Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I have been intrigued by the study guides from Progeny Press ever since I first heard of them, before I had children. A couple of years ago, we had our first chance to use one, for review, and enjoyed it. When I was offered another study guide recently, I knew it was something we wanted to do. I chose the Wagon Wheels Study Guide. Wagon Wheels is an easy reader we have had on the shelf for years and a wonderful story.

Little Miss is the only child I have who was in the correct age range (grades 1-3) for this study, so she was the one who got to go through it. The guide is sent as a fillable PDF, so it can be completed entirely digitally, but I chose to print it. For our family, something on paper is much easier to use than something on the computer, in general. I do appreciate having the PDF, as I can use it again when Miss Joy is old enough.

Before we started reading the book, we read a page of background information and talked about some of the issues that affected the family in the story. We also looked up maps to find where they came from and where they lived.

There are four chapters in Wagon Wheels, and after a few pages of studying some of the more uncommon words found in the book, the child is directed to read the first two chapters, answer questions about them, and then read the last two chapters and answer questions about them. Instead of doing it just like that, I chose to have Little Miss read one chapter a day. After reading the chapter, we answered the questions that went along with it, and studied the words that were from that chapter. The book is just enough more difficult than most she’s reading right now, and the chapters are long enough, that it worked best to spread out the reading over four days.

After the questions about the chapters (which included studying a few passages from the Bible and discussing how they related to the book), there is a page about Fact or Opinion, and Little Miss had to identify which one each of 15 statements was. She had fun with that! Next, she had to go through the book and find compound words, writing them down on a page. After that, she got to draw pictures to illustrate several compound words. The last activity in the book is a crossword puzzle, which she was quite excited about.

After all the activities about the story, there are hands-on projects and research projects suggested to extend the learning. At the very end of the book is a list of other books by the author of Wagon Wheels, and other books that have similar topics.

We really enjoyed this study. Little Miss enjoys reading, and she enjoyed thinking about the book. I believe I’ll be looking into doing more literature studies with her in the future; this seems to be something that will work well for her. Be sure to click the image below to read reviews of other Progeny Press study guides!

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

One thing I decided to do differently with school this year was to try out different ways of doing Language Arts. I’m not totally happy with the course we’ve been using for several years now, so I decided to phase it out and, instead, use programs I get for review, instead. When we were offered a subscription to LightSail for Homeschoolers, I thought this sounded perfect. Lots of reading practice, writing practice, spelling…everything included. For the first week we had access to it, Mr. Sweetie, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss all loved it. They spent a lot of time exploring the books that were available to read. Since then, their enthusiasm has petered out a fair amount, but they are still using it several times a week.

The core of this program is Reading. The Premium subscription, which is what the two boys have been using, contains more than 12,000 books! That means that anyone should be able to find books that appeal to them. I have found it fascinating to see what my boys have chosen. I knew that Mr. Imagination was interested in animals, but I had no idea how much he would be interested in books with lots of factual information about unusual animals. Most of the books he chose to read were picture books with lots and lots of information in short snippets. His favorite was Nature’s Ninjas: Animals With Spectacular Skills, and he wished there were a lot more like that one! Mr. Sweetie had a harder time finding books that appealed to him. It did help when I reset his grade level, from Grade 6, which he is currently in, to Grade 3. That helped him find more books that were a bit simpler; he struggles with reading. Both boys very quickly found the feature that reads books to them—they liked that much better than reading for themselves!

LightSail is “lexile driven.” This means that each book is rated for the exact reading level, based on vocabulary. The first thing that each of the children did when they started this program was to take a test to determine their exact reading/comprehension level. They would read a sentence or two or a paragraph, and then select a word, from four choices, to complete a summary sentence. This let the program know what type of books to offer. Throughout the books they read or had read to them, they frequently ran into what LightSail calls “clozes.” These are places where a blue box replaces a word in the book, and four choices are given. The child has to select the one that fits best. Based on their answers, the program updates their Lexile level every 15 days. I just checked the data on my three children; two of them went up and down over the course of the six weeks we used this program! Here is a screenshot of one of the questions one of them had.

The parental controls are very good with this program. Many books require permission from a parent before the child can read them; this frustrated Mr. Imagination because he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to read a book about wolves, for example! Many times, that was simply because LightSail hadn’t yet checked out the book to make sure there was nothing objectionable in it. However, once it was actually about werewolves, so I was quite glad that I could decline permission on that one.

Other than reading books, there are three other areas that LightSail offers instruction for. We didn’t end up using these areas. One is Writing. There are several different kinds of writing that are offered, but I couldn’t figure out how to assign them. One is apparently accessed by clicking a button when completing a book, but I was never in the right place at the right time to get anyone to do that (imagine… my boys didn’t choose to do a writing assignment!).

Vocabulary is another area of study. This seems to only be activated when a child chooses the wrong answer when doing a cloze. The correct word is studied in several different ways. Once again, we didn’t use this feature much at all—I think I had Little Miss look at it one day, and she couldn’t make heads or tails out of it!

There is also Fluency. From what I saw about it in the information, the child reads a passage into a microphone, and then the parent listens and marks their mistakes. I didn’t even try doing this, because we don’t have a microphone that works with my computer. Anyway, we do oral reading practice every day, anyway.

Little Miss had a different subscription than the boys did. Hers is called World Book Kids, and is for her age group. She has had access to all sorts of fun books about animals. She enjoyed books about pandas, platypuses, flamingoes and many others, and also some books about a dog who gets himself into trouble and learns lessons. In addition to choosing the correct word for a cloze, she also has comprehension questions. She struggles a bit with those, since she hasn’t been able to get them read aloud to her and she doesn’t understand all the words yet. She still loves using the program, and hearing all sorts of fun picture books read to her! Here are a couple of screenshots from her pages.

