*This is a collaborative post

As you may or may not know, we are a home educating family! Since the first lockdown last March I made the decision to remove my children from school, partly because I feel like I knew deep in my heart that over the next 12 months they would be in and out of school due to the pandemic, but mainly because learning from home, really worked for us. When they were originally set work from their class teachers, I sort of took it into my own hands to switch things up and make the learning work for my children, while still learning what it was they needed to know.

As it turns out, home schooling was one of the best decisions we have made. It's incredible, I only wish I had made this decision earlier! We can learn at our own pace, in our own way - and learn about all the topics they want to know about!

It took a few months for us to really find our feet, and figure out what sort of home learning we would be do, and trust me, there are a lot of different types of home education! It turns out we have a semi-structed approach to home learning (which makes total sense, because my life is run on routine, schedules and lists!). It doesn't necessarily mean that our average learning day is meticulously planned every minute, but it gives us a rough idea of what we will we do each day, what we will be learning, and what physical work we will have to complete.

Speaking of physical work, I am an absolute sucker for a good worksheet. They seem to work well for my children too and although we don't use worksheets every day for every subject, we do go through quite a lot of them! 

There are a huge number of printed and online resources available for personal use, as well as online groups where you can connect with other home educating parents and swap ideas - but personally I love creating my own home school printables.

Sure, it's easy to find cheap or free printables online to use with your children, but sometimes you just want to be able to customise and change the worksheets to suit your children, their abilities, interests and the topics you are learning about - which is exactly why I love making my own!

A huge bonus of creating your own worksheets for home learning, is you can make them look as simple (I'm looking as you Comic Sans!) or as intricate and detailed as you wish.

(This was a poster I created, for when we were learning about Seeds & Trees)

Personally I tend to do a mixture of the two. If it's a question or writing themed worksheet, I will use more basic fonts to ensure my little ones aren't distracted by the writing, but for projects, art work or pieces that I want to look a bit more personal or handwritten I do use different fonts.

A great way to access new fonts is to use a script font from Font Bundles. You can easily register for a free account and search through many different types of fonts, such as Handwritten, Graffiti and Calligraphy. As well as the many free fonts available, there are ones you can purchase too. It's a really fab site, and so easy to find the perfect font.

There are so many benefits to creating your own home school printables for your children! It means you can create exactly what you want, rather than spending hours searching the internet for that perfect piece, which might not even exist! It means you can focus on the exact academic lessons you child needs, without any unnecessary 'filler' work. Making your own printables gives you the ability to use your creative skills and imagination to whip up all sorts of fun activities! From games, to colouring pages, flashcards, memory games, quotes, banners - anything your heart desires!

Using your own printables means you can specifically customise work to suit your child's needs, and can easily be adjusted to suit different children too. This particular point is ideal for me, because my two older children do focus on the same topic, but as they are different in age, their abilities are different, so I can switch up the work to suit both of them!

The sky is the absolute limit when it comes to creating printable for home education - I suppose the only real constraints are printer ink, and time! 

Learning to create your own home school printables may seem difficult or time consuming, but there are many tools available to you, which helps make it so easy, and so much fun to do! Personally, my current favourite tools to create printables are Canva and Font Bundles! They make the whole experience so simple and easy, and help me to create exactly what I want to create!