Product Review

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.

I have been using the 1st Grade Entire School Year Curriculum from Homeschool Easy with Little Miss lately. She finished her preschool and kindergarten books about a month ago, and was eager to learn to read, so I thought this level would be a good fit for us. She was excited about trying something new, too.

We received the entire year of materials from Homeschool Easy in a zip file.When I extracted it, I found seven folders, one per subject, plus two PDF files about how to use the curriculum and an overview of it. Each week, I opened each of the folders, found the folder inside that for the week we were ready for, and printed the pages for the week. We simply worked our way through the worksheets each day, going back to the guide for some of the subjects in order to find the links we needed for videos or online books. It took an hour to an hour and a half a day to do all the work, which I thought was pretty good. Little Miss enjoyed most of this schoolwork, and it took little enough time that she didn’t get bored.

We started most days with the Math. I was very surprised, when we started working with this math course, that it jumped right into place value. Obviously, children are expected to know their numbers when they start this course! Little Miss is quite advanced with her numbers, so it wasn’t a problem for her. We cut out the paper place value blocks that were provided, and she enjoyed building each of the numbers she was told to. She quickly caught on to place value and had no trouble with it. By the fourth week, she had worked on ordering numbers up to 200, and was adding, too. This course seemed to move ahead very quickly; I have some children who wouldn’t have been able to handle it as well as Little Miss did. Looking ahead, I see that addition and subtraction are pretty thoroughly covered, as well as skip counting. Money and graphs are also introduced. In this photo, she had built the number 145 with the paper place value blocks.

We usually worked on Reading next. This presumed that the child would know the entire alphabet and how to sound out words already. The first lesson introduced a number of sight words. I made a number of changes in how we used the program in this subject, since Little Miss wasn’t ready for reading sight words yet. She learned a few of them, and I helped her read the content in the lessons. Each lesson introduces a group of words (words with a particular short vowel, or long vowel, or other combination, or simply high-frequency words). The first page has a word list and several sentences using the words. Then there are several pages of flashcards to print, cut out and glue together, and then a couple of pages of sentences with blanks to fill in. There is a crossword puzzle and a word search with the week’s words, and some comprehension activities.

The next thing we usually did was Grammar. We learned what makes a sentence, and then about different kinds of sentences. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are introduced later in the year. Each week has a page for each day, in which the child either copies a sentence correctly or writes their own.

Little Miss’s favorite subjects were Book Reading and Science. She especially loved the Book Reading. We were able to access books online to read together by clicking a link in the monthly guide. Most of the books are very simple and repetitive, and she loved helping me read them, and enjoyed answering the questions on the worksheet, too. Some of the books are nonfiction, and some are fiction. She wants to keep on doing them! For Science, we often watched YouTube videos and then answered questions about them. She didn’t like the first one, but she enjoyed the rest (the first was “too silly”). We studied plants while we used this course; bugs, mammals, birds and water animals come up later in the year. This was one of her favorite science projects—she has always loved picking flowers!

History is one subject we struggled with in this curriculum. It is very American, and the first month’s theme is Patriotism. We don’t live in America, so it didn’t apply to us. We simply skipped a few things, like the page that said to color the country we live in—it was a map of the United States! Month 2 covers the Presidents, and Months 3-8 study the geography and history of the United States.

I appreciated the Writing subject. Each week there are two writing prompts given, with several lines on which to write a short story. These have been very helpful. We are part of a writing group, and it’s hard to come up with topics. Using these papers has really helped Little Miss come up with things to take along to share with the group.

It was interesting to use a new curriculum for a few weeks. I was disappointed in how advanced it was, since it was for first grade. I would have expected it to start out a lot simpler. Little Miss is advanced enough that I would have been able to teach her to read using this, but it would definitely have taken longer than the schedule allowed for. Most of my children, however, would not have done well with this. There are very few directions for the teacher; you need to know how to teach a child in order to use this. If you are confident, however, and just need a framework, this might be a very good choice for you. The cost is fairly reasonable for a full year of school curriculum, and since it’s digital, it’s fully reusable for other children. A lot of printing is required, so that has to be factored in. All the materials needed, though, are available online and easy to find by just clicking links. Have a look at what other people have to say about this curriculum—I’m especially interested in reading some reviews of other levels, since there is a complete year’s curriculum available for grades 1-5. Click on the image below to find the other reviews.

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.

About six weeks ago, we were presented with the opportunity to do a course from Journey Homeschool Academy, and had to choose between two topics. The children and I spent our science class time for a few days checking out the various sample lessons offered for the two courses, and decided that Experience Astronomy: Elementary looked pretty interesting. We learned a lot just from the two video lessons that were available as samples! We’ve been using this program now for five weeks, and are really enjoying it. We’re watching the lessons with the whole family, while the evening dishes are being washed. We’re only doing one lesson a week, so just one night a week is spent on astronomy. I decided to do it this way so that Gayle and the older boys can learn about the heavens, as well. We haven’t spent much time with astronomy, so this will plug a gap for them.