There are many other resources available on this site that we haven’t used. The World Book Encyclopedia is on here, and timelines and maps from World Book, as well. One tab has thousands of videos on all sorts of topics, and another has livestreams from places around the world. We decided not to use these, because we were running out of data on our plan, and the livestreams we did look at were pretty boring. That was because of time zones—it is night where most of them are when it’s day here!

So, what do we think of this program? Mr. Sweetie has made it clear that he is no longer interested in it. He would rather read to himself from other books than try to use this program; he wants simpler books than he is offered here. Mr. Imagination likes it, but he has a hard time finding exactly the right book. Little Miss loves it! I think there is a lot of potential here, but it’s not for us. As I keep learning, over and over again, computer programs don’t work as well for us as print books or PDFs that I can print out. I am glad we used this, because it taught me a lot about Mr. Imagination’s interests in books! Now I know better what kind of books to look for at secondhand shops, to catch his interest. Have a look for yourself; this program might be just what you need! Read more reviews by clicking on the image below.

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

A couple of months ago, I was offered the chance to review a program from Reading Kingdom again. We have used programs from this company in the past, and while the children had fun with them, I didn’t find them overly helpful for us. One of the choices offered this time, though, was Spelling Ninja. Mr. Imagination tends to be imaginative with his spelling, as well as in daily life, so I thought maybe this program would help him. He has been using it now for about six weeks.

There are 15 levels in Spelling Ninja. Each level has 10 pages. Each of those pages has a sentence, with a picture to illustrate the sentence. The sentence are progressively longer as the child works through the program.

Each sentence is read to the child, and then he can read it to himself. When he is ready, he clicks a button or hits enter to show he is ready to move on. Then, he is supposed to type the sentence. In the first level, only one word is blanked out at a time to be typed, but gradually the number of words that are blanked out is increased until, in level 9, where Mr. Imagination is currently working, most of the sentence is blanked out! The idea is to increase his capacity for remembering the words and how they look. He is given a certain amount of time to type each word, and if he can’t get it in that time, the program shows him the word again, and then he has to give it another try. If he has too much trouble with a sentence, he has to type the whole thing again. He can’t move on until he has typed each word perfectly.

When Mr. Imagination first started using Spelling Ninja, he got very frustrated, to the point of tears. He was having trouble finding the keys he needed on the keyboard, and it was also moving too fast for him. I got into his settings and changed it so that he had more time, and that helped. It also helped when he finally learned to check that Caps Lock was off! He has been spending ten minutes a day using this program. To be honest, I haven’t seen much progress in his spelling abilities. I think it’s good practice for him, and maybe someday he’ll learn to pay attention to the spelling of the words he writes. It’s not a magic cure, but hopefully will be a piece in the puzzle of teaching spelling! It is definitely helping his memory for words, since he has to remember eight or ten words of a sentence to complete a page correctly. It should help him learn to use punctuation better, too, since he must type that in correctly to finish a sentence. I really like that he can use the program by himself; I only have to be involved if he runs into trouble.

Click on the image below to read reviews from other families of this and two other programs from Reading Kingdom! I plan to read a few to see if Spelling Ninja helped their children, and if I can pick up some tips to make it work better for Mr. Imagination.

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

Little Miss and I have been having fun working through a book titled Building Thinking Skills Beginning 2, from The Critical Thinking Co.™. We always enjoy the workbooks we get from this company, and this one is no exception! She loves doing pages from it, and always wants to do more than I had planned. We started out doing five pages a day, but now we’re often doing ten or more.

The first several pages were very simple—name a shape and its color, figure out what “rule” applies to a group of shapes, match shapes and colors. Then there were some activities having to do with numbers of shapes in a group, and then we started working with patterns. Some pages have groups of pictures, and she is supposed to figure out which one is different, point it out, and tell me why it is different. That takes some thinking! As we progress through the book, I’m seeing that similar assignments get more difficult. A new step or concept will be added to the ones we’ve already been doing. For example, instead of shapes of particular colors filling a grid, and having to figure out which one is missing, there might be numbers or symbols, and the colors vary. Instead of one symbol missing from a grid, there are two missing—and then three.

Concepts like halves, longer/shorter, more/less, and taller/shorter are introduced. Most of the pages are very colorful and attractive, although some are black and white. That contrast, in my opinion, adds to the attractiveness of the book. A lot of pages instruct the child to point to a particular item; some say to draw lines to it. Some pages require drawing simple shapes. Little Miss quite enjoys the ones where she is to color pictures with a limited number of colors, and make each one different!

This book is available either in a hard copy or as a PDF. I received the PDF because I live outside the United States and it would have been cost-prohibitive to mail one here. I think I would order the PDF if I was buying the book, though. Most of it can be done on the computer screen, with the child just pointing to things or drawing a line with her fingers. A lot of pages just require talking about what is there! I’m printing the ones that tell her to draw something, and it’s nice that a lot of them can be printed in black and white. The biggest reason I like the PDF is that I will have it for Miss Joy to use in a couple of years, whereas a print book is consumable.

Little Miss is a bit on the older side for this book; it’s intended for use by preschoolers/kindergartners. She does have to stop and think a bit about some of the assignments, though. It’s been good for her to be forced to think logically to complete the activities! As we progress through the book, she is having to think a little more and a little more. I like this book and the way it helps children to think logically! I want to go through it with Miss Joy when she is four or five—I think she’ll love it, too!
Click on the image below to read more reviews of products from The Critical Thinking Co.™.