate that work was done.

FOUR: Students should write their Name, Date, Day #, and Course on each assignment. This makes it easy to grade/review, organize, and save the work for your files.

FIVE: Have students give work to you regularly. Everyone has their own system that works for them. Some collect work hourly, daily, weekly, etc., but we recommend collecting and reviewing student work regularly, with daily being optimum.

SIX: Check your State Laws for any homeschool procedures you may need to follow. We are a curriculum provider and not a school, and the parent/guardian needs to handle any of the paperwork process to legally homeschool.

SEVEN: Essays & Presentations in Language Arts begin at the 2nd grade level. If your children have never done essays or presentations, they’ll be basic at first but will improve each year as students progress. Our Language Arts has a flow to it with students writing an opinion or argumentative essay on Mon, narrative essay on Tue, a digital presentation over Wed and Thur, and creative writing on Fri. Some people prefer to do one essay over Mon and Tues. Our Language Arts is designed to produce good writers and communicators, prepare for college, and/or the work environment.

EIGHT: Integrating research is an important aspect to the curriculum for grades 2nd and up. One of the goals of the program is to teach students how to learn. Students should spend time researching the topics presented and taking notes, especially for Science and History/Social Studies spending approximately 45 to 60 minutes on each course.

NINE: If you get locked out, email us so we can assist. Be sure to have reading books on hand or supplementary work available while you wait.

TEN: Keep it fun! We encourage you to create a positive, fun, and engaging learning environment. Mix it up when you need to, get outdoors, and let kids make some of the decisions too.

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Daily Deals from a Nerd Mom

Parenting, Homeschool, & Life In Between

Discovery K12 – FREE Online Curriculum

*Originally posted May 31, 2016

Over the years, we have tried out many, MANY different homeschool curriculum and styles. Most are free and some are subscription. We always seem to gravitate back towards the Discovery K12 site, especially during the Summer when we aren’t doing “official” school. I have posted about them before on my own after discovering them, originally on our homeschool blog, but there have been many updates since then and many more to come!

Discovery K12 – FREE Online Curriculum

Discovery K12 is a FREE online homeschool curriculum for grades PreK – 12 . It can also be used by public school children over the summer for some fun reviewing. Children should really continue reading throughout the summer months so you can easily use the Reading section and log their progress using their online log system. Discovery K12 can be used as a full curriculum or as a supplement. We personally like to use it along side some of our other curriculum.

Student Accounts

Each student has their own account and log in info. Each school day, the kids sign into their accounts and the assignments for the day is right there, or you can choose the day you are on if you are not on the same day from the sidebar menu – there are 180 days total for each grade level . I suggest keeping track of the day you are on because this is one thing DK12 does not track, as far as I can tell. It would make it much easier for us to sign in and continue on with the last day we left off on since we are never on the same day DK12 is, or at least have a way to see where we left off instead of searching through the days. I’m not sure if this is one of the additions coming for the new 2016/2017 school year or not but it would be a great one.

You can view a Sample Student Account !

The subjects offered on Discovery K12 are Reading/Literature, Language Arts, Math, Spelling, Science, History/Social Studies, Visual and Performing Arts, Physical Education .

Extra Curriculum is also provided, including Spanish, HTML Coding, Healthy Living, and Personal Finance * (*Available 2016/2017 school year) .

New Assignments each Day
Over 16,000 Lessons
Weekly Spelling Program
Quizzes and Tests
Grading and Reporting
Classic Literature eBooks
Fun and Easy-to-Use
Parent/Teacher Account (optional subscription)

Parent/Teacher Account

The optional subscription for a Parent/Teacher account is the latest addition. For those homeschoolers who need, or want, to keep records of their daily assignments, quizzes, attendance, etc., the Parent/Teacher account keeps track of it all automatically. You can easily add existing student accounts to the Parent/Teacher account and stay up-to-date on their progress and create transcripts, certificates, and diplomas. The regular price for a 1-year subscription to the Parent/Teacher account is $99.

With a regular, free Student account, they can still keep track of their progress but the Parent/Teacher Account keeps all of your students together in one account and is for you only. Before, I would have to sign into each student’s account to click around and find all of their progress for each section. Now, it is much easier for me to have it all in one spot and there are extra tools for me to use!

How We Use Discovery K12

We use Discovery K12 daily alongside another online paid curriculum. On days when we don’t have much time to dedicate to school, we use Discovery K12 only. The nerdlings go through one daily assignment pretty quickly so sometimes we do two daily assignments in a day.

Assignments can be a video to watch and a worksheet to print off for note-taking and research, a set of math problems to work out, Spelling words, coloring pages, and more. I like to keep a dedicated notebook for each child so they can work on any work that needs to be written. DK12 does have printable graph paper and other related printables for specific assignments if you like.

Reading consists of the students choosing an eBook to read and is divided by grade levels. We can choose from any grade so we can find the right book for our reading level. After reading, we can log the title, author, number of pages and number of minutes read in the online logs (underneath the Reading section on the daily assignment page.) We just log the number of pages and titles read since setting a time causes a meltdown in this house.

Discovery K12 has made our homeschooling much easier because it has all of the basic subjects (plus some!) for each day. This way I know they are getting snippets of pretty much most subjects available in a day and I don’t have to have a million books and resources for all 3 nerdlings!

We are finishing up our school year now and so I will be able to print out a Certificate of Completion for each grade level for the kids! This is available in the Parent/Teacher account.

2016 – 2017 School Year

The new 2016-2017 School Year Calendar is available now. The year starts on Tuesday, September 6, 2016, and ends Monday, June 12, 2017. You can choose to start any day that you like by using the Daily Assignments page as I’ve mentioned before.

Have you heard of or used Discovery K12 before? Let us know your thoughts on it below!