homeschooling

For my final review of the 2017 Homeschool Review Crew year, I have a very interesting product to talk about. The Forbrain headset is from Sound for Life LTD, and its purpose is to help people age 4 and up to help improve attention, short term memory, concentration, and verbal working memory. They recommend this headset for people with attention difficulties, speech and language issues, and poor memory. 

No one in my family has any of those problems. 

That might make one wonder why I requested to review this product then, and that would be a fair question. In fact, I almost didn’t request simply because I didn’t think we were the right fit for the product. But then I got to thinking about a couple of things going on with us right now (one new and one not).

First, Seahawk. This is a bit of a delicate issue, growing more so as he ages. But as it pertains specifically to this review, I can’t really beat around the bush. He’s a terrible speller. I had a thought during the request period for this product that maybe if he wore it each day and recited spelling rules and words, maybe something would click in his brain and help him to retain the words he consistently misspells (that always becomes thate, for example). 

The second thing is that our Rosetta Stone microphone broke a few weeks ago, so it’s been a bit difficult for the kids to get a good handle on their foreign language (French) pronunciations. So we’ve been using the Forbrain headset to help them be able to hear themselves during their lessons. 

Now that I’ve discussed what its intended uses are and how I’d planned for us to use it, let’s talk about what it is. Forbrain is a headset which has little pads that sit in front of your ears, a band that wraps around the back, and a microphone coming off a little box on the right side. The box contains a rechargeable battery (and all the mechanical stuff that make the product work, I’m sure). There’s also a power switch on the box. To use it, you first turn it on, then place the headset on your head properly. Then you start talking. It doesn’t matter what you say – if you (or your child) is studying, then say the things they need to remember. If you’re working with a child who has speech difficulties (ages 4 and up only), then they can just repeat what you say. If your goal is to help improve memory issues, then read a book out loud. The important thing is that the speaking happens. You see, when the person wearing the headset speaks aloud, they can hear their own voice. I’m not entirely sure how that happens considering there’s nothing that goes inside the ears, but it does. By wearing this headset while speaking, people can hear their speaking mistakes for themselves, thus prompting them to correct themselves over time. It’s really a remarkable tool.

How did it work for us, a family of people who aren’t necessarily the intended audience for this product? I’m happy to say that I’ve been really pleased with our progress. I can hear the difference in my children’s French pronunciations after a few weeks of using Forbrain. Additionally, Seahawk doesn’t put that pesky silent E on words that shouldn’t have it anymore – at least not as often. He still has a long way to go to become a “good speller” (or even an adequate one), but I really think that his being able to hear the spellings of the words he struggles with the most will help him in the long run. He’s the most auditory learner of all my kids (so far), so listening to things – even his own voice – is a huge help for his learning. Consistent use of this product will help him over time. I’m sure of it.

Blessings,

One thing I never feel like I’m doing enough of with the boys is Bible study. This is getting better since we switched our main curriculum to one that has a Bible reading plan built in, but I’m almost always interested in reviewing Bible study curriculum when it comes available anyway. Today, Munchkin and I will talk to you about Kid Niche Christian Books and their Weave Your Word in Me — Part 1 set.

Kid Niche (niche rhymes with stitch) is passionate about teaching kids how to grow in Christ. They have a variety of resources for teens and preteens to teach them all about God and about developing – and keeping – a relationship with Him. There are also resources for younger children and their parents to work with, making sure that relationship starts at a young age. This is so important for our children! It’s not enough to just take them to church once or twice a week and hope that they somehow, magically, know God and read their Bibles. We have to model this for them, and begin teaching them at home on a daily basis when they’re very young. Kid Niche is there to help.

Weave Your Word in Me — Part 1 is a Bible study for the 4th-6th grade crowd (roughly ages 8-11). It comes printed and hole punched, ready to be inserted into your child’s binder. It’s not bound, so you will need to have a place to keep the pages to prevent them from being lost. (We don’t have binders at the moment, so I put Munchkin’s set into a file folder. It’s a bit loosey-goosey, but it’s working for us.) There are 36 lessons, so you can take it nice and slow and study the Lord’s Prayer a little bit at a time for the entire school year, or you can study hard and intense, doing a lesson a day and get through it a lot faster. It’s not a difficult curriculum, so we’ve been doing 3-5 lessons per week.

