The K5 Learning Blog urges parents to be pro-active in helping their children reach their full academic potential.

K5 Learning provides an online reading and math program for kindergarten to grade 5 students.

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K5 Learning Blog

We know how critical spelling is for elementary students to develop their language skills. Many of you search our spelling pages for free worksheets to help complement your children’s spelling needs. However, our worksheet section needed some improvements in navigation to help you find the worksheets you want more easily.

We’ve spent some time doing just that and here’s the result.

A Simple Guide to Math Divisibility Rules

As your kids develop their mathematical skills, the will start to discover the rules that guide computation and problem solving. Rules in math are based on patterns. Students learn to recognize these patterns in different math situations as well as the rules connected to these pattern.

Today, we are going to take a look at divisibility rules.

What are divisibility rules?

Divisibility rules are a quick way of working out if a number is divisible by a fixed number without performing the division. This is usually done by examining that number’s digits. The best way to explain this is to jump right in. We are going to show you the divisibility rules for the fixed numbers 1 to 9.

Divisibility by 1

This one is easy: every number is divisible by 1.

Divisibility by 2

The number should have 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 as the unit’s digit. For example:

Divisibility by 2
The unit digit is 0 so 1,240 is divisible by 2.

Divisibility by 3

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, the number is divisible by 3. For example:

Divisibility by 3
The sum of the digits is 12. 12 divided by 3 is 4, so 381 is divisible by 3.

New Kindergarten Math Worksheets and Improved Navigation

A while ago we told you about the updates and new worksheets we added to our Kindergarten reading section. We have now completed similar updates and added more worksheets to our Kindergarten simple math and other activities sections.

Let’s give you a tour.

Improved navigation of kindergarten pages

Just like the Kindergarten reading section, we have segmented the topic areas into separate pages. So now, when you come to our Kindergarten math page, you’ll see this:

$Kindergarten math homepage$

Short Plays for Back to School

Now that the kids are getting back to school, teachers and parents may be looking for fun new ways to engage kids in reading in the classroom or on play dates. How about trying out a short play? We’ve added two new workbooks of plays to our bookstore to help you get yourselves organized.

To test out the plays, we have added two sample plays to our free worksheet section.

New Grade 1 Vocabulary Worksheets

We have expanded our grade 1 vocabulary worksheets page with two new sections. These two sections include worksheets on practicing matching and writing words to pictures, context clues, and filling in missing words in sentences.

We’re also in the process of writing a vocabulary 1 workbook, which will be published to our bookstore shortly.

New worksheets added to the grade 1 vocabulary page are:

Match pictures to words

The student needs to circle the picture that matches the word on each line.

K5 Adds Worksheets on How to Join Cursive Letters

Cursive writing is tough for younger students. Once your child has learned how to write individual cursive letters, it’s hard to move straight onto writing entire cursive words. So we’ve added a new section – a middle step, so to say - that helps students grasp how to join two individual letters. We’ve created a page of the most common letter joins with individual worksheets for each.

They are as follows:

Joining cursive letters at the bottom, such as ch or kn.
ch letter join

The Best Books About Insects for Young Readers

By Sheila Welch

What could be a more appropriate subject for summertime reading than insects? Here are four books – very different in content, intent, and format – all dealing with insects.

The Gnats of Knotty Pine

A favorite of my own children, THE GNATS OF KNOTTY PINE by the prolific author / illustrator, Bill Peet, is not a book admired by the NRA. Peet doesn’t hide his own negative opinion of the “sport” of hunting. The first few pages depict a meeting in the forest attended by an assortment of wild critters from the largest ( a gigantic moose) to the smallest (one tiny gnat in a swarm of gnats). The animals are hoping to devise a way to stay alive and deal with the hunters. How they accomplish their goal is clever and will amuse readers in third through fifth grade.

New Kindergarten Worksheets and Sections

We are constantly working on improving our free K5 worksheet center. Over the last few weeks we have been putting our efforts into the kindergarten section.

As we’ve added a bigger variety of worksheets, we’ve also re-organized this whole section. Let us show you.

If you come from our main worksheet page, click on kindergarten worksheets.

Free worksheets

Four Tools to Help Your Kids Practice Expository Writing

We recently discussed the difficulties young students have with expository writing. Here are some tools to help your kids when tackling this style of writing.

They are PDF files so that you can easily print them.

Framework

First, your child needs to put his/her thoughts straight. Here’s a template to help them plan out their report writing.

The importance of learning expository writing at a young age

Expository writing definition

We most commonly know expository writing as report writing. This type of writing has the purpose of explaining and clarifying.

Expository writing is fact-based and presents reason, explanations, instructions or directions. Unlike other forms of writing, this type of writing does not include descriptive details or opinions. For expository writing students need to organize their thoughts, follow a plan, sometimes conduct research and support their findings. Honestly, this writing is the most straightforward type of writing your child will learn, yet it is the hardest to grasp.

Free Worksheets

Workbooks