Product Review

I’ve always felt like geography was the weakest subject in our homeschooling. I’ve tried various ways of incorporating map work into our school days, but everything I tried was hated. Finally, I just hung a world map from the bulletin board beside the chair I sit in to read aloud, and when I think of it I’ll point out the location of the story we’re reading. When Let’s Go Geography came available for review, I decided it looked like something we could really use. Because it was described as being good for approximately grades K-4, I decided to have Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination use it. No one older wanted to, anyway.

Each week, we get to study a different country. The first two weeks were actually regions of the United States, first the Northeastern States, and then Hawaii. After that, we spent a few days with Canada, and then Haiti and Nicaragua. We’re going to Belize on our next adventure. My little boys are loving this course! Especially, Mr. Imagination cheers when I say it’s time for geography. A few days ago, we were reading a biography in the evening and it mentioned that the person had gone to Hawaii. I didn’t even know Mr. Imagination was listening, but he got quite excited and pointed to Hawaii on the world map, telling everyone that we had studied it! That was fun to see. And just look at the list of places we get to “go” in the future! (Do you see what the last one for Year 1 is?)

Each lesson has a lot of variety. It’s set up so you can spend five days per lesson, so one section of the lesson each day of the week. We ended up doing each lesson in only 2-3 days, and skipping a few days each week. It’s just hard to fit something like that in every single day. We did the map work and colored, cut out and glued the flags one day. Another day, we listened to the national anthem from the country and watched the YouTube videos linked to in the lesson, and then each boy dictated to me what he remembered about the country and I wrote it on a notebooking page for him. Sometime later, either that day or another day, they each colored a picture of something from the country. Little Miss always had to have a coloring page, too, and she usually wanted a map to scribble on as well! There are crafts given for each lesson, but we never did any of them. They would have been fun, but we didn’t have the needed supplies on hand. It’s not that they are hard to find, but just things that we don’t keep, such as white and red plastic disposable cups to make into a lighthouse, or paper lunch bags to make into a puppet. I keep hoping we’ll come across a craft that we have the supplies for.

Built into the year’s study of geography are three review lessons, one after each two continents have been studied. This review lesson looks like fun! I know my boys are going to love matching flags with the correct countries, and we’ll spend some time learning about latitude and longitude as part of the first review lesson. There are also some pages to match pictures with the country in which they were taken.

Here is Mr. Sweetie with some of his pages.

And this is Mr. Imagination, with some of his pages!

We’re saving all our pages, and at the end of the year I’m planning to have someone drill holes in them so I can sew the books together. Then, each of the boys will have his own book of world geography. When years 2 and 3 are available, I will probably buy them; this is a program we have really enjoyed. All you need to use it is an internet connection and a printer! I am trying to get a few books from the library with more pictures of the countries we’re studying, but our local libraries are pretty small. This is when we’re glad for YouTube and someone who has taken the time to find links for us!  

My 5-year-old has been asking for school, and begging me to teach him to read. I’ve given him the attention I could, but I wasn’t sure he was really ready to learn to read, so I haven’t been pushing him at all. When the opportunity arose to review K5 Learning, I showed it to him and asked him if he wanted to try it. He was excited to do this online program, and couldn’t wait till I got the information about logging in to do it. He faithfully does his “school on the computer” every day, and wants to do the worksheets, too.

There are three parts to the K5 Learning. Mr. Imagination has only been using the Reading and Math; he’s too young for the Spelling. He is doing very well with the Math part. I usually just let him do it by himself, because I’m busy helping the older boys with their schoolwork when he does it in the morning, but a couple of afternoons when I’ve been working in the kitchen he has wanted to do his school, so I’ve gotten to observe. I couldn’t believe what he was able to do! He was supposed to put numbers in order the one time, and they gave him 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, and 95. He did it correctly without hesitation. He was also supposed to use the greater than and less than symbols (> and <) that day. He had a little more trouble with that, but caught on pretty quickly. Yesterday he was working on addition on it, and when he finished he came running into the kitchen saying, “Two plus two is four!” I quizzed him on a few other simple facts and he figured them out pretty fast, too.

