Homeschooling

Book Review—Mastering Logic & Math Problem Solving

June 10, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in
exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I
compensated in any other way.

When we were offered the opportunity to review a product from The Critical Thinking Co.™ , it wasn’t hard to decide that my boys would enjoy Mastering Logic & Math Problem Solving. Several of them enjoy puzzles, and even though the book is advertised for grades 6-9, I knew several of them outside that age range would like to try out the problems in the book.

I didn’t use this book for formal classes. I just printed out several pages at a time and left them lay on the table until someone picked them up and started working on them. Mr. Intellectual (grade 11?) was probably the most interested, followed by Simon. Mr. Diligence (grade 9) is the only one within the range of this book. He isn’t the type to really get into this type of activity, but he did help solve a number of them. (This picture shows Simon working out the first set I printed.)

The first set of pages I printed out had to do with gettting various combinations of people, animals, or things across a bridge, or over a river in a boat, without anyone or anything getting eaten. Simon and Mr. Intellectual spent a Sunday afternoon working out all of those, and quickly discovered that they were all basically the same idea.

Another week, I printed out a bunch of classical brain teasers. Several of the boys spent a couple of days mulling over the “nine dots” problem, in which they were supposed to draw four straight lines connecting all the dots. When they finally gave up and I checked the answer key, the answer was so obvious they were quite disgusted with themselves! Several of the other problems in this section, though were quite easy, and we enjoyed figuring out the answers. With the next several pages, I read out a number of the problems while dishes were being washed one evening, and we discussed them together. What fun to come up with answers to these riddles—the one we couldn’t quite figure out, though, was the lady giving a riddle to the census taker about the ages of her three children. The egg timer riddle was easy for Simon—and a great way to get him to practice his math skills a bit.

There are a lot of different types of math problems in this book. We didn’t get to the ones about ratios, proportions, percents, or even the algebra ones. I took a look at them, though, and they are fairly similar to the ones we get in our math books. That means that this book would be a great supplement for children who need more practice with algebra in real life situations. I can see us using these problems for races—who can solve them first? They would also be good for keeping up with math skills over the summer.

There are 193 pages in this book, and it is packed full of fun activities and puzzles that sharpen thinking and math skills. You can buy either the print version or the ebook for the same price; in my opinion, the ebook is more worthwhile because you can print as many copies as you want, for your own family—and it’s definitely worth getting!

Click on the image below to see what 65 other families are saying about their experiences with products from The Critical Thinking Co.™!

Creative Problem Solving, Dare to Compare Math, Mastering Logic & Math and Who Is This Kid? Colleges Want to Know! {The Critical Thinking Co.™ Reviews}

Product Review—Page A Day Math

June 3, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Every summer when we stop doing school for a couple of months, I start looking for worksheets for my younger boys to do, so they don’t lose all their math facts when they aren’t using them every day. Every year, I try something different, and I haven’t been very happy with anything I’ve found. Now, though, I think I have what we need! I looked at Page A Day Math when it came up for review, and was immediately interested. We’re in the middle of our school year right now, but it looked like just what we needed for extra practice now, and I definitely plan to use these kits in the summer when we’re taking a break.

Page A Day Math offers kits for each of the four math operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Each kit also includes some handwriting practice books, which I didn’t use so can’t comment on. You can buy either physical kits or digital ones; we were given the digital ones, which are to be downloaded and then printed. They can be used for as many children as you have—I like that! They are quite easy to print and staple together and make a great supplement to any math curriculum.

I printed a couple of the booklets from the Multiplication Starter Kit for Mr. Sweetie. He knows his multiplication facts, but is still pretty slow, so I thought he should get some more pratice. He times himself for a minute every day and does as many problems as he can in that minute. He’s getting faster! Each booklet introduces a new times table. The front and back of one page are to be done every day. First, the student is to trace each fact, and then write the answers. I don’t require Mr. Sweetie to do all the tracing, although he does a lot of the numbers because they are faint enough that he has trouble seeing them otherwise. (I’m guessing that when I get a new drum for our printer, later this week, the pages will print a little darker!)

Mr. Imagination is working through the Subtraction Starter Kit. These each focus on subtracting by one number (-1, -2, etc). As with the multiplication books, each page also has a lot of review of previously taught facts.

