TOS Crew Review: abcteach

abcteach is a teacher's tool site. You can get premade worksheets and generate many worksheets from crosswords to word finds, word scrambles to math puzzles and bingo sheets.

There are premade word walls and theme units, worksheets and reading selections on books and people of all kinds.

There is a file that you can put the worksheets you make into on the site for easy reference. It's a really powerful site for practice worksheets of all kinds.

The directory includes these categories:

• art and music
• book units
• border papers
• clip art
• fun stuff
• graphic organizers
• handwriting
• holiday/seasonal
• homeschooling and parent resources
• language arts
• languages/ESL
• learning centers
• math
• middle school/junior high
• Montessori materials
• preK/early elementary
• puzzles/games
• report forms
  
• science
• shape books
• social studies
• sports/phys ed/health
• teaching extras
• test taking skills
• theme units
• think green/teach green
• thinking skills
  

Cost:

• $40.00 per year for individuals or groups sized 2-9
  
• $70.00 for two years
• $35.00 for groups of 10-29
• $25.00 for groups of 30 or more
• There is super site pricing for groups of 100 or more. Contact support (at) abcteach (dot)com.

This site is a classroom teacher's dream! If I had taught elementary school, I'm sure I would have found lots of time fillers, transitional activities, and skills classes fodder. I actually used to own for my PC two programs that generated crossword puzzles and word searches back in the early to mid-90s. These days abcteach has those tools and more for the taking on its site.

Last year I had a group membership to the site which made it possible for me to test it out. Then we were given four weeks to test drive it for our TOS review. There have been other discount offers through homeschool co-op recently and in full disclosure the TOS Crew members were given the same $20 discount that was recently offered through the Homeschool Coop. Still $40 is reasonable, if you can't gather a group, if worksheets are in high demand at your house.

I do try to keep a membership to this sort of site each year. I've tried several. The one thing I have mixed feelings about with regard to these sites is that while the worksheets can sometimes provide much needed extra practice for certain skills, I don't find them as useful as I would if I still needed to keep a classroom of nearly 40 middle schoolers on task for 45 minutes at a time!

I do find these sites useful just not always useful enough to warrant the cost. I'm also not into giving tons of worksheets to my kids. However, I bet you knew that already! I think what makes abcteach unique among these sorts of site is the ability to customize the worksheets. It's definitely worth a try!