On the other hand, he’s having more trouble with the Reading section. I can’t tell that he’s really learned much there although he picked up rhyming words very fast from working with them on there. I’m guessing he is dyslexic and that reading will be a little harder for him. It does seem like K5 Learning does not start at the very beginning; my impression is that even Kindergarten starts with some prior experience presupposed. They do say they are a supplementary course, rather than a complete curriculum. My impression is that they spend more time working on sight words than phonics.

There are worksheets to go with each lesson. You can actually use the worksheets without having an account. Mr. Imagination loves doing them, and has done very well. On the sign-in page, worksheets are suggested based on the lessons the child has been doing recently. (It looks, though like he didn’t understand what he was supposed to be doing on the one page here!)

In my opinion, if you have a child who wants to play games on the computer, and you want them to be doing something educational, K5 Learning would be a good choice. As a replacement for other schoolwork, I don’t think it’s a very good choice. One thing that would make it a lot better would be the ability to choose the lessons you want your child to do, and to be able to start them where you want them. As it is, if you want them to be working at a different level from where the program puts them, you have to contact the website. I did do that when Mr. Imagination started out, because the math he was being given was too advanced for him. I asked them to reset him at the beginning of Kindergarten (he had tested between Low Kindergarten and Low 1^st grade for reading, and Intermediate Kindergarten to Low 1^st on their assessment), but when he got on again the next time he was still at the same place he had been before.

Mr. Sweetie has also used K5 Learning a few times. He mainly does in the evening after his chores are done, when he feels like playing on the computer. He has mostly done the reading part. He’s been given exercises like finding the main idea of a paragraph, or figuring out the meaning of words. They spent a lot of time having him do reading comprehension exercises. I did enjoy the opportunity to have him do the assessment and get a bit of an idea where he is academically. He tested from just below to well above grade level in the various areas they tested. Nice to know he’s average!

Since I don’t have anyone doing the spelling part, I took a look at it myself. There were two areas to choose from, Vocabulary Tutor and Spelling Tutor. In Vocabulary Tutor, you are given a definition and a sample sentence, and must determine what the word is. They do give you dashes to show how many letters are in the word. The Spelling Tutor is similar, except that they pronounce the word for you. In both cases, you have to spell the word correctly before moving on. They seem to be coordinated; for example, I misspelled a word on the Vocabulary part, and that was the first word when I switched to the spelling part.

My final opinion: There are pros and cons to K5 Learning. I like that it is self-directed; I don’t have to help my boys with it much at all. When they want to play something on the computer, they have an educational activity to do. I don’t like that it is sight-word based rather than phonetic. Also, you must keep in mind that it is not a complete curriculum, but supplementary. The part I don’t like about using as a supplement is that you can’t choose the lessons you want them to do. If you’re interested in seeing if this program is a good fit for your family, they offer a 14-day free trial. Up to four students are allowed per account.

I have been trying to teach my boys touch typing for a long time now. Esther learned when we still lived in America, using an old typing book I had picked up somewhere. It was very similar to the way I had learned, and really worked. The boys have been using a variety of computer programs, and none of them was working as well as I thought they should. I had been thinking about finding something else, so when The Typing Coach Online Typing Course, from The Typing Coach, was offered for review, I jumped at the chance. Mr. Intellectual has been using it for five or six weeks now, and he is really happy that he got to.

This program is quite different from the other online typing programs I’ve seen. It took awhile for Mr. Intellectual to get started with it, because there is a lot of introductory material to get through. To start out, you read a brief introduction, then watch a video introducing the method used in The Typing Coach. After that, you are asked to print several documents, which contain the passages you’ll be typing for practice, and then watch another, much longer video explaining how the course works. It took my boy several days to get through all that! The last step before actually learning to type is to do the Before and After Snapshot—type the Gettysburg Address for three minutes and take a screenshot of your results.

Finally, you’re ready to start the first lesson. That covers good posture while typing (mine isn’t very good all the time, to be honest). The second lesson covers the home row. It begins with an audio in which the instructor tells you where to have each finger and what letters to type. Then, you practice, using the student packet you printed out earlier, until you can get through several lines without a mistake. When you feel ready, take a test. You will not pass the test until you have 100% accuracy! The big difference I’m seeing between The Typing Coach and the other programs we’ve tried is that you are not to look at the screen. You are to keep your eyes on the paper you’re copying from. While you listen to the audio, of course, you won’t see anything on the screen, either. You are to type in a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. That makes it work much like real life.