Little Miss is working with the Pre-K Math Starter Kit. This introduces the concept of addition; Book 1 teaches adding 1 to 0-10, Book 2 adds 2 to each number, and so on. I’m not sure what the difference is between these books and the Addition Starter Kit. Little Miss is doing well with these books. She’s been making up addition problems for me, and then she remembers the answers the next day, quite often.

Each kit comes with flashcards to print. I like the looks of them! They are meant to be printed on paper, then folded with the fact on one side and the answer on the other and glued together. Instead of just one fact on the addition and multiplication cards, there is a pair of “twins” such as 0+7= and 7+0=. I like that the facts will be correlated in the child’s mind that way. Of course, the subtraction and division cards only have one fact on each.

Each kit also comes with an assessment, which is useful to determine where to start the child. Based on the results of these assessments, I started Mr. Imagination in the first subtraction booklet, and Mr. Sweetie in the fourth multiplication one.

I really like that the children can work independently with these materials. I had to show them how to use the booklets the first day, and since then I just ask if they’ve done their page. So simple! I’m impressed with this product, and it is one we’ll be using for many years, I believe. Click on the image below to see what 52 other families have to say about it!

Daily Math & Handwriting (Print + Cursive) {Page a Day Math Reviews}

Product Review—Reading Kingdom

May 29, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

When we were given the opportunity to review Reading Kingdom again, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss were pretty excited to use it. Little Miss has been wanting to learn to read, and Mr. Imagination remembered having fun with it a couple of years ago, the first time we reviewed this product.

Reading Kingdom uses a variety of activities to help children learn to read fluently. Each lesson introduces one word. In some lessons, the child must pick the word out from several choices of similar words, several times. Next, she must look at several words with blanks in place of some letters and choose which one would make the word being studied, then fill in the missing letters by typing them from the keyboard. After that, the word is used in various sentences, which are read to the child, who also needs to choose the proper words to make the sentence. After clicking on the words, he/she has to type them, too. Finally, at the end of the level, the child gets to read a whole story! In earlier lessons, the focus is more on learning the letters that make the word. For example, here are several activities from the lesson in which “cat” is taught.

After a week or so, I saw that Mr. Imagination was pretty bored with Reading Kingdom. He is a fluent reader now, and his abilities are way beyond this program’s usefulness for him, so I let him quit. Little Miss, however, is loving it still. She’s been using it an average of 3-4 days a week through the review period (about 5 weeks, I think), and still enjoying it. In fact, it’s a great incentive for her to get her other work done, so she can do Reading Kingdom for 20 minutes! She often does two sessions a day, which is all the program allows, although I allow her to stop whenever she wants to. She enjoys getting to do computer work like the older children, and the activities are just games to her, for the most part. She was quite frustrated at first as she learned how to click in the right places and where the keys are on the keyboard. She struggled with correlating the lower case letters shown her on the screen with the capital letters on the keyboard, but it helped that a picture of the keyboard often popped up with both capital and lower case letters on the keys and the correct one highlighted. I still did have to help her find the correct one for awhile, but for the last couple of weeks she’s been doing great.

Each child has his/her own dashboard, reached by clicking on their name on the main dashboard. The child is to click on a picture of an owl to continue with the program. You can also check their progress by scrolling down a little; here is the chart showing where Little Miss is with it. By clicking on the title of one of the sections, you can see the individual lessons, and also use this area to redo a previous lesson.

Now, the real question is, does the program work? Will it teach a child to read? I think it can. I know for sure that Little Miss is much more aware of individual words on a page; she was picking out words in the Bible one evening last week as we were reading together. I was pointing to the words as we went, and she learned to recognize a few, quickly, which she had never done before. I haven’t spent enough time watching her do her Reading Kingdom lessons to know if she can read all the words she has been introduced to, but the one time I did stop by her and check, she was able to read the sentence fairly easily. One thing I noticed that she’s picked up from it is the skill of moving from left to right on a page, which is quite important for reading well.

Would I buy a subscription to this program? I might, if it was a matter of needing something educational for my young child to do and I was overwhelmed and not able to spend the time to teach her to read. For children with no major learning issues (I have dealt with severe dyslexia, so that colors all my experiences with this sort of program), it would likely result in a child being able to read fairly well. I don’t see it building a very strong foundation in phonics, though; it seems more like sight reading to me. That being said, though, awhile after we used it two years ago, I introduced “ing” to one of the boys who had been using Reading Kingdom, thinking he had never seen it and would not know what it said. He easily read it, and when I expressed surprise, he told me he had learned it with Reading Kingdom! That showed me that this system can work. Maybe I just think it’s too lazy on my part! Anyway, I’m going to allow Little Miss to continue using it as long as she enjoys it, and see how she progresses. It sure helps me out!

Check it out for yourself! If you go to this page, hover over the Resources tab and you’ll see several sample lessons. Go through a couple of those, and see if this program would be a good fit for your child. Also, click on the image below to see what 31 other families have to say about it. Three families have also used ASD Reading, developed for children on the autism spectrum, from the same company. I always enjoy reading other people’s reviews after I have posted my own.

Product Review—Beyond the Stick Figure Art School

May 12, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I have a son, Mr. Imagination, who loves to draw and wants to learn more about art. When we were offered the opportunity to use the Beyond the Stick Figure Complete Drawing Course Plus 3 Bonus Courses from Beyond the Stick Figure Art School, he was very enthusiastic. This sounded perfect—a step-by-step, incremental guide to art.

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss working on an art project.

The first several lessons went very well; both he (age 8) and Little Miss (age 5) loved doing the projects, and even Mr. Sweetie (age 10) joined us. We learned about circles and dots, and curved lines and straight lines, and practiced looking for these in objects around the house. We drew circles on paper, and made pages of bubbles, then colored them in with markers. We drew designs with each of the other components of pictures, too, and colored pretty designs. Then, we started drawing flowers. I really liked the projects where we drew a flower in the foreground and then more behind it! I have never considered myself an artist, but I could do that!

As we moved on, however, my little ones got bogged down in the repetition. We ended up skipping a large section of lessons so that I could see what the rest of the course was like, in order to tell you in this review, and found a project that they liked better. We got to draw hills, cover the nearest one with grass, and paint the picture with a watercolor wash. Everyone enjoyed that! Unfortunately, because of the lockdown due to COVID 19, we did not have proper watercolor paper. We had to use printer paper, because that’s all we have (we were not able to get more because it’s nonessential), and it doesn’t work well with watercolors.

We also were not able to get the markers that are recommended. I think if we had been able to, the earlier projects would have been much more satisfying. She recommends Prismacolor markers, and they aren’t sold in this country anywhere that I could find, even without lockdown, so I bought the only ones I could find. They were washable, which means the color ran and mixed in ways we didn’t want it to. If you want to use this course, try to find the proper markers (if you live in America, they are on Amazon—shipping is much too high for me to be able to get them that way here).

Anyway, back to the course. The next section, which we haven’t done anything with yet, is about watercolor painting. It looks fun! Even though my little ones are tired of this course, because of the constant repetition, I think I can interest them in the painting part of it. I watched a few of the instructional videos, and in them she was teaching how to create different tones of paint. Once we are able to get watercolor paper, I want to try this. As with all the other lessons, these techniques are taught baby step by baby step.

Further lessons cover acrylic painting and sculpture. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to those lessons. They sound interesting; it’s just that Mr. Imagination feels pretty bored with the lessons we have done. I feel like this course, although it is simple enough for young children to do, would be better for older ones who can understand the need for repetition.

All the lessons are presented as 1-10 minute videos, with the instructor, who happens to be a homeschooling mother herself, talking through what she is doing and wants her students to be doing. She has a lovely British accent (and I can now tell the difference between British and Kiwi!). We did have some issues with the videos. The worst simply had to do with our computer. These videos are from Vimeo, and my computer often freezes when I play Vimeo videos. We had to do a lot of reloading to make them work. Also, the sound is very quiet on some of them, and even with our speakers plugged in, we had to strain to hear her talking. Here is a picture of our dashboard. It is very easy to move from one lesson to the next, although we have to mark each one complete in order to move on. It’s extremely easy to go back to a previously completed lesson!If you have a child interested in art, this might be something to look into. It certainly is easy to use; just watch a video to see what materials you will need for a given section, then move on and watch each instructional video and follow directions. Click the image below to read what 80 different families have to say about this course.