Weave Your Word in Me — Part 1 follows the Lord’s Prayer, teaching children not only how to pray as prescribed by Jesus, but also why we are to pray in this way. It does a wonderful job of combining New and Old Testament scriptures together, helping to explain some of the concepts within the prayer to children. Each lesson consists of Bible reading, comprehension questions, and a written prayer. A lot of these are fill-in-the-blank type questions, but some are more “essay” type. The written prayer at the end of the lessons are similar to the questions, in that there is a guide for students to work within, but they are also free to add in their own thoughts while they write and pray.

I decided to use Easy Peasy Homeschool for our core curriculum this year, and it includes a Bible reading time in each day’s lessons. It was really easy to have Munchkin sub in the Kid Niche lessons instead of what was written on the Easy Peasy website. He’s been enjoying having the worksheets to help him process what he reads in the Bible, and I’m glad he’ll have a record of what he’s learned and prayed this year.

In addition to Weave Your Word in Me — Part 1, there is also Weave Your Word in Me — Part 2 available. You can also buy the two parts individually for $20 each or together as a single set for $30.

Click the banner below for more reviews on Kid Niche.

Blessings,

 

 

Learning about the place we live can be exciting for a young child, and it’s fairly easy to teach them. But what about teaching about places that are far away? That’s a lot trickier. A good homeschool geography curriculum is vital in that, and I have one to tell you about today.

Let’s Go Geography is a downloadable curriculum that offers a lot of hands-on activities, which is perfect for its target age demographic of grades K-4. Because my two older boys are outside the age range, Small Fry (K) and I have been learning about the world around us for the past few weeks. He’s barely at the point where he can differentiate the city from the state where we live, and definitely doesn’t understand about the countries yet, so his little mind is perfect for starting fresh with something like this.

After you purchase the curriculum, you are given access to the site, where you can download the lessons. If you’re like me, you may not want to print the entire year’s worth at a time though. Let’s Go Geography sends you an automated email each week (at roughly the same day and time as when you first signed up – for me, this is on Sunday evenings), reminding you to get the new lesson ready, including direct links to the lesson (just log in to the site to access). I think that’s pretty neat! There’s no excuse for forgetting that way.

The Specifics of Let’s Go Geography

Each lesson covers a specific geographic area, and the first several lessons are all based on North America (Northeastern United States, Hawaii, Canada, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Belize are the first six, which is all I’ve gone through yet.) Each lesson is broken down into “chapters,” making it easy to divide the work up over a single school week. In order to get an idea of how the curriculum works, I’m going to go over the “chapters” in lesson 1 in a bit of detail.

Map It!

This chapter shows children what the country they’re studying looks like. Depending on the map you choose to download and print (there is one suggested and linked in the curriculum download, but it’s just a suggestion; ultimately, you’re responsible for finding your own map), it could also show them where the country is located in relation to the rest of the world also. Children are instructed to color the map. For older children, you could also have them label important parts (individual states, large cities, rivers, etc).

The Flag

In this chapter, children learn to identify the flag of the country they’re studying that week. Included in the curriculum is a map of the overarching section of the study (in this case, North America and some of the nearby islands) with places to glue the flags. Students are also asked to draw a line connecting a flag to its country. Another option is to download the “passport” that goes along with the curriculum (an extra fee of $2.99, or go to the website and share about the curriculum on your favorite social media outlet to get it for free). Once you print out the passport and put it together, your child can glue the flags onto the correct pages of that.

The Music

This section provides links to listen to musical selections from the country. There are also lyrics for the national anthem.

Let’s Explore

In this chapter, there’s lots of information specific to the area you’re studying. In the Northeast U.S. lesson, students are taught about the geographical features specific to the region. This includes photographs of the region and short descriptions of what you might find there or things the area is famous for.

Create

This is a fun chapter – it provides a craft for the children that relates to the region. For the first lesson, children use a red Solo cup and printable flames (included in the curriculum) to make a lighthouse.

The final pages include a coloring page of the region and a notebooking page for older students to make a written record of what they learned during the week. (Due to the age of my student, we didn’t use the notebooking page, but he loves to color, so we did use the coloring pages.)

How We Used It

As I mentioned before, I used this curriculum with my Kindergartner. It was a bit intense for him to go at the rate of even one chapter per day, so we took it nice and slow, getting through one region approximately every two weeks. At this rate, it will take us 2 years (kindergarten and 1st grade) to get all the way through this curriculum, but that’s okay – I was blessed with lifetime access to the product (I’m not sure if this is the way it works for everyone, or if your purchase of the full year is good only for one year). I had him glue his flags onto the map I described earlier rather than into the passport, simply because the passport gave me a lot of grief in the printing process (which is not a problem with the file itself, just in that reloading paper into my printer and getting it to print correctly was a bit of a hassle). Also, I didn’t have any cardstock to make a good passport cover.

Right now, all of his papers are just kind of loose all around the school shelf, which isn’t ideal. I think I’m going to help my 5 year old to turn all of this great info into a lapbook pretty soon. This will keep it all very organized, but also make it much more interesting to look at, and will give him a keepsake to look back on when he’s older. The curriculum download includes several notebook cover options, one of which we will put on the cover of the lapbook. If you have an older student who would do better to keep his papers in a binder, you can use the cover printout in that way instead.

Final Thoughts

We’ve enjoyed working with Let’s Go Geography. I didn’t realize when I blindly printed out the first lesson that a lot of it is better used on the computer because it includes live links to things (the printable map, a YouTube video of the national anthem, etc). But some of it works just fine printed – in fact, some of the pieces have to be printed. So my advice is to spend the time on your computer going through each lesson in advance and printing just the pages that actually need to be printed.

You can get a full year of Let’s Go Geography for $21.99. If that’s a bit difficult for you to swing all at once, they also have a payment plan, wherein you agree to the whole year but make two equal payments of $12.99, one for the first semester and one for the second. If you’d prefer to buy just one semester at a time, the first semester is available for $14.99 (I didn’t see anything on the site about the second semester individually). There are also coupon codes available from time to time – currently there is a 25% off special going, but I don’t know how long that will last.

Blessings,

 

 

One thing that the Homeschool Review Crew is amazing at is introducing me to products and companies I’d never heard of. Such was the case four years ago with Progeny Press. Every year that I’ve been on the Crew (this is my 4th), Progeny Press has offered literature study guides to members of the Crew. And every year, I’ve been blessed to review one. This year, Munchkin has the Charlotte’s Web E-Guide to work through.

Charlotte’s Web has a special place in our hearts because it was the first novel Munchkin ever read when he was just 6 years old. I thought it would be a fun one for him to study deeper even though he’s read it before and is very familiar with the story. It’s neat to take books you know and love and look at them through a more critical lens, and that’s just what I’d hoped Munchkin would accomplish through his review of this study guide.

Progeny Press offers study guides for literature of all genres and age ranges from lower elementary (roughly grades K-3, including novels such as Frog and Toad Together) clear up to high school with selections like The Hunger Games. The study guides are available as instant downloads or you can purchase a physical CD-ROM. The guides are interactive PDFs, meaning that you don’t even have to print it out if you don’t want to – the student can type their answers right into the PDF reader. That doesn’t mean that you have to do it that way, though. Printing is allowed by the copyright, so long as it’s all for students in the same family. For our use, I received a downloadable study guide, which I’ve saved to my computer (and backup drive) for use with future kids, and I printed one copy for Munchkin. To save on paper – and make it feel more “legit” – I printed front and back, then punched holes in the pages and added them to his school binder.

Once we had the study guide all situated, I bought the Kindle version of Charlotte’s Web for him to read. We already have two copies of the paper novel, but they’re packed up in storage (read: difficult to access and/or find) and I didn’t want to deal with possible late fines through the library. At just $4.99, buying the e-book was the right answer for us.

I love Progeny Press Study guides for a lot of reasons. I love how they start with prereading activities to do before you even crack open the book. In the case of Charlotte’s Web, they suggest studying spiders and having the child(ren) do a short report on them; taking children to a working farm to learn about the animals; and starting a vocabulary journal so that they can learn and start using all the “fancy” and “complicated” words that Charlotte uses. In addition to the prereading activities, the study guides always include a synopsis of the book and short biographies of the author and illustrator (when applicable).

