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

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

Learn More about K5's online learning program.

K5 Learning Blog

Earth, Sun and Moon Worksheets for Grade 1

Learning about our solar system is fascinating to most kids. The sun, the moon, the stars and planets are covered in all elementary school grades. In grade 1, students start to learn the basic facts about our Solar System. Students are asked to use observations of the sun, moon and start to describe patterns, such as how the sun rises and moved across the sky. They also learn about patterns of daylight at different times of the year.

In our science worksheets section, we have created a series of worksheets that cover the earth, sun and moon for grade 1 students, including:

Day and night

In grade 1, kids learn that day and night happen as the earth spins relative to the sun. We’ve created 2 worksheets for kids to practice day and night:

Day and nigh worksheet

How to Measure the Volume of a Cuboid

What is a cuboid?

A cuboid, also referred to as a rectangular prism, is a solid three-dimensional box (or object) that has six faces that are all rectangles. Here’s an example of a cuboid:

What is volume?

The volume is the amount the three-dimensional shape takes up.

New Printing and Tracing Letters Workbook

We’re lacking in workbooks for kindergarten students in our bookstore, but we are doing something about it. Today, K5 published the first of a series of new workbooks for kindergarten. It’s a letters workbook focused on learning to trace and print the letters A to Z, understanding upper and lowercase letters, and putting letters in alphabetical order.

Let’s show you how some of the pages look.

Letters A to Z worksheets

Here’s what the letter A worksheets look like. Each letter has four worksheets dedicated to learning that letter, starting with tracing and printing the letters A and a:

Trace and print letter A

Trace and print letter a

How to Make Learning to Spell Fun

Spelling, spelling, spelling. During the school year, our kids grind their way through lists of spelling words. Hunched over sheets of paper with pencil in hand, kids try to stay focused as they write words over and over again to memorize the spelling. There has got to be a better way to keep kids motivated as they learn to spell.

spelling not fun

Next time your child grumbles about the weekly spelling words, try one of these methods to make learning to spell more fun.

Play games

play games to learn to spell

From the simplest games, such as hangman, to more sophisticated apps, there are lots of games that will help students stay motivated whilst learning to spell words. Scrabble is a great example. The game gets your children’s competitive juices flowing as they complete to score the most points from creating words out of a selection of letter tiles.

Science Worksheets for Grade 1 Students

Hot on the heels of our kindergarten science worksheets, we have today published science worksheets for grade 1 students. The plan is still to add curriculum-based science worksheets up to the end of grade 5 for free.

Science worksheets for grade 1

Our science worksheets for budding young scientists cover the following topics:

Plants

This section covers living things, parts of plants, seeds, plant life cycles and how plants adapt to their environment. Here’s one of those worksheets, covering the plant life cycle:

grade 1 plant life cycle

All our worksheets come with answers on a second page:

plant lifecycle answers

Words that are Both Nouns and Verbs

Can a verb also be a noun? The short answer is: yes.

As we know a noun is a word that names things, such as persons, places and things, as well as feelings, ideas and acts. We also know that verbs are action words. We use verbs to describe what nouns do. So how can a verb also be a noun.

Let’s take a look at an example:

The word: play.

I like to play in the park with my friends.
Play is a verb in this sentence.

We’re going to see a play tonight at the theater.
Play is a noun in this sentence.

There are lots of words that can be both a noun and a verb. Here are some:

Bait
Love
Peel
Bowl
Exit
Fly
Park
Ship

We’ve created some worksheets in our grade 3 grammar section for students to practice writing sentences with words that are both nouns and verbs.

Nouns that are verbs

K5 Learning Adds New Crosswords Book to Bookstore

Hot on the heels of our picture crosswords book, we have created a crosswords book for students in grades 3 – 5. Crosswords help students to practice vocabulary and spelling.

Crosswords

The book contains 20 crosswords on topics relevant to older elementary school kids. We’ve taken great care in choosing words that fit within the vocabulary curriculum for kids in grade 3 to 5.

Each puzzle is accompanied by clues. Here’s what one of the crosswords looks like:

Space crossword for grade 3 to 5

Crossword clues for grade 3 to 5

K5 Adds Kindergarten Science Worksheets

By popular demand, we are branching out into science. Our plan is to add free science worksheets for kindergarten to grade 5 to our website. Today, we added the first section of science worksheets for pre-school and kindergarten students.

Science worksheets for kindergarten

Our science worksheets for these younger students cover the following topics:

Plants and animals worksheets

This section covers living things, plants, animals and animal homes. Here’s one of those worksheets, covering plant parts:

plant parts worksheet for kindergarten

All our worksheets come with answers on a second page:

plant parts worksheet for kindergarten answer sheet

K5 Learning Sells Picture Crosswords book

We keep adding new workbooks to our bookstore. Today, we've added a picture crosswords workbook for kindergarten to grade 2 students. Crosswords are a great way to practice vocabulary and spelling. They’re fun to do as well.

Picture crosswords

The book contains 20 crosswords on topics relevant to younger elementary school kids. We’ve taken great care in choosing words that fit within the vocabulary curriculum for kids in kindergarten to grade 2. The crosswords look like this. We've added word hints for the youngest students. The intent is that if you don't need the word hints, you can just cut off that section.

picture crossword

New Grade 2 Reading Comprehension Workbooks

e have published 80 new leveled reading comprehension stories in our bookstore. Spread across eight workbooks with120 stories in each, the stories are level J to M. Answer sheets are provided for each story.

The reading comprehension workbooks in our bookstore are leveled from A to Z, based on the following text criteria:

-    Vocabulary words
-    High-frequency words
-    Average word size
-    Number of words per sentence, on average
-    Amount of repetition of words and phrases
-    Story length
-    Subject matter complexity

Let’s show you one of our new stories. This one’s from our level L2 reading comprehension workbook.

Sample grade 2 reading comprehension story

We provide the vocabulary words for each story in the right corner. The vocabulary words are listed at the beginning of each workbook. The stories are written to meet grade-level requirements. The story below is an mid-grade reader for grade 2 students:

Free Worksheets

Workbooks