Homeschool Review Crew

I have a little girl who loves doing school. She is only three years old, but she badly wants to do school just like everyone else does, and is thrilled when I print her a page to do. When PandaParents asked for people to review their program, MESSYLEARNING FOR PRESCHOOLERS AND KINDERGARTNERS, I showed it to her. She wanted me to print it out immediately so she could get started that night, and wasn’t real happy when I told her she had to wait till it was sent to us. Ever since we got it, she has been wanting to do her “new school” almost every day. One Sunday night when I was putting her to bed and she was overtired, she cried that she “had to do her school” and therefore couldn’t go to bed yet! Of course, I let her know that she was definitely going to bed right then, and had to wait till morning to do school, and then Gayle and I had a chuckle about the latest excuse for prolonging bedtime.

Each month of MESSYLEARNING has a storybook and a video of the same story being read, and then a lot of activities to go along with the story. These activities teach concepts such as patterns, shapes, sounds, and numbers.

We were sent three months of the program. I did not use A Jolly Jingling Journey, because we don’t do Santa Claus. I did look over it a bit; basically the story is about a little boy dreaming about going to the North Pole and meeting Santa Claus.

The first month we did is titled Mommy Baby. The story has to do with a child who doesn’t want to go to bed, and she and her mother play a game of Mommy and Baby–(“Are you Mommy’s little mittens? I am your little mittens.”) and so on. In the activities, several letters of the alphabet are introduced. There are activities that test comprehension and retention of the story, and others that talk about emotions and feelings. One section of pages discusses animal’s tails, what they look like and how they are used. One page matches animal mothers to babies, and some talk about big and little. There are also pages for matching pictures to silhouettes, and objects to their shapes. I was really surprised with how well Little Miss did on this one. I had her cut out the objects and glue them to the shapes, and even though her cutting skills still need some improvement she remembered the shape of the object and matched them all correctly. Toward the end of the book is a project of coloring and cutting out shapes and glueing them together to build a panda. Little Miss isn’t quite ready for this one, so we didn’t do it.

The other month we did is titled Scotty Skunk Hears a Scary Sound. This story involves a skunk searching, through the four seasons of the year, for a good home. I don’t think the seasons mean anything to Little Miss yet; she couldn’t seem to grasp that concept. She loved doing dot-to-dots of a few letters, though, and coloring the S’s in a grid to make a path for the skunk. She did very well with the pages of matching animals to their homes and to silhouettes. Farther on, there is a project in which you are to make a picture of a sailboat by cutting and glueing shapes. I think she’ll be able to do that.

This course is fun for little ones who are begging to do school. For us, the timing was perfect, since I don’t have much suitable for a three-year-old, but have one who needs to feel like she’s doing the same kind of things the older children do. One thing that would have made it a lot better would be to have a physical copy of the book. There are so many pages to print, in color, that it would just be a lot nicer to have a workbook to use. Also, the instructions often suggest using stickers to cover pictures; it looks like these will be included in print versions, but obviously we only had pictures to cut out and glue. We did do some of the activities on the screen, but I don’t like to do that very much. For this age, I really prefer a hard copy. I liked all the practice Little Miss got with her fine motor skills. She has done a lot of tracing, coloring, and cutting with this program. I’ve been letting her glue the pictures she cuts out into a notebook, so we have somewhat of a record of what she has done at this age. I do think that for most children 4 or 5 would be a better age to do these books. There are a number of concepts that she wasn’t able to grasp yet, as I mentioned above. Maybe the best way to use it would be to use part of it as a preschool program and then again in a couple of years as a kindergarten program! It introduces a wide variety of concepts.

Edit: As of 2024, this website seems to be gone. I cannot find it anymore.

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We were recently assigned to do a review of Kids Email Safe Email for Kids, and given a one-year subscription. I wasn’t at all sure we needed it, because when my children wanted to email someone I just let them use my gmail account. We were put on the review team, however, so I signed the four up who are in school this year. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the results, and may just end up paying for this service after our year ends.

Kids Email was started in 2009 as a safe way for children to email. Parents have the control over what happens with the child’s account; there are many settings you can tweak so that your child can only use it the way you want them to. All incoming and outgoing messages can be sent to your inbox, and you can set it so that only letters from approved senders are visible to your child (you have to approve a person the first time they send something). You can also set particular times or days when the program can be accessed, if you wish. There is also a filter watching for bad language. We had to laugh at one email that Mr. Imagination got from a cousin. The cousin was listing the baby animals on their farm, and one item in the list was 250 CENSORED. We knew from the context that it was chicks, and of course we knew it was the kind of chicks we approve of, but I was happy to see how the filter works.