Does it work? Yes, at least for Mr. Intellectual! He already knew how to touch type, but was very slow and not accurate. He had been averaging 6-10 words per minute, with several errors. Today, when he did the Top Row Learning Check in The Typing  Coach, he typed 11 words in 40 seconds, with no errors. He’s pretty happy to be able to type faster. In fact, when he writes stories, he is now typing them rather than using a speech-to-text program! I will probably be using this program for some of my other children in the future (you don’t want to use it with children much younger than about sixth grade, unless you have time to help them through it). One thing I really appreciated is that Mr. Intellectual was able to do this program pretty much on his own.

We did have some frustrations with this course. At first, the website seemed pretty clunky and hard to navigate. After playing around with it and looking closer at everything, we found what we needed, though. We did notice that things were changed as we used it, and it’s actually much better than it was before. Another frustration was that you have to wait two days, to the minute, before retaking a test that you have failed. That is especially aggravating when you’ve left Caps Lock on accidentally! We did find a way around that, though; if you enter a different name you can retake it immediately, so my boy used his middle name a couple of times. However—remember that the purpose of this course is to teach mastery and accuracy! That is why the rule about not doing the test again immediately. You are to practice and practice until you are absolutely accurate.

The suggested pace is a lesson a week for ten weeks. Mr. Intellectual hasn’t quite held to that pace, because life is pretty crazy around here; he’s finishing lesson 3 right now. We’ve had a lot of days we had to take off school to go to Christchurch for appointments, or other life happenings, including our upcoming trip to America. He has learned a lot, though, and plans to finish the course after we get home. I highly recommend this course for anyone who wants to improve their typing speed or accuracy, but you will have to have the patience to figure out the course.

To read what 100 reviewers think about The Typing Coach, click here:

One of the products we have been able to try out lately in order to review for The Homeschool Review Crew is Creative Freewriting Adventure, from the Home School Adventure Co. I requested this item for review because we often have a hard time coming up with ideas for writing stories for our homeschool writing group, Dead Boring. I thought maybe this book would help with that. Well, it has—but not for everyone, as I was hoping. It was a bit too involved for most of the children, but Mr. Intellectual is doing very well with it.

I downloaded both the basic Creative Freewriting Adventure book and the Creative Freewriting Adventure Coloring Book Edition. They are the same except that the Coloring Book Edition has a coloring picture to go with each assignment. Mr. Intellectual was not interested in that, so we didn’t use it at all.

There are ten exercises in the book. Each one gives you a story to set the stage, and then suggests several things to incorporate into your story. After studying these two or three pages, you are to set a timer and write for 15 minutes. Use your imagination and come up with a continuation of the story you were given in the beginning, putting yourself into the scene! After reading the first assignment, I was inspired to write a story, and it was quite fun. I don’t normally do fiction at all; I’ve never been able to come up with much of anything. This was different, though. It was very easy. I’ve been wanting to do another of the exercises, but haven’t had time. Maybe someday soon. I typed my story into the computer, rather than handwrote it. Here is my story:

Mr. Intellectual has now completed four of the exercises. He is spending a lot more than 15 minutes per story. Each day he works on it for 15-30 minutes. He started out typing, but his speed is still pretty poor, so I had him dictate into the computer. Esther found a program, some extension of Google Chrome, which converts speech to text, so he’s using a microphone and “writing” that way, then correcting what comes up on the screen. He still has so much to write for each story that it takes him several days to write each one! Here is one of his stories:

And, what are these assignments like? The first four feature famous Greek philosophers. A little of their life is described, and then you are assigned a scene to put yourself into. Several questions help you think about what might happen next, and you are asked to think about your senses. What do you see, hear, feel, smell? The next four follow the same format, but have to do with the book The Wise Woman, by George Macdonald. The last two have to do with eternity and Jesus’ birthday. It will sure be interesting to see what Mr. Intellectual comes up with for some of these exercises!

I’m glad I chose to use Creative Freewriting Adventures. Stacy Farrell has done a superb job of making writing fun. I don’t know if I’ll ever use this product again (it is a digital download, so I will have it available as long as it is in my harddrive), but it is certainly worthwhile for my budding writer.