Beyond the Stick Figure Complete Drawing Course {Beyond the Stick Figure Art School}

Product Review—Everyday Education, LLC

May 6, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I don’t know about anyone else, but it seems like writing, and penmanship in general, are very difficult to teach to boys. They just aren’t interested! I struggle to get them to write at all, let alone legibly. Therefore, I was somewhat interested in using Perfect Reading, Beautiful Handwriting ebook from Everyday Education, LLC. The premise sounded great—a simple method for teaching beautiful handwriting, and good reading. I thought I would use it to supplement the Language Arts program we’re using with the boys, and get a start on teaching Little Miss to read and write with it.

When I received the ebook, I was quite interested in reading the introductory pages. The history of our current type of cursive handwriting was fascinating, and I like the premise of this book, which is to simplify writing so that everyone can have beautiful handwriting. I believe the book would work to teach a child to read, as well, assuming the child had no learning disabilities and the mother had enough time to spend with them doing the lessons. For me, unfortunately, it didn’t work well.

I did not end up using this course as a supplement for my boys. This book teaches Italic writing, which is beautiful and simple, but they had already learned the normal cursive. Therefore, I felt like it would be too confusing for them to try to relearn everything. I did use it for Little Miss, to work on letter formation. She loved doing several pages of the letters, and did very well at learning the sounds. Each letter is given a picture of a word that begins with that sound—like A is apple, E is elephant, I is igloo, etc. We didn’t get beyond writing letters, though. The program doesn’t start putting letters together into words until all the letters have been learned. Then, it introduces short vowel words, consonant blends, compound words and plural words. It then moves on to vowel-R words and vowel teams. Each of these lessons has a list of words to learn to read, and then several sentences using the words. Each of the sentences is printed with blank lines under the words for practice writing. This is one of the strengths I see in this book, that the child is expected to write directly below the example, which makes it easy to follow the model.

After thoroughly learning the shapes of the letters, children are introduced to joining them. With the Italic system, most of the letters are actually not joined, as in most cursive systems. I found that quite interesting.

In summary, this book was not a good fit for our family at this time, both because I have already taught my boys to write cursive with a different system and because of the dyslexia that runs in our family. In the introduction, this book states that everyone will be able to read well by going through this system, but I know from experience that some people will not be able to—at least not with someone like me teaching them. I tried systems like this with my older boys and utterly failed, although I’m sure some people would have done well with it. This book would work well to teach most children to read and write, however, and if I didn’t already have a course on hand to use with Little Miss I would give this one a try. Take a look at it and see what you think!

Fifty families have been using Perfect Reading, Beautiful Handwriting over the past month and a half; see what they have to say about it by clicking the image below!

Perfect Reading, Beautiful Handwriting ebook {Everyday Education, LLC Reviews}

March 2020 Photos

April 26, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the last of the photos from March that I didn’t get fitted into other posts.

For science this year, we’re working our way through Exploring Creation With Zoology 3: Land Animals of the Sixth Day. When we studied the chapter about cats, the grand finale was to cut out pictures of cougars and deer from the notebooking journals, and toss the cougar onto the deer. If the cougar landed on three deer, that meant it had enough food and could live and reproduce. If not, it died. Each deer that didn’t get eaten reproduced, and another cougar would move into the area. It was very interesting to see how the number of cougars rose with the number of deer, and then the deer population dropped when there were too many cougars. It was a very vivid illustration of the balance of nature!

Mr. Intellectual dissected a shark for his Biology course. He was supposed to have a perch, but we made do with what we had. The shark had been in the freezer for a year!

Little Miss loves to haul things in her wheelbarrow! This was before Simon fixed it up and painted it.

I’m not sure who took this picture, but I liked it. This is a rare picture of Mr. Diligence sitting still for a few minutes—obviously Goofball made herself at home on his knee very quickly!

Product Review—Home School in the Woods

March 26, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Last month, we were offered the opportunity to use and review a product from Home School in the Woods. We really enjoyed doing a history study from them six or eight months ago, and the children were fairly enthusiastic about doing another project now. I gave Mr. Sweetie, Mr. Imagination, and Little Miss the choice of two Lap-Paks, one about Knights and one about Benjamin Franklin. They decided they would like to do the Knights K-2 Lap-Pak, so that’s the one we requested. We’ve been working on the projects in it ever since receiving our download. We haven’t quite finished, but almost. We put the lapbook together yesterday, and got a start on coloring the picture for the cover.

There are 12 different little projects to do for the lap book. Each one gives more information about knights. The first project talks about the feudal system in general and how it was organized. There were also projects about the knights’ armor and weapons, and how a king knighted a man (that one was very fun!).

Each project required printing from one to five pages, each on its own PDF, on either white or colored paper or cardstock. I was thankful to have a supply of these on hand from the last time we did a similar-style study! Each project was a little different. Most of the projects have some sort of flaps to lift in order to read information underneath, and a couple of them have several small pages stapled together. One project involved drawing a coat of arms for yourself or your family. Mr. Sweetie remembered seeing a coat of arms that related to our family in a book we have about the Middle Ages, so he based his on that—fun! Two of the projects used paper fasteners to make moving parts, and another has a little “puppet” to show a tournament happening.

This project is a really fun supplement to a study of the Middle Ages. It was something different to do in our school days. We learned a fair amount about knights, and in such a way that the children will remember what we learned. They did get pretty tired of coloring pictures by the end; there is a lot of coloring involved. I had them work on coloring while we read aloud, and that helped. This project was good for developing fine motor skills, and, as one of my boys learned the hard way, it is good for learning to follow directions! I had to reprint one or two projects because they weren’t done correctly.

Pros—fun way to learn
easy way to do a little art
very little preparation time required
all printing is black and white, with one page per PDF
Cons—lots of coloring, which my boys struggle with
quite a few pages to print

Will we do more of these projects if they are offered to us? Yes, indeed! We would love to do the Benjamin Franklin lapbook next! Would I buy one? Yes, to use as a supplement to a study we’re doing. These projects are well-thought-out and easy to work into our school days. And by the way, if you’re interested in how the elections work in the United States, this publisher has a Lap-Pak about them. Check out this page if you want to know more about it. Also, if you are curious about lapbooks, I found a very informative blog post about them, here. Click on the link below to see what 79 other families experienced with various products from Home School in the Woods!

Home School in the Woods Collections - Lap-pak, Timeline Figures, History Studies & Activity-Pak {Home School in the Woods Reviews}

Product Review—Pilgrim’s Rock, LLC

February 28, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

One of the products available for review from the Review Crew recently was The Unbreakable Faith Course from Pilgrim’s Rock, LLC. After I looked at it a little bit, I printed out the information and showed it to Gayle, asking him if this was something he was interested in our family going through together. We ended up being put on this review, so for the past month our evening Bible time has been spent working through this course as a family.

The Unbreakable Faith Course consists of 6-8 video lectures per part (there are 6 parts), as well as reading two books, The Box and God the Reason. Both of these books were sent to us as PDFs, and I printed them to make it easier to read them together. We have gotten through the first three parts, and started the fourth tonight. Each part ends with a quiz, which we have also been doing together. We go around the room, each person answering a question. If there is any objection to the answer chosen, we discuss it. Even Little Miss wants her turn, so someone supplies her with the correct answer! When we began working through the course, we started by reading The Box. We found this book very good and easy to understand. As a discussion between two imaginary friends, a Christian and an atheist, some very good arguments and proof for the existence of God were displayed, in a very accessible way. Part 1 had a lot of good thoughts that we appreciated hearing; I believe everyone in the family was getting a lot out of the course at that point. Esther wrote this about it in her newsletter: “There’s a lot to be learned from this course, as it turns out, and I feel like the little that has stuck with me is only a scratch off the surface. But some things it talks about are things like He created the universe; therefore, He is outside the laws of the universe. It’s not a problem for Him to do the things the Bible says He’s done (raising people from the dead, Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark, etc.). Who do we think He is when we think He isn’t (or can’t be) concerned with our little things here? Even Jesus gave us a definition of something that was “easy” to do in Luke 12:25-26—add a cubit to our height!” As we started reading God the Reason, however, and moving on into the videos for Parts 2 and 3, we started feeling like there was a lot of repetition. We read the book, and then heard the same thing in the videos. That kind of repetition can be very good, but in this case it was a bit much. All of us are feeling fairly similarly at this point, that the content of the course is going over our heads. Esther and I, and Mr. Intellectual, have quite good vocabularies; I would say well over high school level. Even so, we struggle to get a lot out of what we hear and read from Unbreakable Faith. Esther said she would consider this course to be difficult for a high schooler to grasp. Gayle feels that the average high schooler or even university student would struggle to make it all the way through the course, because of the way it is presented. He also mentioned this evening again how wordy it is; it would be better if it was a bit more concise. There are some very good illustrations, both pictorial and verbal, which we can understand. We appreciate the way God is glorified and His truth is upheld. One thing we are taking away from this course is that there is no excuse for someone not to believe in God. As Craig Biehl, the author and speaker, says over and over, the evidence for God is “clear, comprehensive and compelling.” He makes that point abundantly clear, with much evidence to back up his claim. We also appreciated a very simple way to counter an atheist’s claim that there is no God: To know that, you would have to know everything in the universe and beyond! God the Reason is a lengthy treatise about Who God is. The subtitle is the theme for the entire course: How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith. Each chapter talks about a different facet of God’s greatness, such as that He is eternal, He needs nothing, He cannot be known unless He chooses to reveal Himself…. Many arguments are given, in depth, in support of each of these statements. There is a lot of meat in here; this is not a book for “babes in Christ.” I think it would take me several readings to get everything out of this book that is in it. Who would this course be good for? Those who have a very scholarly bent and enjoy listening to solid Bible teaching. If you enjoy listening to sermons about apologetics, this may well be a great fit for you! Thirty-four families besides ours have been using this course over the past month. Click on the image below to hear what they have to say about it—I’m going to be reading some of those reviews after I finish my own! It’s always good to hear multiple points of view about something like this.

The Unbreakable Faith Course {Pilgrim's Rock, LLC Reviews}

Product Review—Lets Go Geography, Year 2

February 25, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

A couple of years ago, we had the privilege of reviewing Year 1 of Let’s Go Geography. Mr. Imagination loved it and badly wanted to continue doing it, but last year it was one of the things that completely went by the wayside when I was pregnant. This year I decided to make a point of getting back to it—and then had the opportunity to review Let’s Go Geography,Year 2! He and Little Miss were very excited about getting to be part of this review. I have Mr. Sweetie join in, too, although he isn’t nearly as enthusiastic. We’re really enjoying it, although I didn’t get quite as far during the first few weeks of having it as I would have liked.

So far, we have studied the North and South American continents in general, and created dividers for our ring binders for those continents and Europe. These dividers are something new with the program, which I really like. Having the binder makes it easy to keep the pages together, which was something we struggled with when we did Year 1 awhile back. I gave each of the three children their own binder, and we 2-hole punch all the pages to put in the binders (3-ring binders are almost non-existent in this country—we have to order them online if we want them!). We have also studied the Pacific Northwest states and the Mountain West states. One of the videos we watched for the Pacific Northwest study was about Mount St. Helens. Mr. Sweetie was so intrigued by that that he wanted to write about the volcano for our writing group. He didn’t know enough about it, though, so we’re reading a book I had on the shelf. I love it when their interest in something is sparked by a lesson like that! One of the videos from the Mountain West states was about potato growing in Idaho, and Mr. Imagination wrote about that for his summary of what he learned about those states. He shared that story at our writing group.

As we worked through the next lessons, we’re looking forward to studying Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela and several other Central and South American countries, and then move on to Europe, where, among others, we’ll study England, France and Germany. I’m not sure what contries are studied in the second half of the year, because I haven’t looked ahead at that semester yet. It sure looks fun to “travel” around the world this way, though!

Each lesson is laid out in the same format. We start with map work. On a map of the continent, we color the country we’re studying, and then color a flag of that country and glue it onto a page with another map of the continent. We listen to the national anthem and a song from the country, and watch several videos on safeYouTube about the country or region, then write on a notebooking page that’s provided about what we learned. Then, there is a coloring picture, and a craft. Mr. Sweetie’s favorite part of each lesson is watching the videos, and I think Mr. Imagination and Little Miss love the crafts best. So far, we got to do some painting for the first one, with a mountain scene (which inspired Mr. Imagination to paint his own version immediately afterward!), and then we cut and glued paper to make a desert sunset with cactuses silhouetted in front.

The day we were working on that one, we had just started when we had a surprise visit of a few people, including two young girls, from a local, very restrictive religious commune. The girls were very shy, and I was praying desperately about what we could do with them, and got the idea to include them in the craft. It was the perfect thing to get them doing something with our children, and they seemed to enjoy it. So, the timing was perfect with that—praise God!

I’m loving Let’s Go Geography for several reasons. The most obvious is, of course, that we get some geography lessons in and learn about different parts of the world. Another benefit is that we sometimes get a story for our writing group out of the lesson! This program is also providing some art lessons for my children, which is something we have really lacked. I’m excited to be able to provide my little ones with more ways to be creative, since I don’t have the imagination to come up with projects on my own. If you would like to include geography into your homeschool, check out Let’s Go Geography—it’s great for the primary grades! Forty-nine homeschool families have been using this program lately. Click the image below to read what they have to say about this great program!

Geography for Kids - Year 2 {Let's Go Geography Reviews}

Product Review—SchoolhouseTeachers.com

January 8, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

For the past three years, ever since I joined the Homeschool Review Crew, we have had a subscription to SchoolhouseTeachers.com. This year, again, we were given the Ultimate PreK-12 Annual Membership. I spent about three hours one afternoon exploring the courses that are available on this website, and barely scratched the surface. There are so many resources here! It’s almost overwhelming. To use it properly, you would need to know what you want, and then search for that, specifically, then branch out into the fun things that you find.

We’re taking our summer holiday right now, so we haven’t been doing much school during this review period. I did find a few fun courses to do. Mr. Imagination loves cooking, so we started using Sue Gregg’s Whole Foods Cooking Lessons Archives. Her cookbook is divided up into 14 weeks of lessons. Lots of topics are discussed; it was a great chance to teach all the children about why I like to soak our grains before we eat them. There are several lessons involving grains, and then the course moves on to beans, and then animal protein. We haven’t gotten very far in this yet, but I like what we have used! The lessons include the printable recipe, and a series of pages showing every step of the recipe in photographs. My favorite feature, though, is the Talking Food Pages, where she teaches the why behind her choices, such as soaking the grains, or using real butter rather than margarine.

Another course we started is American History in Picture Books. We’re working our way through American history right now (we have been for the past two years because we have found so many wonderful books to read!), so I didn’t start at the beginning of this course. Instead, we jumped to Unit 6, which is scheduled for Weeks 22-24 of this 58-week course, and read the books I was able to come up with for that unit. The focus was on Lewis and Clark, the War of 1812, and the Erie Canal. I definitely want to continue using the book recommendations in this course to supplement what we’re already using. These are my favorite type of picture books!

I also bookmarked two geography courses, Trek to the Holy Land and Beyond, and Everyday Explorers Australia Archive, which also covers New Zealand. These look really fun—I’m hoping I can work in time for some geography this year! There are also two more cooking courses in my bookmarks tab. They look fun, too. I like the thorough lessons plans that are included. Each course is broken down into daily lessons, with all the information you need to teach, every day, and boxes to tick off so you can keep track of what has been accomplished.

You can put together a complete curriculum for your whole family from SchoolhouseTeachers.com. They have courses for every subject—Math, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Art…you name it, they have it—and for every grade. The courses are easily searchable by grade or by subject, as well. Just be prepared to spend a lot of time looking, as it’s so easy to get off onto rabbit trails, with all the fun courses there are. And then there is the World Book library, which I haven’t even looked at yet….

We also enjoy the video library. There are video courses for every subject. Our favorites, of course, are the history ones. Some of my boys ask, occasionally, if they can watch a Drive Through History movie (we wish there were more available, but enjoy the ones that are there), or a Torchlighters movie about a hero of Christian history. In the past three years, we’ve watched some of those several times.

SchoolhouseTeachers.com is truly a great resource for the Christian homeschooling family. I’m hoping to utilize it more fully this year than I have in the past—we’ll see if I can remember to do that!

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