Here is what I see when one of the boys gets an email from someone I haven’t previously approved:

One feature that my boys have loved playing with is the ability to draw pictures. They use the computer mouse, and can choose the size of line or dot they want, and the color, and draw whatever they want to. That is good eye/hand coordination! When they are finished, they simply attach the picture to the email they have written. I have heard some complaints that there aren’t enough colors, but otherwise they are very happy with that part of this email.

Here are a couple of the pictures they have come up with. This was at the beginning; they are getting a little more skillful now.

The boys also like that they can choose the background for their inbox. There are a number of pictures to choose from; I think all of them chose either the wolves or the horses. For girls, there are some princess-type pictures, too. These just make it more fun!

Another thing I really like about it is that it gives some of the boys a lot of practice in typing. They do typing courses, but this forces them to make up what they are typing as they go, rather than copying. I type what the younger ones dictate, but the older ones have to do it themselves, and then I help correct spelling so that the recipient can understand what they get! One problem we have run into, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be an autosave function. I might be missing something (it’s not unlikely), but if the page is accidentally reloaded, everything that has been typed so far is gone. Once, I was helping someone send an email that took a long time to write, and the internet blinked off, which it often does here. The email was lost. That usually brings tears of frustration, even if I help them redo the letter.

This program also grows with the children. When they are young, their address is @kidsemail.org, but when they are a bit older, you have the option of changing to @kmail.org, if they want a more adult-looking address. Children who use the kidsemail.org address have the option to have an incoming email read aloud to them. This worked the first time or two that we tried it, but after that it didn’t; probably my old computer was the problem. I like the idea—it’s another way to get children to practice reading as they follow along!

Overall, I am very happy with Kids Email. This is one review product that I didn’t think we needed, but I’m now glad we got it. Because of this, I have incorporated writing an email a week into each of their schedules, which is something I had wanted to do but never got around to doing. So, Grandma, aunts, and cousins get to hear from my children a little more! On the other hand, some of my boys aren’t too happy about it. They would rather not have to type something out of their heads, but rely on me to write letters when they want them sent.

Sometimes we end up with products to review that I wasn’t very excited about. Reading Kingdom was one of those; my hesitation was because it is an online program, and I don’t like my younger children to have a lot of screen time. We were assigned to this review, however, so I had Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination use it every day as part of their schoolwork. I’m still not sure what I think of it!

Reading Kingdom claims to teach reading by immersion, the way young children learn to talk. Rather than only teaching sounds, as phonics does, Reading Kingdom also teaches sequencing, writing, meaning, grammar and comprehension. The course is made up of a series of stories. Each story is introduced by first teaching each word. A variety of methods are used to teach the word, including showing several words with blanks and the child has to choose which one can turn into the desired word. After all the words in the story have been mastered, both on its own and in a sentence, the child gets to read a book on the screen. Here is an example of one activity, this one teaching the word “they.” Also on this screenshot you can see a couple of other features that enhance the program. The number in the yellow box is the number of points earned so far; each 20,000 points advances the child to the next level. The reward isn’t much, but they enjoy seeing what happens next when they open their passport. 2/15 indicates how many parts they have done out of the total in the session; this session has 15 parts, and he is on the second one.

Children are supposed to use this program four days a week or more for best results. My boys have averaged 3.6 days and 4.4 times a week—yes, they have those numbers on the dashboard where we go every day to access the lessons! It is recommended to only do one or two sessions per day (in the lower levels, only one word is taught in a session), but there is a way to override this if you want your child to do more. A couple of times, I allowed my boys to do up to four sessions, with breaks in between, but most of the time they did just one or two, depending on time. They did enjoy this; I don’t very often let them play games on the computer, so this was a game they were allowed to do and that made it fun. One problem Mr. Imagination had was that the screen moved on too fast for him, but after I got into the settings and changed it to move slower, he could handle the lessons much better. The default speed was just right for Mr. Sweetie.

I have thought of some pros and cons for Reading Kingdom:

Pros: Children can do this program with very little input from an adult. It is set up so that they can do it completely independently. Using this program helps children learn to spell and use the keyboard at the same time they are learning to read.

Cons: Children are expected to figure out without being told when to use a capital letter to begin a sentence, and when to use the correct punctuation. The punctuation wasn’t too hard for my boys to pick up, but the capitalization was a major frustration for them. Many times I had to rescue someone who was crying because he kept hitting the right key and it wasn’t accepted! Also, teaching reading by immersion, while it works for some children, will not work for others. I have had children who could only learn something if it was specifically told to them—they could not figure things out from context clues.

