Product Review

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

The subject my children have struggled with the most is spelling. Can anyone relate to our struggles? I would guess so! Even the children who have caught on to reading very easily are still spelling their words rather wildly, with little or no heed paid to the rules I have tried to teach them. I don’t know what the problem is, but I do know it is frustrating! Because we have such a struggle with this, I was happy to receive complimentary subscriptions to WordBuild Online from Dynamic Literacy.

There are two basic levels included: Foundations and Elements. Foundations focuses on prefixes and suffixes; Elements goes into the Greek and Latin roots that make up the English language. All three of my school children have started out in Foundations 1, although technically Mr. Sweetie, who is reading at a sixth-grade level, could have gone into Elements 1. I felt like he needed the practice with English prefixes, though. 

There are 25 units in Foundations 1. Each focuses on on prefix or suffix. So far (I think they are all at about the same place), they have practiced prefixes such as over-, under-, un-, and re-, among others, and last week they were working with some suffixes, like -er and -est. I’m having each of them spend 10-15 minutes a day on these lessons, just getting through what they can in that time. I’ve been a little surprised at the lack of resistance I’ve encountered! Usually, none of them wants to do anything in the way of spelling or grammar, but all three are cheerful about doing a lesson of WordBuild Online each day.

Foundations 1 is introduced with a 2-minute video. This video presents the concepts of graphemes (the letters we write), phonemes (the sounds of the letters), and morphemes (meanings of parts of words), and teaches the meaning of prefixes and suffixes. 

There are five main activities that are supposed to help cement the concept of each prefix/suffix. First, there is a short introductory video explaining what the affix means and how to use it. I’m not sure of the order of the remaining activities; one great thing about this program is that children can use it on their own, without any help from Mom, so I haven’t had to pay much attention! One activity involves matching the affix with root words and then typing in a definition of the new word. Another has them choose a sentence in which the new word is used correctly. Another has them match the words with the proper definitions. 

We have been using our laptops and the iPad to do these lessons. The laptops have been the best tool, we’ve found. We have had some trouble, while using the iPad, of being sent back to the login screen when entering an answer. I haven’t been able to troubleshoot this; it could be that Little Miss accidentally hits the wrong button on the touch screen. This has never happened on a laptop.

We have not used Elements yet, of course; there are two or three Foundations levels to work through before reaching that level. A couple of the children were accidentally placed in Elements at the beginning, though, so we watched the introductory video. I found it quite interesting! It explains why English is so hard to read and spell (blame it on the Normans in 1066!). The teacher explains that we need to learn to spell English by meanings, rather than the way a word sounds. I had never thought about it that way before, but it sure makes sense!

So, the big question is always: Does this course work? Will my children know how to spell better after they complete WordBuild Online? I don’t know yet. Mr. Sweetie is convinced it won’t. He claims that there are mistakes that will keep the younger ones from learning; for him, it is too simple. He does admit that the program is “tolerable!” We haven’t used it long enough to know for sure, though. It certainly does offer more reinforcement for what I have been trying to teach them in their workbooks, and is easy enough that I will continue having them do it. This program is a welcome addition to our Language Arts repertoire, something I was needing without knowing it. And, hopefully I’ll be able to tell, in a year’s time, whether or not it helped! Be sure to click the image below to read other families’ reviews of this program.

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

Incentive charts can be hard to design. When I make one, I tend to end up with a very basic grid. These work, but they sure aren’t attractive. Sometimes, it’s nice to have something pretty and fun, though. It’s great, for non-techy, uninspired people like me, when someone else does the hard work and designs a pretty, fun chart. I was offered the use of the Healthy Habit Trackers from American Coaching Academy last month, in order to write a review. 

The Healthy Habit Trackers were designed to get children off screens and moving. Each of the 12 pages that come in one PDF has a list of five or six habits, with a 30-day checklist to help get these habits established in the life of the user. Most of them focus on exercise, while a few involve healthy eating. One even has common household chores! One page is a yoga challenge; I didn’t even print that one. 

Quite a variety of exercises are included. The Flexibility Challenge includes 30 seconds each, doing a quad stretch, touching toes, a hamstring stretch, butterfly stretch, neck stretch, and v-stretch. The muscular endurance challenge includes one minute each of wall sit, run in place, high plank, crab bridge, and wall pushups.

I also like the Kindness Challenge, which encourages giving a compliment, sending a text or email to a friend, giving a hug to someone, or holding the door open for someone. There is also a Nutrition Challenge. To fill in this chart, a child would need to drink five glasses of water, and eat two servings each of fruit, vegetables, lean protein, and grains. This chart has fun drawings of various foods from each of these groups to fill in. 

Each chart is shaped differently. Some are spirals, some are calendar pages. One is a rainbow, and one is shaped like honeycomb. Each chart is colorful; Miss Joy badly wants to cut the pictures out of each one!

Now, how did we use this? Well, I’ll have to admit that we didn’t use it very well. I printed all the pages (except yoga, of course), and had the school children look them over. Each of them chose a page, as did I, and we did the exercises on our page that day. It was rather fun, doing exercises all together. Miss Joy positioned herself right in front of me, and imitated my every move! For several days, the children kept doing their exercises and filling in their charts, but then life happened. Our children get a lot of exercise anyway, caring for the animals, so I’m not too concerned about getting them off screens (which they don’t get much of, anyway). 

More useful than the Healthy Habit Trackers is the bonus that came along: a set of blank habit trackers! They are just as pretty as the main set, but I can fill in any habits I want to establish. We’ll definitely be using those at times. I like having incentive charts I don’t have to design myself. 

If you are in need of a physical education program for your homeschool, definitely have a look at the Healthy Habit Tracker from American Coaching Academy. This might be just what you need. And, be sure to click on the image below to read reviews from other families. I’m sure some of them found this product much more useful than we did.

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

After we bought an iPad in December, I asked Esther if she knew of any good Bible memory apps that I could use with it that would help me with memorising scripture. For many years I’ve been working on memorising large portions of the Bible, but I’ve been frustrated with how hard it is to actually learn them. I have been just using my Bible, running a card down the page to cover up what’s coming next and trying to recall the passages and recite them that way. However, when you can read nearly an entire verse a glance the way I can, it is too easy to just read the passage instead of reciting it. I wanted an app that would help me to learn the words of the Bible. She found me one, and while it had some fun games it didn’t really do what I wanted. Then, I was given the opportunity to try out a subscription to The Bible Memory App–Bible Memory PRO from BibleMemory.com. I jumped at the chance. I’ve been using it now for about six weeks and I am impressed.

It took me a week or two to really learn how to use Bible Memory PRO, and at first I wasn’t sure I liked it. It didn’t have the fun games that the other program had, and there were a few facets of the program I had a little trouble wrapping my head around. However, the more I have used it the more I like it. Setting up an account was the first step. With a Pro account four different people can have their own account. For this review I was allowed a few more than that. Esther and Elijah and I all signed up and so did Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination. You have the choice when adding verses to add single verses or entire chapters. Each verse or chapter can be put into a collection. The collections make it easy to find what you need, although it took me a couple of weeks to figure out how I wanted to organise my collections. It’s very easy to change the names of collections, or even move chapters from one collection to another. Each chapter becomes a sub collection of its own.

After adding a chapter it’s time to learn the verses. You learn one verse at a time. First read the verse, then type the first letter of each word. Do that twice, or more often if you did not get 90% of the words correct. The first two times through you can see some of the words flickering on and off which gives hints to what all the words are. After those two times through you have to type the first letter of each word without seeing any of them to test your memorisation. You also have to remember the reference. If you got 90% accuracy you are considered to have memorised that verse and are ready to move on. I like to learn one verse a day from the passage I’m currently working on.

Each day you are told you need to review certain verses. The program pays attention to how well you know the verse when you review it, and decides from that how often you need to review it. If you did not get 90% of the words correct it suggests that you swipe the verse off the screen and redo it. I like to use the setting to combine all verses needing review which shows me the text of the verses that the program doesn’t think I need to review that day and leaves blanks for the ones that need to be reviewed. You can also choose to review the entire chapter in one go, or you can review individual verses – whatever works for you.

There are two other options for reviewing verses besides typing the first letter of each word, but I have not used them. One is flashcards; I just looked at it but I could not see how it was supposed to work. The other is drawings; I am guessing that you may need an Apple pencil to draw on an iPad and I do not have that. Like I said, this program does not have a lot of fun games for reviewing verses, but it is very effective. I am remembering the chapters I’m trying to memorise much better than I was before. Esther said it is helping her to learn better as well. Elijah quit using it soon after he started. He didn’t feel like it was the right program for him. Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination used it for a short time, but they are not fast enough at typing for it to work very well for them. If you don’t know the keyboard very well, you lose too much time hunting for the correct keys. I may try them with it again sometime in the future. And speaking of finding the keys one thing I appreciate is that if you hit any key that touches the correct one it counts it to be correct. Since I’m using it by tapping the on-screen keyboard, with usually just my index fingers, it’s very easy, when going fast, to hit a nearby key instead of the one I want. Of course, that also means that if the correct word is different from what I thought it was but begins with a letter very close on the keyboard to the one I was trying to hit the program thinks I know the verse better than I actually do.

Bible Memory PRO can be used on any device. Esther and Elijah have used it on their iPhones. I am using it on my iPad. It can also be used on a computer or an Android device. As long as the device is connected to the Internet it syncs with wherever it was used last. Overall I am very impressed with this program and I intend to keep using it. I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to review Bible Memory PRO because it has given me the tool I really needed to memorise scripture more easily. Click on the image below and have a look at other families’ experiences with the program.

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

We finished our math books for the year early, in October, and we won’t be starting our new books until February, so I was happy to try I Know It to fill in the gap so that Mr. Sweetie, Mr. Imagination, and Little Miss won’t forget everything they’ve learned! I Know It has math lessons for grades K-5, so it worked perfectly for us right now. It is intended as a supplement to any math curriculum; I just picked lessons that reviewed or reinforced concepts that I felt each child needed a bit more practice with before we drop studies altogether for the summer.

I Know It is very easy to use. We were given a Family license. With this license, there is only one login/password for everyone in the family, and when we login, we simply click on the picture with our name. I like that, because it can be tricky to have a different password for each child! It’s very easy to switch users with this system. There are two ways to approach lessons. You can let each child choose their own lessons, or you can assign lessons. I chose to assign lessons, which is also very easy. I simply got onto my page, browsed through the topics and looked at the sample problems, which appear when I hover over a lesson. Then, if I want someone to do that lesson, I click the check to the right of the lesson title. A box pops up which allows me to assign the lesson to any or all of the children. I can also choose how long the lesson stays on their home page, how many problems I want them to work (1-40), and whether they need to redo the lesson if they get less than a certain percentage correct. Then, click Assign Now, and the lesson is on that child’s page for them to work through when they next login! After I showed each of my three students how to use the program, I didn’t have to help them much at all except for assigning more lessons when they had completed the ones I had already given them. I did find out that Mr. Sweetie can’t remember what add, subtract, and multiply mean. He gets them mixed up! Oops. (I think he’s slightly dyslexic.)

The parent dashboard gives all sorts of reports about the children’s progress. One tab shows fun graphs of what they have accomplished. Another shows the lessons they have worked on and the scores they got. Obviously, one of them is struggling with decimals!

Children are given immediate feedback for each problem. If they got it right, a banner shows up across the problem, saying “Good Job!” or something like that, and the robot in the lower right corner of the screen does a dance. If the child doesn’t like the robot, it’s easy to switch to an emoticon or nothing by clicking the arrow beside the robot. Mr. Sweetie, doing 5^th grade work, was automatically given the emoticons, because the program figures that older children like them better. He was delighted, however, to figure out how to get the robots that the others had! If the answer is incorrect, the correct answer is shown and explained—and the robot acts very disappointed.

Little Miss enjoyed this program. She did very well with it; school is easy for her. She just finished 1^st grade, so that is the level of lessons I assigned to her. She found all that I gave her quite easy, especially since directions can be read aloud so she didn’t have any trouble understanding them. Mr. Imagination didn’t have any trouble, either; he just finished 4^th grade, so that’s the level I assigned to him. The first day or two, he had to learn the terminology that was used. He was working with place value, and the wording was different from what he was used to. He soon picked up on it, though, and had no more trouble. Mr. Sweetie, however, had a lot of trouble. I assigned him to work with decimals, and it turned out to be adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing with decimals, which he struggles with. He has just finished 6^th grade, and I gave him 5^th grade work, but it was still quite a challenge for him.

I Know It is a great way to supplement a math curriculum. It does well at giving more practice in areas in which a child is weak, and for keeping in practice through holidays. Each lesson, except the decimal ones Mr. Sweetie struggled with, took about 10-15 minutes to complete, so it’s a quick, easy way to keep up skills. Click the image below to see what other families have to say about it!

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

One thing I am always on the lookout for is a way to make practicing math facts fun and easy. When we were offered a license to use MathRider recently, I jumped at the chance. This program makes it fun to practice facts. In fact, for the first several days we had it, Mr. Sweetie, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss all competed to be able to play it first! The enthusiasm has lessened somewhat as the facts are getting harder, but they still enjoy it, for the most part.

The basic idea is that you and your horse Shadow go on a quest. You might need to find a flower to cure your mother, a gem that some monkeys have stolen, or the place to which a kidnapped princess has been taken. To meet the goal, you must ride your horse through a series of beautiful and mysterious lands, and the horse must jump one obstacle after another. The only way he can make the jumps is if you answer the math facts correctly before he gets to them. The faster you answer, the faster he runs and the more points you get, which means you finish the quest sooner. Each quest contains as many rides of 30 math facts each as it needs to so that you can get the number of points needed for that quest.

Players only answer facts for one function at a time. It is recommended to do the addition quests first, and then subtraction, followed by multiplication and division. Each function has four levels, and the recommendation is to do the Starter level first, then Intermediate and Advanced, finishing with Master. That last one appears to be just one ride. I’m the only one who has reached that level yet here, and it seemed that finishing was based on speed and accuracy. After every ride, you get to look at the map to see how far through the quest you have gotten. From that, you can see how much farther you have to go to reach the goal.

Each player has their own dashboard with statistics. The “top challenges” are the facts you have missed.

Except for one thing, I really like MathRider. I hadn’t been actively looking for a program to make math practice fun, but I am glad to have this, and we’ll be using it until we stop for our summer break, around Christmas. I like that the children can use this without any help from me, and I like that they are only racing themselves, not other children or the computer. I like that the program adjusts itself quickly to the child’s speed; Shadow walks or runs according to how fast the answer is entered. I really like the simplicity, yet attractiveness, of this program! I also like that the program is offline. You simply download the installer, install the program, and enter the registration key that has been emailed.

The one thing I don’t like is the magical aspect. In one of the quests, there is a wizard who gives you directions for the quest, and the ending is always somewhat magical. It’s such a good program otherwise, though, that we’ll use it for awhile anyway.

Little Miss really likes MathRider still. Mr. Sweetie says it’s “ok.” Mr. Imagination says it’s awful. He has tried the same quest six times and still can’t achieve mastery! I think all three are stuck on the Intermediate level of Addition. It is certainly exposing their weak areas! Mr. Sweetie, for example, doesn’t know 5+7=12 very well. Mr. Imagination has still been counting on his fingers to add, even though he’s in fourth grade; I noticed that by now, after a month of using MathRider, he’s not using his fingers as much. I think that, if we’re consistent with it, he’ll learn the facts a lot better.

Click on the image below to read other people’s reviews of MathRider!

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.