Then you dive into the actual studying. Each chapter chunk has comprehension questions, which are superb. They help your child make sure he read the book and understood what he was reading. Comprehension is where a lot of literature guides end, but not Progeny Press. In addition to the comprehension questions are a variety of different activities for making sure students understand the vocabulary of the selection. These activities include multiple choice for figuring out the definition of potentially problematic words, having students come up with their own definition of the words based on context, thinking of synonyms for vocabulary words, and more.

Once your student has finished the vocabulary and comprehension sections for the selected chapters, Progeny Press really shines and stands out from other literature programs. There are “thinking about the story” questions, which go beyond comprehension and push students to think about the way things are in the book rather than just about what happened. For example, one of the questions in the Charlotte’s Web guide is “Why do farmers raise pigs?” This is the kind of question that relates to the story indirectly, forcing students to really think for themselves rather than just flip through the book to fill in a blank. (In case you’re wondering, my almost-11-year-old responded to this question with “To make bacon.”)

And then there my very favorite part of Progeny Press guides: the biblical “digging deeper” section. In these questions, the author of the study guide gives scripture references that relate to a part of the story and asks questions to draw the two together. For example, “Do you believe that human lives and animal lives are equal in value? Read Genesis 1:26, Genesis 9:3, 8-11, and Psalm 8. What do these passages say about the place of humans and animals in God’s creation?” This is the type of question you don’t get with most other literature guides, and it’s what makes Progeny Press one of my absolute favorite curricula for studying literature.

Munchkin, an avid reader anyway, has absolutely loved having the opportunity to reread something “easy” that happens to be one of his favorite books anyway. I love that he’s getting some new perspective on this favorite classic. He’s not too far into it yet (he worked lightly over the past several weeks, and has picked up a lot more steam now that we’re doing school each day in earnest), but he will absolutely be finishing this one. It’s a keeper!

Blessings,

 

 

In case you’re interested, we’ve reviewed for Progeny Press in the past. Click the following links for my past reviews: Little House in the Big Woods, Tuck Everlasting, and Give Me Liberty. For more of this year’s Homeschool Review Crew reviews of Progeny Press, click the banner below. Selected titles include The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, Charlotte’s Web, The Silver Chair, and MacBeth.

When my oldest son was small, I made a mistake in teaching him to read. I used a book which said to tell the child that “reading is hard, but it’s very important.” As soon as he heard that it was going to be difficult to learn to read, he essentially gave up in that moment. (Now, at age 13, he’s a competent reader, but he doesn’t enjoy it and definitely doesn’t do it unless he has to.) Seeing that happen made me vow to never use those words with another child again. And I haven’t. My second child (now almost 11) practically taught himself to read and was reading novels by age 6. My third child, Small Fry (5 years old), is at that magical age now where he’s excited to learn to read. We’ve been working on it here and there for several months now, and with the help of a new iPad app from Veritas Press, he’s having fun in the process.

The Phonics Museum App is a fun, homeschool phonics app for kids in preschool or kindergarten. It teaches letter names and sounds, how to write them, listening for the sounds, and more… all in the super fun setting of an art museum. The teacher in the Phonics Museum is Miss Biddle, and she’s a delight. The actress playing her is full of energy, and you can’t help but enjoy watching her.

Each letter is represented by a famous work of art (the “museum” part of the Phonics Museum), and children move through the museum just like they would a real museum: on the elevator and through hallways. The elevator takes children to different “floors,” and each floor focuses on a single set of letters. Floor 1 teaches the letters A, M, and B. When your character gets off the elevator, you find yourself in a hallway with paintings of apples on the wall. By tapping on the first painting (they’re all the same for a particular letter, but the lessons that you don’t qualify for are grayed out until you complete all the previous ones). Tapping on the painting pulls your character into the painting where a set of easels sit. Each easel represents a short piece of the lesson. There are between 9 and 13 easels per lesson (that I’ve noticed – those numbers might be a little off). The easels alternate between videos of Miss Biddle and activities for the child to do, making this a multi-sensory learning experience.

In the early lessons, there are three types of easels in the Phonics Museum: videos, songs, and games. Later on, a fourth is added: books. (Small Fry is on the fourth floor of the museum so far, and just added his first book. I’m not sure if more types of easels are added past this point or not). The videos are Miss Biddle explaining about the letter, interacting with other characters, etc. The songs are variations of the alphabet song (so far, we’ve come across three different versions). The games are the most fun. They include drawing the letter, listening for the sound at the beginning of words and tapping the painting if you hear it, locating the letter in a group of other letters, matching up a picture with the correct word, and more.