Each lesson, as I mentioned, has a video. This is usually about 15 minutes long. It is accompanied by a 2-3 minute Memory Video, with the main points the teacher wants us to remember. There is also a PDF with supplementary material. This always includes some suggested books to read, a craft activity, several pages of handwriting practice, notecards with the memory points, and a quiz. We’re using the notecards (I have them taped to a cupboard door) and the quizzes, and we’ve done a couple of the crafts. Mr. Imagination loved making a “planetarium!” I like the quizzes to help us think about the video lesson again the day after. It also makes a very easy science class!

Another project we did, which the children really enjoyed, was creating a constellation from marshmallows and toothpicks. Can you guess what the favorite part was? Eating the marshmallows afterward!

These lessons are very much based on the Bible. In every lesson so far, we have been taken on a “field trip” to some ancient archeological site where there was evidence of ancient man worshipping or studying the heavenly bodies (the sun, moon, or stars), but the teacher is very careful to point out that worship of these things was not what God wanted. Also, one of the assignments for the course is to memorize Psalm 8. Most of my boys already know it, so they recite it along with him when he quotes a verse.

Looking ahead, I’m seeing more lessons on the constellations, and then some about eclipses and meteors. After that, it looks like we’ll be making a trip through the solar system before a couple of final wrap-up lessons. This looks like fun! I’m really enjoying this course, and I know some of the rest of the family are, too. Some won’t admit it, but they all sure pay attention when I put the computer on the table and turn it on. Since we do this on a night when the big boys are on dishes duty, they are a captive audience, too. We often quit using review products as soon as the review posts on my blog, but this is one that we’ll continue using till we reach the end.

Sixty-seven families have been using programs from Journey Homeschool Academy. If you’re curious what others say about these courses, as I am, click on the image below to read their reviews.

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.

I was quite interested to see how the MaxScholar Orton-Gillingham Software from MaxScholar works when I heard about it. Nine or ten years ago, I had two boys who were not learning to read, no matter what I tried. I came across some online programs that taught math skills, but I couldn’t find anything I liked that would teach reading. In answer to prayer, I finally found a physical program that worked. It was an Orton-Gillingham based program, so that made me curious about how MaxScholar was set up.

Little Miss was put into Level 0 of MaxReading. In this level, she chooses a “chapter”, which is actually a picture. The program asks several questions about the picture for her to think about, and then she moves on to a series of questions with multiple-choice answers. Each question and answer have a button beside them, which when clicked read the sentence aloud. After she chooses an answer, the program moves on to the next question. She’s really enjoying this section of the program.

Mr. Imagination was put into Level 2 of MaxReading. He chose the first book in the list, “Australia”, and has read the first two chapters. Vocabulary words are highlighted; he is instructed to click on them to read the definitions, then read the entire story. After reading the story, he is supposed to highlight the topic of the story, the main idea, and important details, then write an outline of the story. After that he is instructed to write about the story, choosing either to write a summary, answer an open-ended question, or answer a general question. The final activity for each story is a 5-question multiple-choice quiz. Once again, each question and answer have a button to click to hear it read aloud.

For MaxPhonics, he has the choice of working on consonants and short vowels, consonant blends, or digraphs. There are also several games available. I saw a memory game and one where you are to chose the missing part of a word. There is also a section called MaxWords, which teaches rules for breaking down words into syllables, and also covers prefixes and suffixes.

Mr. Sweetie was placed in Level 5 of MaxReading (out of 12 levels). His stories are more advanced, but follow the same progression for each lesson. His options for MaxPhonics and MaxWords are the same as the ones available for Mr. Imagination. He has several other programs available, though: MaxPlaces, MaxBios, MaxMusic and MaxVocab. MaxPlaces begins with a world map. A lot of cities have green dots beside them, and when you click on the dot you get to read a story about that city and then answer some multiple-choice questions about it. MaxBios contains short biographies of people in many different careers, with a quiz after the story. Based on the categories I saw, this is not a program I want my children to spend much time with. MaxMusic contains the lyrics of songs from many different performers and groups—once again, a program I’m not happy for my children to use. MaxVocab looks fun, though, with three types of games to play: Hangman, Definitions, and Word Search.

The teacher’s dashboard contains a wealth of resources. Of course, there is a section for generating reports of each child’s progress in the program, but I also found a section of materials for the teacher. These are actually lesson plans and techniques for teaching a child to read. They look very useful and doable! This program looks quite useful, however, since we already have the other program and have been using it, I will continue to use it. However, I can see it working well for families that need the extra help of letting someone else do part of the teaching. The games will be fun for my children, too. I like to have access to educational games for the odd time when the children want to play on the computer. This program is put together quite well and high quality. If you want to try it out for yourself, there are some lessons that can be watched to see how it works. Also, be sure to click on the image below to see what 60 other families have to say about MaxScholar!

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

A good many other families are also using SchoolhouseTeachers.com right now, and describing their experiences. Find their reviews by clicking on the banner below!