I asked the little boys what they think of it. Mr. Imagination said, “I like every single bit of it except the aliens.” These “aliens” are pictures that appear every so often. I’m guessing they are included to appeal to children who play a lot of video games, but I could sure do without them! Most of the pictures are alright, though. Mr. Sweetie said, “I have learned to spell a few words, but didn’t learn much about reading.”

I really haven’t decided yet whether Reading Kingdom will help my boys or not. I had Mr. Sweetie use a reading fluency test when he began using the course and again after five weeks of using it, and there was really no difference in the two tests. They are enjoying it, however, so I will let them continue doing it. It’s better than most computer games I’ve seen!

The same company has also developed a program called ASD Reading, which is for children on the autism spectrum. If you have a child like that, you may want to look into this program.

When I had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, to sign up to review some unit studies that Creation Illustrated has started producing, I thought that sounded very interesting. I have never used unit studies, so this seemed like a good way to try one out. I was given the choice of using the Snow unit study, or the one about Pine Trees. Because we are studying botany for science this year, I thought the Pine Trees study sounded like a good fit. I was sent the Snow study as well; maybe sometime we’ll use it.

I have found this study interesting. We started by reading an article about pine trees from the Fall ’17 issue of Creation Illustrated, which is linked to in the unit study. There was a lot of information about pine trees (I didn’t know that only one species is native to the Southern Hemisphere!), where they live, how they grow, and what they do for mankind, as well as spiritual lessons that can be drawn from them. After that, we watched several YouTube videos that were linked to. One that was especially interesting was about pine trees in Japan, and another that we enjoyed was about the second oldest Bristlecone Pine in the world. Amazingly, it began growing soon after the Flood!

After our introduction to pines through the article and the videos, we started on the study itself. The first written activity was to learn to spell and define a list of vocabulary words. This was too hard for my 6- and 8-year-olds. The 12-year-old would have greatly struggled with the spelling, since he is dyslexic and these are hard words, so we skipped that part. We did work on definitions, though, by matching the words on one page with their meanings on the next page.

A Bible study about pine and fir trees was the next activity. We looked up the references given, and then decided if the verse talked about pine or fir, and what the wood in it was used for. I was glad that the version used was noted, because once we didn’t notice that it said NIV, and we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to see! Once we did notice that, we skipped the verse. The last activity we had time for was to name the area in which certain pine trees are native, and then locate them on a map. Because we have had to take several days off lately, when I was sick or we were away, we didn’t quite finish the study, but I plan to next week. We’ll be identifying pine trees in photographs and answering a lot of questions about pine trees, and then doing a page of math calculations based on pine trees. I’m not sure yet if we’ll do an essay or an art project about pines; we’ll see when we get there. The last activity is a word search, so that will more than likely happen.

The Intricacies of Snow unit study appears to be very similar. One thing that would be very difficult for us to do is building an igloo, which is an activity that is suggested! There were more fill-in-the-blank questions in this study, it looked like when I flipped through. This study is based on an article in the Winter ’18 issue.

I have learned, by doing this review, that unit studies really aren’t our style. I’m glad to know that—but if they work well for your family, definitely consider trying out some of these! I like the way nature study, Bible study, Language Arts and Math are all tied together here.

Creation Illustrated is a beautiful magazine. The photography is incredible, and inside both the front and back covers of both of the issues I looked at is a two-page full-color photograph of a beautiful scene from nature, with a Scripture verse on it. I enjoyed looking over the articles and reading some of them. Each article uses some facet of Creation or the created world to bring out spiritual truths. I noticed articles on such topics as how kangaroos care for their young (fascinating!), the Grand Canyon, a man living a self-sufficient life in Alaska, and a family caught in a blizzard. Each issue also includes recipe cards for vegan dishes, a study guide for the issue, and a coloring picture and photo contest. One of the articles focuses on a day of Creation, a different day for each issue that I saw. A unit study is also being written to go along with each issue. If you purchase the unit study, which is especially aimed at 5th-8^th graders, you will get a link to a digital edition of the magazine. The unit study is downloadable, so you can use it for multiple students in your family. The unit studies are available here. If you are looking for character-building or nature-study resources in an attractive format, these magazines are great! Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazines are here, and subscriptions to the digital version will be available soon. Here is a peek at the Spring ’18 issue, which will be available very soon: