Product Review

Product Review—Thinkwell

November 19, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I have never requested a math curriculum to review before. We have been using the same curriculum for math ever since Esther started school, 15 years ago, and I have been very happy with it. Lately, however, I was thinking about what to have Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence do for math next year, and coming up with nothing I felt like they would be able to do. Then, I had the chance to review a math course from Thinkwell, and decided to have them do the diagnostic tests. We were offered one year of either their 6th to 8th Grade Math, or their High School Math; there are 20 math courses altogether. After I scored these tests, we watched the solutions for some of the problems that Mr. Intellectual got wrong, and he liked the way they were taught. Both boys were happy enough with what they saw of this course that we decided to request it, and they will use it for their main math course next year. They have each spent a week and a half working with it this month, so we could see how it works in order to write the review. (We normally spend a much longer time on a review item, but we were not given access to this one until two weeks into the review period, and then those two boys went to stay with friends several hours away and help on their farm for a week and a half.)

Mr. Intellectual chose to do Geometry. His results in the diagnostic test indicated that he could do either Honors Algebra I or Geometry. He is just finishing the Algebra I course with our normal curriculum, but he hasn’t done Geometry before, so he thought that sounded interesting. He’s really enjoying it, and says he is learning things already, even from just the first chapter, Fundamentals of Geometry. Here is a screenshot of the titles of the other chapters in this course:

Mr. Diligence has just finished his 8^th grade math, and his diagnostic test results indicated that he was ready for Algebra I, so that is what I chose for him. He is doing well with this course, too. Here is the table of contents for his course:

Each chapter is broken down into a number of subchapters, and a subchapter tends to be one day’s assignment. Here are the subchapters for the first chapter of Algebra 1:

Clicking on a subchapter title takes you to the actual lessons—here is the first one.

The student is to work his way down the page. First, they watch the video lectures, in order (and Mr. Diligence quickly discovered that, for the lecture to show that it had been watched, he had to go back to the original screen to load the next one, instead of just going from one to the next).

There are worksheets to go along with each lesson; what works best for my boys is to print the worksheet before starting the lesson, then do the exercises that go along with each lecture before going on to the next lecture.

After watching all the lectures, doing the worksheet and checking it with the answer key, they do the “Thinkwell Exercise.” This is an assessment with multiple-choice answers. There is an option to print the exercise so it is easy to work the problems on paper, and then choose the correct one on the screen. One of my boys likes to do that; the other does them mentally, most of the time! Each question is graded immediately. The correct answer is given, and whether you got it correct or wrong, an explanation is given as to how the correct answer can be found.

At the end of each subchapter there are two review worksheets, and then a quiz, which can be taken as many times as the student wants to, and each chapter has a test at the end. The test can only be taken once, but there is a practice test which can be taken as many times as you want to.

The lectures average 2-5 minutes long. The teacher discusses his topic thoroughly, and to the right of the screen are several text boxes illustrating what he is talking about. He also writes on a whiteboard to illustrate his points. His voice is quite nice to listen to—something I appreciate! The boys have found it a bit hard to hear, though, either because it is on the quiet side or because my old computer’s speakers aren’t the best anymore, so they use headphones. That seems to solve the problem (and cause less distraction for others in the room!).

I found it fairly easy to figure out how to use these courses. This sidebar is very useful in going from one page to another. The daily schedule can be found in the Resources tab; quizzes and tests are on the Assessments tab.

To see how my sons are doing, I found that I can log in to their account and click on “My Grades” at the top of the screen. It shows me at a glance how well they have done with the Thinkwell Exercises. I have encouraged them to do the exercises a few times if they are struggling with something.

I am quite favorably impressed with what I have seen so far of these courses! It looks like just what we have been needing. Mr. Diligence commented that he finally understands one of the concepts taught, which is something he had been doing in his 8^th grade math but didn’t understand. I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to let them try a different teaching style. If you have children who are struggling with their math, it may be worthwhile to try out Thinkwell. They have quite a range of courses available—look at this list! They offer a 14-day free trial, and diagnostic tests. Either of these would be a good way to determine if this math course will work for your family.
Thirty people are reviewing this company; read more reviews by clicking on the picture below.

6th to 8th Grade Math (Pre-Algebra) and High School Math (Algebra to Calculus) {Thinkwell Reviews}

Product Review—Creating a Masterpiece 2019

October 22, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

About a year and a half ago, Mr. Imagination began asking me to buy him an art course. He wanted to learn how to draw better. I bought one, but it wasn’t what he had in mind, and he only did the first couple of lessons. He keeps drawing, though, just figuring things out on his own. When the review of Creating a Masterpiece came up, I asked him if he was interested—oh, yes, he very definitely was! So, we signed up and were given a one-year subscription to the online Drawing Program. We had hardly any of the materials needed, so he couldn’t get started for several days till the pencils came, but as soon as they arrived, he was off.

Each lesson is presented in a series of several short videos, with the teacher, a lovely, grandmotherly-type woman, showing each step of drawing a particular picture. Mr. Imagination (age 7) and Little Miss (age 4) both loved watching the videos and drawing the pictures. I loved that they could do the lessons on their own! With a new baby in the house, I don’t have time to sit down with them for art lessons. They were both able to come up with some very good artwork, for their age. Little Miss liked the picture of the pumpkins so well that she drew several more later, without watching the videos. She frequently requests to do an art lesson.

This was the first lesson they did, a cartoon-style giraffe. Even Mr. Sweetie did this one! They were told they could draw just the head and neck, or more of the body if they wished—just have fun. Mr. Imagination drew the entire giraffe. I love his picture!

My children have mainly focused on the pencil drawings, both regular pencils and colored pencils. Because we have no ready access to art supplies locally, I ended up ordering the vellum paper we needed for charcoal drawings from the United Kingdom, and it took awhile to get here. (For those who live in the United States, it will be easy to obtain the supplies; she has links on her website to exactly the items she recommends.) Mr. Imagination hasn’t tried much with the charcoal yet, but I expect him to before too long. He did do quite a few of the other drawings—we had quite the display on our living room wall for awhile, till he took some down to send to a grandma!

Here is an assortment of the other pictures Mr. Imagination drew. I like the wide variety of techniques that are taught with just pencils! The one with white pencil on black paper is a seal, by the way.

I am highly impressed with Creating a Masterpiece. The lessons are presented very clearly, with each step explained and shown. The teacher’s voice is easy to listen to, and it is obvious that she loves art, which is inspiring. I think I could even draw a nice picture by using her lessons! If you have a child who wants to learn to draw, I highly recommend this course. It can be used by all ages, from preschool, as Little Miss has proven, to adults who want to learn how to draw better.

Below are some of the lessons available to us; Mr. Imagination has tried most of these.

This is what one of the lessons looks like. You simply click on a video to get the next steps in drawing the picture!

Click on the picture below to read what 70 other people have said about Creating a Masterpiece!

Learning to Draw {Creating a Masterpiece Reviews}

Product Review—Early 19th Century American History

August 2, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Our normal school days have very little variety. We do math and language arts and Bible lessons, and read stories set in historical times, trying to get a grasp on what happened back then. When the chance came along to review a product from Home School In the Woods, I decided it would be good for all of us to do something different, so I requested The Early 19th Century from their Time Travelers U. S. History Studies line. I knew the school holidays were coming up, and while we don’t normally take any time off, a friend was coming to stay a week with the boys, so I thought we’d take time off our regular school and do this course during that time. Since it took longer than that to do the course, we just cut out other things from our normal days for a few weeks and spent a lot of time doing this.

When I received The Early 19th Century, it took a little while to figure out how to use it. There were so many different folders and PDF files I was confused! Finally, I figured out that the first step was to print the text and project PDF for a lesson, and then I would be able to figure out which masters we needed for the particular lesson. That made it much easier! I just printed, each evening, what we needed for the next day. The instructions for the projects are simple and easy to follow. Each morning when we did a lesson, I read the text aloud while the children started coloring and cutting out the day’s projects. We aimed to spend an hour a day on this course, although it often ended up being an hour and a half. This shows us, the night before we started, sorting pages out and getting ready to start.

The course is laid out in 25 daily lessons. Every 5^th lessson is a catch-up day, where you simply finish the projects for the week. Day 23 is another of those, and Day 24 is when you assemble a lot of the things you did into a lap-book. We did that yesterday. On Day 25, you are supposed to have a Chuck Wagon Dinner, and invite grandparents or friends to show off what you learned—we probably won’t do anything for that. We did most of the projects, although there were a few for which I couldn’t easily find the needed materials, so we just skipped them. Each of the catch-up days includes a few recipes for foods that would have been eaten in the first half of the 19^th Century. I’m keeping those in mind for possible future use.

Here we are, during the first lesson, figuring out what we’re doing.

A wide range of subjects were covered in this course. Some were fairly common topics, such as the war between Texas and Mexico, which included the Alamo, or the Erie Canal, and some were things I knew very little about—like the Tripolitan War with the Barbary Pirates. One lesson was devoted to learning about the presidents who held office during the early 1800s, and another briefly covered a number of other famous people from that era. One lesson talked about the mountain men, there were two lessons about the pioneers, and one talked about the gold prospectors. The last lesson talks about slavery in America up to 1850.

Every lesson has copywork, which is sentences from McGuffey’s reader. We didn’t do this, since the boys all have penmanship practice in their language arts books. Almost every day, we also put some pictures on our timeline. Throughout the course we added to a songbook of early American songs. Some were ones we read about in the Little House books, so it was fun to hear them (I looked the songs up on YouTube and we listened to them; if the words weren’t clear, I read the songs aloud.)

A lot of the projects are simply cutting out mini-books and pasting them together; of course, we read the text blocks together. I liked the ones where they had to write something about the topic, but the boys didn’t! We each put together a timeline of American history from 1790-1850, and made a map with different layers to show the growth of the United States from 1800-1850. That was fun; I’ve always liked the maps like that in the encyclopedia, and now we know how we can make them ourselves. We didn’t quite get this project finished; we may come back and do it yet. There were also a few projects like pretending to pan for gold or make a Mexican serape, which we didn’t do. Here is Little Miss’s version of the quilt pattern we colored in.

This project was fun. They each wrote several sentences about the mountain man/explorer inside the minibook, and then added something to the picture to make it 3-dimensional. The suggestion for Jedidiah Smith was to glue fur on, but we didn’t have any—so I grabbed the clippers and cut Mr. Sweetie’s hair!

By far the favorite project was the jumping jack. This was based on toys that early Americans would have made, and everyone had great fun putting theirs together and playing with it! The model log cabins were fun, too. The hardest project we did was a “Daguerrotype Photo Album.” It took us a week just to do that one project! The instructions said to print the pictures for it on ivory paper, but we didn’t have any, so we printed them on white paper. Then, we brewed some strong black tea, dipped the paper in it, and dried it on top of the wood stove. To make the pictures look old, we tore around them. Then, we were to glue them onto foil-covered card stock and into the album, and write about each of the people. Since there are 17 pictures, it took awhile!

There are pros and cons to using this course. Some of the pros, for us, would be that it gave us something different to do in the middle of the school year. The boys all liked that they had only math or language arts to do in a day, not both. They also enjoyed making things from paper. It gave us some art/craft time, which we don’t tend to get otherwise. We learned new techniques for making things from paper (I learned that none of them had heard of scoring cardstock for folding it!), and they practiced coloring and making things look as nice as possible. They also learned what two-sided tape is and how to use it.

We used a lot of 2-sided tape to put together these lapbooks, but it was worth it. The children are all happy with their final product.

See how thrilled she is to show off hers? I’m not sure who took this picture; I found it on the camera this morning!

As far as cons, the biggest one would be all the printing. I spent a lot of time at it, trying to get the cardstock printed correctly (I now know a lot more about the innards of the printer than I did before!). It also cost a lot to do that printing. We went through about a ream of paper, since I was making five copies of everything, and had to buy extra cardstock, which, where we live, is hard to find and expensive. I was glad when Esther found a place we could order it online!

One of the last projects was to make a game with which to review what we learned. We played it this morning for our history time.

Overall, I’m happy that we used this course. It’s not the way we normally do history, and we would have gotten more out of it if we had done it more slowly and read books to go along with the supplied text. However, we’ll be going through that era slowly within the next year, so we’ll be referring to our projects at times. If we hadn’t gone through it as fast as we did, we never would have finished it, knowing us! If you and your children enjoy hands-on activities to go along with historical studies, try out the Time Travelers line of products. They are well-done and we really enjoyed what we did. Or, if you’re not sure whether this type of study is for you, this would be a good way to find out! And, here’s an interesting blog post I found about this series, which explains why the publisher pulled it together and some of their thoughts about how to use it.

World History (Project Passport), U.S. History Studies (Time Travelers) and Timeline Collection: A Collection of Historical Timeline Figures {Home School in the Woods Reviews}

Product Review—Dyslexia Gold

July 2, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Sometimes, we end up being assigned a review that I’m not very excited about. Dyslexia Gold was one of those—but I may end up being thankful for it, anyway. When I filled out the form to indicate my interest in a lifetime subscription for the Dyslexia Gold Full Bundle, I gave it a fairly low interest level, but said that I would be willing to do the review if they needed people. I suspect that Mr. Sweetie has a mild level of dyslexia, so I hoped that if we used this program it would help him. The biggest reason for my hesitation is the fact that it is hard for us to fit computer work into our homeschooling day!

Mr. Sweetie has been playing games on Dyslexia Gold most school days since the middle of April. There are four categories of games, Engaging Eyes, Fluency Builder, Spelling Tutor and Times Table Tutor. I told him to do Engaging Eyes every second time, and choose one of the others for the days in between. Engaging Eyes is supposed to help children’s eyes learn to track better, which is what I suspect to be his biggest struggle with reading. Before he started, I downloaded a couple of stories from his grade level and marked the errors as he read while I timed him. His reading speed at that time was 52 words per minute, with 8 errors per minute. I had him read the same story again yesterday, and his reading speed was 61 words per minute, with only 5 errors per minute. When he was tested by the Dyslexia Gold website, his reading speed on April 14 was 66 words per minute, but by May 27, when they tested him again with a different story, it was 71. So, it looks to me as though this program might be working! Also, I noticed yesterday that he sat down and read a story to Little Miss without any prompting. I am going to have him continue to use this program for awhile, and see if it helps.

Engaging Eyes has several different games to help children be able to read better. The one Mr. Sweetie has used the most is Target Practice. He wears 3-D glasses for this one, which were sent to us in the mail. They make red and blue circles converge and appear to be at different levels, and then he uses keyboard arrows to aim at them and move the “gun” up or down. Whack an Alien teaches children’s eyes to move quickly. Speed Fix flashes several sets of letters, and you are supposed to click if you have seen an “a” in the set. Eye Tracking has letters appearing across the screen, and you’re supposed to click when you see a certain one.

Fluency Builder is mostly a phonics program. It doesn’t seem to have been very helpful here, as I have already put Mr. Sweetie through a couple of intensive phonics programs. Spelling Tutor had him write a sentence on paper, then check it. If he missed a word he had to practice it several times. This didn’t seem very helpful to him, either. The Times Table Tutor, however, I believe, will be quite helpful. Mr. Sweetie is having trouble learning his multiplication facts, and this is a good way to practice them. The main point is to get faster, which is what he needs. I’m planning to have him do this frequently, too. (This photo is of Mr. Sweetie doing Fluency Builder.)

When you log on to Dyslexia Gold, you are given the choice of the four types of games. There is also a tab on that page for reports. That’s where I found Mr. Sweetie’s reading speed from the two times the website tested him. It also tells what level he has reached with each game and how often he has used it.

I don’t know if I can say this program is worth paying money for; I’ll have to have Mr. Sweetie use it longer to know that. I do know he doesn’t complain about doing it, and even seems to enjoy it, which is more than I can say for most of his schoolwork! If you suspect eye problems to be at the root of your child’s reading difficulties, this might be a good program to check into, however.

Dyslexia Gold Full Bundle {Dyslexia Gold Reviews}

Product Review—Pathway to Liberty

May 8, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I’ve always been quite interested in studying history, and for the past several years have been enjoying looking over various history curricula to compare them. I’m always looking for the perfect history course, and have pretty well come to the conclusion that I’ll never find exactly what I’m looking for. I keep looking, though, because it’s interesting to see what people put together. When the opportunity came up to review a course offered by Pathway to Liberty Homeschool Curriculum, I decided I would like to check out one of their levels. I chose Year One, Universal History of Pathway to Liberty’s History Curriculum, the first of four years that take students of all ages through the entire scope of world history. I chose this level because one of the first books studied in this level is one that I have been wanting to study with my children, and also because, when I’m comparing history courses, I like to look at the beginning of time.

Universal History starts with Genesis 1. After studying the first 11 chapters of Genesis in some depth, we will move on to studying the ancient civilizations. After studying Abraham, a couple of weeks are devoted to Egypt, and then the main focus is the history of the Old Testament, spending a little time with Babylonia and Persia as they enter Biblical history. A couple of weeks of the history of Greece wrap up the year.

So far, we have gotten through the first four weeks of this course. I requested two of the four levels, so I have Mr. Diligence doing Level Two and Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination doing Level One. Level One is intended for K5-3^rd grade. Mr. Sweetie is in 4^th grade, but struggles enough with writing that I decided the lower level would be best for him. Level Two is for 4th-6^th grade; Mr. Diligence is in 8^th grade, but he, too, struggles enough with academics that I thought the lower level would be a better fit for him. (Levels Three and Four are for grades 7-9 and 10-12, respectively; they do the same reading and watch the same YouTube videos as Level Two, but do more in-depth research and writing.) Levels One and Two are quite different, but at the same time they correlate well with each other. For the first three weeks, Level One was a study of the days of creation and the character of God. Meanwhile, in Level Two, Mr. Diligence watched a video on YouTube each week and we began working our way through Ruth Beechick’s Genesis: Finding Our Roots, which I had been wanting to study ever since I borrowed it from a friend a few years ago. In Week Four, we all started studying Noah, and the younger ones are studying In the Days of Noah with me (I make Mr. Diligence sit in on reading that one, too!). One thing Level One includes that the older ones don’t is coloring pictures for nearly every lesson. My boys didn’t want to do them, but Little Miss loved coloring several. She also loved helping to make this poster of the days of Creation. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, but it’s something that I don’t get done without something pushing for it to happen, like this review.

I have really enjoyed this study, so much so that I plan to go through the rest of the course that we were given. The boys grumble about taking time to do it, but they are learning and enjoying what they learn all the same. One thing we picked up on when we were reading the Book of Adam, from the 2nd-4^th chapters of Genesis, was that the tone of the writing is that of an eyewitness. I was reading chapter 2 aloud, and Mr. Intellectual challenged me on what he heard; he was sure I had misread something. When he looked it up in the Bible, however, we were all rather excited as we talked about the rivers of the Garden of Eden. The wording could hardly have been anything other than an eyewitness account—read it for yourself if you’re dubious. Then, of course, as we worked our way through Beechick’s book, we came to that same conclusion.

The videos we have watched so far on Pathway to Liberty’s YouTube channel have been good. The first few didn’t really stand out, but the one we watched for Week Four about Noah and the world that perished, which we watched all together one evening as a family, was absolutely fascinating. The younger children probably didn’t get much out of it, but we stopped it to discuss points with the older ones a couple of times. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes up in the future!

This curriculum is available either as hard copies or digital. I received the digital copies, which means I can print as many as I want for my children. I three-hole punched the paper, then tied the books together with yarn, which is working well.

One part of this course we have done some, but not as much as recommended, is word studies. The recommendation is to choose five words every day to find definitions for from the Webster’s Dictionary 1828. We have done a few, but not that many. We also haven’t done the writing assignments recommended. We could go to a lot more depth with this study. It could easily replace a lot of Language Arts, tying it together with history, which would be great. I just don’t have the energy for that right now!

My conclusion about this history course? So far, it is very good. It looks like the entire year that we were given is going to be great. Looking ahead farther, I would guess that I, personally, would not do well with the slant of the year in which American History is studied; having moved away from the United States I don’t share the same view of US history that it looks like this author has. However, I do greatly appreciate the way she ties history into the Biblical framework. The study we did in Level One about the character of God was absolutely great. I will admit that it was hard to figure out what answers she was wanting for some of the questions; if I hadn’t had the answer key handy for the first three weeks of that level, I would have had no idea how to answer some of the questions.

Be sure to read some of the reviews that other people have written! All four years of this curriculum have been use and reviewed by various families, so there will be a lot of different points-of-view. If you’re looking for a Bible-based history course, this may be one you want to check into.

Universal History, The Middle Ages, US History & World History Curriculum {Pathway to Liberty Homeschool Curriculum Reviews}

Product Review—CrossWired Science

April 17, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I wasn’t overly excited about reviewing CrossWired Science when the opportunity was presented, but we watched all the sample videos before I made the final decision, with input from my four school boys. We all agreed that the videos were fascinating—and one of them answered a question I had vaguely wondered about before (how do animals get their Vitamin D?). We decided to request this online program for review and give it a try. Am I ever glad we did! I am loving it! The children are enjoying it, as well, some more than others.

We have been given access to both of the global topics that CrossWired Science has come out with so far, Sound, and Fluid Dynamics. So far, we have mainly focused on Fluid Dynamics, since the majority vote from the boys was for that one, although I would like to go through Sound as well. It has been fascinating to learn about how air and water work. We have watched videos on a number of subjects that all have to do with air and water movement. For example, one was about Dog Slobs & Cats. It showed, in great detail, how both animals lap water and why dogs make a mess while cats are tidier (although our cat manages to splash milk all around her dish, somehow). After we watched that, Mr. Imagination checked out our cats’ tongues to confirm that they have the texture that the video said they did. Other videos talked about dolphins, boxfish, penguins, nose aerodynamics (now we know why our cats are so lazy!), carburretors, and the alulas on bird wings (another lifelong mystery cleared up for me), among other topics. Each video has a worksheet with questions from the video, as well as a true/false online quiz. We have not done any of these worksheets, because they were not available when we started the course, but have done the quizzes. There were a few discrepancies between the quizzes and the videos; this is a brand-new course and is a work in progress, so I expect to see these problems resolved soon. (It’s very good already, but once these issues we noticed are corrected, I believe this site will be great.)

Besides the videos, there are many other suggested activities. There are a lot of options for experiments. I somehow neglected to get any pictures of my boys trying out the matchhead rockets, but they spent several days playing around with them. They had loads of fun building and shooting off these miniature rockets, and Mr. Intellectual discovered a new-to-us YouTube channel full of fun experiments (I think it includes a fair number of explosions, which he loves!). They also tried out the paper airplanes and figured out how to make a loop of paper fly very well across the room.

One page suggests many books to read. We have a few of them, so we added them into our read-aloud day. I was happy to be reminded to read The Great Dinosaur Mystery and Dry Bones and Other Fossils with my boys. The wide range of books that are recommended would make a great library. They suggest several biographies by Janet & Geoff Benge, one of which (Alan Shepard) we read in the past year. They also recommend Creation magazine, so I told Mr. Intellectual to spend his science time one day summarizing what he had been telling us about from the most recent issue the day before.

Right now, we’re working our way through the Gold Dig section. This is six pages about bones. The first page had a video and a quiz; we’re currently on the next page, which talks about all sorts of subtopics having to do with bones—just look at this outline!

There is a worksheet which goes along with this. Each day, I’m reading through about three sections of this page with Mr. Diligence, Mr. Sweetie, and Mr. Imagination, and we answer the questions that go along with those sections. It takes about 15 minutes to do that much, and that’s about all the time they can handle doing something like this, since we usually don’t get to it till after lunch and they are ready to run outside! Mr. Intellectual is doing this part by himself, since he is a strong reader. One thing we really enjoyed about this page was a photo of the International Space Station. What we really loved was that New Zealand, and the top part of our island, was in the background! It’s a very clear photo, and we could almost see where we used to live!

I’m also looking forward to learning about sound. So far, all we have done there is to watch one video, which was about the larynx and the vocal cords. It looks like the Global Topic on Sound is laid out similarly to the one we’re working on. All the Digging Deeper pages have something to do with sound, in humans as well as the animal world. We had started the year using the same series of science textbooks we’ve been using and loving for the past several years, but I’m thinking we’re going to finish what we want to use in CrossWired Science before we go back and finish that book. There is so much to love in this course! We’re enjoying the variety of ways to learn about the topic, and we love the way it points to the Creator. One thing we’ve noticed is that the videos don’t actually mention God, but what we read on the screen does. The videos do talk about how things are designed to work the way they do, very definitely giving glory to God if you think about it a little. I am very slow to buy an online program for school, but this is one that is worth the price they ask for it, even for us. I like it and am very glad we were put on the review.

If you are interested in trying out this fascinating website, here is a coupon code that will take $5 off every order—no matter how many times it is used: loh12.

One thing I had a bit of trouble figuring out is how to schedule CrossWired Science. There is so much information here, in a variety of styles, but it’s not laid out in lessons, although I have heard that there is a suggested schedule somewhere on the website—I haven’t found it myself. The intention is that a student will choose what appeals to him, and work through most or all of each project (Fluid Dynamics is one project) in any order. The way it’s set up, you click a button labeled “Finish Quiz” at the bottom of each page, and then you can tell by looking at a bar at the top of each page how many more pages there are to complete. All ages can do this course together. Of course, older children will go more in-depth than younger ones, but even Little Miss, who is four, enjoys the videos. Also, there are two levels. We’re using the First-Timer course, but for those who have been through it once as a younger child, they can do it again using the Second-Timer course. I haven’t looked at it yet, so I can’t say how it is different. Here are screenshots of the menu on the Lesson Page. You can see that they have made it easy to tell which lessons are completed.

Each project is intended to be a full Science curriculum for a month or two. The plan is to have enough projects up to provide six years of Science! I’ll be very interested in following the progress of this course to see how it develops. Of course, not only can it be used as a stand-alone curriculum, it could also be used as a supplement to any other science curriculum. Be sure to click on the banner below to see what the rest of the 80 reviewers have to say—I’ll be checking out some of those reviews, because I’m curious to know what others think of this!

Sound, and Fluid Dynamics {CrossWired Science Reviews}

Product Review—Brinkman Adventures Season 6

October 11, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We have been listening to the Brinkman Adventures audio dramas ever since the first season was released. We’ve enjoyed some episodes more than others, of course; some have been absolutely great, and others were not quite so interesting but still good. When we saw that Season 6: Underground Rising was available for review, all of us hoped we could get it, and we started listening to it right away.

The first two episodes are about the Dutch Underground during World War II. The stories were quite interesting, and the fact that they are true stories from the producer’s grandparents makes them especially interesting. The 3^rd episode, Twice Born Fly, was a fun story about when the father of the family found himself in prison in quite bizarre circumstances. I was expecting the punch line that came, but it was still a really fun story, with a great message. The 5^th and 6^th episodes, about the Free Burma Rangers, were very exciting. We were nearly on the edge of our seats at times during these stories. Probably our favorite episode, however, was the 4^th one, I Wonder Why? This tells the story of a family who moved to India to run an orphanage and experienced some amazing miracles—as well as some very difficult times. I think we appreciated it so much because we could relate to some parts of the story. The children of the family went through culture shock, and had many struggles learning to love those around them, as well as learning to adjust to a completely different way of life. The way they changed through the story was really special.

In the episodes about the Dutch Underground, there were stories we quite appreciated, as well as aspects that bothered us somewhat. My favorite part of that story was the scene where the Nazis burst in on a meeting of the Underground. It was New Year’s, so one of the women had made oliebollen, or oil balls, and those treats saved the day. We have a friend who came from Holland, and she makes oil balls every year; we get treated with them when we join her family on New Year’s Eve. That part of the episode was more meaningful to us because of our friend. We also appreciated the attitude of the Underground workers that they wanted to help deliver those who were being taken to death. It meant putting their own lives in danger, but they were willing to do that for the sake of others.

On the other hand, the attitude expressed by one young man that, “Life on the sidelines is very boring,” rather bothered me. When he left the sidelines and joined in the fight, he started doing things that go against the teachings of Jesus. I know many Christians believe that war is different, but we take the Sermon on the Mount literally, and don’t believe it is right to use violence at any time. There was also the issue of stealing ration cards—is it right to steal, even in wartime? I know this was a very difficult time, and I’m not sure what I would do if I were there—this makes a good topic for discussion! Another problem we had with these episodes was the very thick Dutch accent one of the narrators has. It was authentic, and I enjoy the producer’s quest for authenticity, but we quickly lost the younger half of the family as we listened to this story, and they didn’t want to hear any more episodes, sadly, although I believe everyone ended up listening to Twice Born Fly.

The two episodes about the Free Burma Rangers were fascinating, and very exciting. I didn’t know anything about them before, but what we learned, from the audio drama and from the Real Stories page on the Brinkman Adventures website, is amazing. The dedication these men have to help people who are being attacked is wonderful. On the other hand, as I mentioned above, are Jesus’ commands to not kill suspended in war time? I did appreciate what one person stated in Episode 6, that Jesus said we are to love our enemies.

We really enjoyed the Real Stories page. All the children crowded around to see as I looked at the pictures and read the stories on that page. It really adds to the audio version to have this page available and be able to see photographs of the people and events that are featured. At the end of the section for each episode there are a couple of paragraphs to help apply the lessons to our lives. We ended up skipping through those the evening we looked at the page, because it was bedtime and we just wanted to see the pictures—maybe sometime we’ll go back through and get more out of the stories and discussion suggestions.

If you are a family, like us, who enjoy listening to stories, check out the Brinkman Adventures. As I said, we have really enjoyed most of their productions. The first season was definitely our favorite, but some of the other seasons have been very good, as well. And, if you are interested in trying them out, they are offering a coupon right now. The code is FALL10 and is good for 10% off all their products. It is live from October 10-31, so go to their website and try out some great audio dramas for your family!

A total of 70 people are reviewing this digital product, so please click on the banner below to read other people’s perspectives!

Product Review—Picta Dicta Natural World from Roman Roads Media

September 13, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Have you ever thought it would be interesting to learn some Latin? We really haven’t done much of anything towards learning a second language; we dabbled a bit in Spanish and German, but with two boys who struggled majorly with just English, other languages haven’t been a priority. However, when Roman Roads Media asked for reviewers for their Picta Dicta online courses, Mr. Intellectual expressed interest in it. We were given a subscription to Picta Dicta Natural World, and I have been using it a little myself, too.

When I set up an account, when we were first given access to Picta Dicta, I added myself as a student as well as being the administrator, and then signed up Mr. Intellectual with our other license. As part of creating the accounts, we had to choose which level to use. There are six levels to choose from: Basic, English, Reader I, Reader II, Express, and Teacher. Basic and English both focus on English words, and everything is read to the child. Reader I and Reader II introduce the Latin words for the same words that are introduced in the first two; I’m not sure what the difference is between them. Teacher appears to only have the introductory pictures for each word, without any activities. It is very easy to switch from one level to another by simply logging in to the administrator account and editing the student’s settings.

Both Mr. Intellectual and I chose to use the Express level. It teaches everything that is in the other levels, but faster. Words are introduced, with a story about each word to help you remember it.

After you have been introduced to about six words, you are given one of the words.

On the next screen there are pictures and a phrase about six words, some that you have learned and a few others that you will learn soon, and you have to choose the correct one.

After going through all of them, you are introduced to a few more words, until you have learned all the words for that topic. For example, in the first topic, Basic Animals, you learn the Latin words for cow, horse, donkey, goat, sheep, cat, dog, lamb, kid, boar, stag, bull, bear, and wolf. You get to match the spoken/written word to the picture, then the picture to the written word, and finally, learn to spell the words. If you make a mistake, you are given more chances with the same word until you get it right. The program is totally self-paced.

So what do we think about this program? I find it fun! Quite often, when I’m working on it, one or another of the littler ones (ages 8, 6, and 3) come along and help me out. They occasionally get something right that I was going to get wrong! It’s a game, where you try to match the right words and pictures. The spelling parts are more difficult, but otherwise it’s pretty easy. There is a small incentive built in, as you can see from my account, here. You get stars for completed lessons, based on how many questions you answered correctly. A perfect score earns you five stars—looks like I should redo a few!

It’s good to have at least a little grasp of Latin, as so many English words come from languages that came from Latin. Mr. Intellectual mentioned the other day after he worked on Picta Dicta that he had learned the Latin word for head, which was caput. He figured out that must be where capital comes from, as in the head city of a region. He was pretty excited about that. So, if you are needing to know Latin, or have someone who enjoys words, this program would be a great introduction. By going through it, you will not only learn many words having to do with animals, but also fruits and vegetables, anatomy, land forms and terrain, parts of trees and plants, water…and that’s just the first few topics! Over 400 nouns are taught in this program. I appreciate learning how to properly pronounce these words; when you read a lot but don’t hear words, it’s hard to know how to say them. Oh, one more thing I noticed: A number of words were very similar to the Spanish words for the same animal. Learning Latin might be a good base for going on with another of the Romance languages, such as French, Spanish or Italian.

Please click on the image below if you want to learn more about this course; some of the other reviewers have given a lot more detail!

Product Review—GrammarPlanet

September 6, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Who likes grammar? I didn’t when I was in school! It’s still not my favorite subject, by any means, but at least I’m starting to understand it better now. However, trying to teach my boys the parts of speech? Difficult to say the least! So, when GrammarPlanet was offered for review, I tentatively asked for it even though it wasn’t developed enough yet to even be able to find out how it worked. I almost hoped we wouldn’t get chosen for this review team, but we were, so Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence have been using it, and so have I, as I try to stay a lesson or two ahead of them.

Every lesson has a video, in which the part of speech taught in this lesson is introduced. These videos are crucial; if you don’t watch them, you will not understand what you need to.

There are also printable notes for each lesson. These are very important, as well; we often refer to them while working through the lesson. After watching the video, the student moves on to the practice sentences. At a minimum you will have ten sentences; each time you make a mistake the program will automatically add one more sentence for you. If you make five errors, you will be locked out of the program until your teacher unlocks it—that gives the teacher (me, in our case!) a chance to see what is going on. I have ended up sitting beside Mr. Diligence each time he works with this, because he takes more time and is more careful with supervision. I can help him figure out what he’s getting wrong that way. The set of sentences in each lesson tells a more or less interesting story. One story was about the steepest residential street in the world, which is in Dunedin—a friend of ours had told our boys about this street (he worked on a house on it once), so they could really relate to it while doing the lesson! Each sentence is to be parsed—you are to identify the part of speech of each word. For the first lesson, you only have to identify common nouns; the second lesson adds proper nouns. The third lesson introduces adjectives and articles, and then pronouns are introduced in Lesson 4. After that it gets more complicated, as possessive pronouns and the prepositions are introduced. Lesson 6 begins requiring students to diagram sentences—and there are answer keys for each one!

And here is an answer key for a random sentence:

When we started using GrammarPlanet, I told my boys that they had to use it until I wrote the review, and then they could quit. Well, as we worked through it and the bugs were worked out of this brand-new program, I saw how well it was working, and last week I informed them that I had changed my mind. I want them to continue using it. The recommendation is to only spend 10-15 minutes per day with this program, to give it time to really soak into a student’s mind, so we’re going to do that. It meshes quite well with the grammar Mr. Diligent is already doing, and reinforces it. I’ve ended up glad to have been put on the team!

I have never used or even looked at Analytical Grammar, but I’m told that GrammarPlanet is set up the same way, only online. It is free for anyone to use; if you want an ad-free version there is a one-time fee to remove the ads. When you set up an account, your student’s progress will be saved, and you can look back at their history any time. (This is very helpful sometimes, when you need to figure out why a word is marked as it is!)

Product Review—Timeline of the American Revolution

August 2, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I have used timeline figures printed by Home School in the Woods for many years. Back in Michigan, I put a butcher-paper timeline all around our living room, up at the ceiling. I wanted to show 6,000 years of world history, with 1 foot per 100 years, so it was 60 feet long. Yes, we had a large living room! As we read books for history, we would put up the stickers we got with pictures on them of the people and events we were studying. I threw that timeline away when we moved, though, because it was getting old and brittle and wasn’t worth transporting overseas. I made a new one out of cloth, and hung it around the top of the hallway in a house we lived in for four years. We added many more timeline figures to that one—but now it’s been packed away for four years because we moved to a very small house and haven’t had room for it since. I do like the idea of timelines, though, so when I got to choose an item to review from Home School in the Woods, I chose the Timeline of the American Revolution from their À La Carte Timelines collection. In our study of American history this year, we haven’t quite made it to the Revolution, so we put the timeline together and we will be referring to it as we work our way through those years.

I really like this timeline. It not only has the dates, it also has all the events they drew pictures of printed on the timeline in light gray, so it is very easy to glue the pieces on. I printed it on ordinary paper, trimmed one side of each sheet, and glued the pages together. Then, I accordion-folded it to make it compact. It’s about the length of our kitchen table when it’s spread out. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been having my three youngest boys coloring the four pages of very nice pictures when they have time, and this week, I had them cut out all the pictures. We glued them in place and talked about some of the events as we went. Mr. Sweetie finished the last few pictures this morning, and located some of the people I read about in the story I was reading at the moment, about a Quaker woman in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. I really like this timeline, and the ease of using it. I’m looking forward to trying out more timelines from them in the future.

Home School in the Woods has many other product lines, as well. They specialize in hands-on history projects in various formats, many of which look quite fascinating to me. They have just released a new product which sounds fun, Project Passport: Ancient Rome, which completes their Project Passport World History Study. I have a feeling my boys wouldn’t enjoy a project like this, but maybe someday Little Miss will and I’ll get the chance to try it out myself! The lapbooks look like a good way to organize what children are learning from history, as well. If you need something to make learning history more fun, definitely check out this company. They have some great products!