After we got through the initial “how does this work?” period, Small Fry was able to do a lot of these lessons on his own. I would sit with him here and there to make sure he wasn’t skipping over stuff that was “hard.” Imagine my surprise when I worked with him during one of these times and he was able to quickly and easily match up the picture of a father and child with the word “dad,” a flying mammal with the word “bat,” and a diagram of roads with the word “map.” I was so excited for and proud of him!

When the opportunity to review this app first came up, I had a hope for it: that it would become something he requested more than his other favorite iPad activities of nonsense games and movies. This was borne out beyond my expectations. He absolutely loves it, and asks to “play Phonics Museum” several times a day. He will happily do several lessons at once – I have to make sure he doesn’t move too fast and miss out on full comprehension. But so far, that’s not been an issue. I’m so glad we got the opportunity to review this app, and highly recommend it for students who are ready and excited to learn to read.

Just for fun, here’s a video of Small Fry singing along with the ABC song on Phonics Museum.

 

The Phonics Museum is available in the iTunes store for $9.99 per month or $99 annually.

Other members of the Homeschool Review Crew are reviewing Phonics Museum this week too; click the banner below for more information.

Blessings,

A couple of months ago, my two oldest kids created their own secret code using the “Ancient Greek” alphabet as their guide. They practiced and practiced their handwriting, assigned each Greek letter an English equivalent, and then started writing messages to each other. I thought this was both interesting and clever of them. Not long after that, we were given the opportunity to review “real” Greek from Greek ‘n’ Stuff, so I asked them if they’d be interested, and (not surprisingly) they said yes.

For this review, we were sent the Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! – Level 3 Set student worktext and full answer key, as well as the pronunciation CD. Once we got started with it, it became very clear that Munchkin was much more interested than Seahawk, so after the first few lessons, he continued alone.

Even though this was our very first exposure to Greek (not counting the boys’ Google searches to find out what the letters looked like), after looking at the website, I learned that it was best to start at Level 3. This is where it’s suggested kids in upper-elementary and older begin, even with no previous experience. The first several lessons are all about the alphabet, which technically should be review for this level (and in fact, that’s how it’s treated). But it was easy enough to slow it down and make 6 lessons (plus tons of flashcard practice) instead of just two. Because we got Level 3, the flashcards that are included start with vocabulary, so I had to find some alphabet ones online. This wasn’t a big deal, though.

Once he’d mastered the alphabet, Munchkin moved on to the vocabulary lessons, which start out slow and steady. Greek ‘n’ Stuff uses a translation method, so at the beginning of each lesson, the Greek word is written big at the top of the page, along with a phonetic transcription and the meaning of the word in English. Then there are a few activities using the word (write the word in Greek, draw a picture of the word, match all the words you’ve learned so far with their English translations, and more). There are definitely enough different types of activities to keep the learning from getting dry or boring. Each day is a little different.

We had another advantage while working through this, too – the kids’ grandfather (Will’s dad) is fluent in Greek due to all his time going through pastoral training, so he was able to help out with the extra tricky pronunciations, and he offered up random pop quizzes occasionally. These usually looked like a Greek word written down, and Munchkin had to give the correct pronunciation and translation.

So far, Munchkin has really enjoyed his Greek lessons. They’re a nice change from our regular foreign language study (Rosetta Stone French), and because it was his idea to learn it, he does it mostly on his own without ever having to be asked. He has learned about a dozen words so far, and his Greek handwriting is quite good. I’m glad he’s taken the initiative to learn Greek; it will definitely come in handy as he gets older and becomes a man of God to be able to (eventually) read the Bible in its original language.

Members of the Homeschool Review Crew are reviewing several different products from Greek ‘n’ Stuff this week:

• Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! – Level 2
• Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! – Level 3
• I Can Study Jonah and Ruth Alone with God (Bible study) – NIV or KJV
• I Can Study Esther Alone with God (Bible study) – NIV or KJV
• I Can Study I Samuel Alone with God (Bible study) – NIV or KJV
• I Can Study Acts Alone with God (Bible study) – NIV or KJV

Make sure to click the banner below for more information on all of these products.

Blessings,