Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review, nor was I compensated in any other way.

I live in a family of artists, literally. My husband does graphic art and comics for a living, and our older boys are following closely in his footsteps by doing illustrations for some new stories we’re working on. The younger set also want to begin learning all about art, so this review from Artistic Pursuits Inc. was well received. Because I’m not much of a “traditional” artist (I knit and crochet, of course, but that’s not so helpful in something like this), I delegated the teaching of Art for Children, Building a Visual Vocabulary to Ballet Boy (16). He and Grasshopper (7) spent several days working on art class together.

Art for Children, Building a Visual Vocabulary is part of an 8-book set, and each book has 18 lessons. The entire course is designed to take four years, giving your student a complete elementary-level art history education. Each book comes with a DVD and a Blu-Ray with video lessons to go along with the text lessons of the book. We don’t have a player for either of those, so my kids used the book alone and didn’t have any trouble with it (but again – artists).

The book has a focus of building an understanding of the elements of art, rather than just looking at pictures. Students are given lessons in landscapes, still life, animals, figures, and portraits. Rather than going through in order, we ended up selecting lessons based on the supplies we had on hand. (Yes, they’re artists, but we work mostly with pencil and/or pen and ink in our family.) This meant that the kids dove in to the still life lessons.

From Ballet Boy:

To start off the still life lesson, they provide examples of images that capture the essence of what still life is supposed to do, which is to capture your imagination and fascinate you with everyday items. It casts normal household things in a new light that draws you in, holding your interest. For example, they show a van Gogh painting of a table covered with various sized, colored, and shaped dishes. They explain to you something that you don’t even notice that you’re noticing. That is the focal point, the thing the artist wants you to see. In this case, he wanted you to notice a chipped dish, and so all of the dishes on the table are arranged in such a way as to draw you into the painting. All of them are angled the exact way to catch the light just right to make it so that you focus on exactly what he wants you to, like a magician. The art of still life is not, therefore, in drawing what you see, but it is in capturing the attention of the viewer and making them see it through your eyes and feel it the exact way you want them to.

The way I taught this to my little brother was, as I was going over the information, he was really confused. I had to make him learn to take what he was looking at tell his own story through the items. I had to demonstrate to him how to make the art “make itself” – how he could feel something when he was drawing and let the drawing show him where he should draw the next line. You can never fully understand still life until you know how to put feeling into your lines. To do this, I had him draw a triangle. Then I made him draw another one. Then I had him throw in a square for good measure. As he saw what was happening, I could see his eyes light up. What was happening was a mosaic of shapes, all with that feeling in them – the feeling of confidence in what you were doing. Knowing where the next line needed to be. He filled a page, every square inch, with shapes and shadings. Then I made him look at what he’d drawn very carefully, for at least five minutes. When he was able to see the outline of a horse hidden away in those lines, I drew a line right down the middle of his page and on one side (his choice) I drew a tiny circle and colored it yellow. I said, “Everything on the yellow side is in the light. The other side is in the dark. Color it black.” He did, and he ended up with a very stylized, elegant horse drawn in a cubist style.

Since then, he’s been doing cubist drawings of everything, so I figured we’d take a stab at putting that feeling into another style of art. He and I worked together to create this still life of a NERF gun. He truly has begun pursuing the artist in himself!

Other members of the Homeschool Review Crew have been working with a variety of books from Artistic Pursuits Inc. and reviewing them this week. Click through to learn more!

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review, nor was I compensated in any other way.

Basic math skills are so important for kids. Starting strong when they are young really makes a difference, especially if they’re excited to start learning. That’s why I was super interested in the idea of the PreK Math Starter Kit from Page a Day Math for Dragonfly (4 years old). We had (and are having) such great success with him reading that I wanted to take advantage of his eagerness to start learning more, and this kit was the perfect thing. Page a Day Math was so generous to us reviewers, however, and didn’t limit us to just one product for one child. In addition to the PreK Math Starter Kit (physical books), I was able to get downloadable copies of their other Math Starter Kits for Grasshopper (7 years old), and some of the handwriting books for him as well.

What is Page a Day Math?

Well, just like it sounds, these books are designed to help your kids with their math facts – with just one worksheet per day. Dragonfly, as mentioned before, has been using the PreK kit, and Grasshopper has been using the Multiplication Starter Kit (he’s pretty strong with his addition and subtraction facts already) and I Can Write in Cursive! My first cursive writing book.

How We Used It

Page a Day Math Kits are designed to be a math fact supplementation system. It works with any math curriculum you’re already using, because its goal is simply to drill the math facts into kids so they internalize them over the long run. We received a physical set of the PreK kit and digital versions of the others. The first thing I did was to go over their website and look for the kits I wanted. Once they were purchased, I downloaded them to my computer (zip files) and then was able to extract them and print out the books I needed. I printed the pages on both sides so that it would feel more like a book, and then put the sheets into a folder for Grasshopper. Of course, none of this was necessary for the physical books that came in the mail.

Each day, I would have my kids do one page of math. It’s mostly tracing numbers and solving problems. In the PreK level (for ages 3-5), you start the day by teaching your child one math fact (0+1=1, for example). Go over it with them a couple of times, then they start tracing the numbers. You can see an example of what I mean in the photograph at the top of this post. There are three sets of numbers to trace (on the first day, it’s 0, 1, and 2; on the second day, 1, 2, and 3; third day, 2, 3, and 4; and so on). Then they trace math facts. As you continue through the books, more math facts are introduced. It’s very slow and methodical, so it’s never overwhelming for the child. At such a young age, it’s important to keep things very simple, and Page a Day Math does a great job with that – just one new problem each day. And then lots and lots of tracing. I love that there’s so much tracing involved here because it really helps kids to learn what each number looks like and how to write it. Such vital skills!

The PreK Starter Kit consists of 10 books, and each one has 2 weeks (14 lessons) of instruction. It starts very simply, as I described above. As more problems are introduced, they are added into the “review” section of each lesson (the back side of the page), but the front side is primarily dedicated to the new addition fact. By the end of the tenth book, students are adding up to 10+10=20.

The Multiplication Starter Kit is very basic as well, starting at the very beginning of the concept (0 x 1 = 0). It mixes in addition and subtraction, too, so there’s no loss of skill while learning a new one. It is mostly tracing, just like the PreK kit, but the main difference is that students are expected to write in the answer themselves. (In the PreK kit, it’s traced all the way through.) The Multiplication Kit has 12 books with 14 lessons each, and by the end of the kit students are doing all standard times tables through the 12s.

The handwriting books are basically the same as the math books, but with letters instead of numbers. Grasshopper is pretty good at writing in print at this point, so he was excited to begin learning cursive. I started him with the basic book, which teaches the uppercase and lowercase cursive alphabet, one letter (two sides of the page) per day. While he’s enjoying this, I think he’ll be even more excited to work on it when two things happen: first, when he gets his cast off (next week!); and second, when the letters start connecting into words.

What We Think of it

Each day when I ask Dragonfly if he wants to do his “number tracing,” I get a very enthusiastic “Yes!!” He calls the main dog mascot, Mo, his “best friend.” It’s really cute. We keep a pencil in the box with all of the workbooks so it’s always ready to go. He insists that his pencil must be “needle sharp,” so sometimes we have to sharpen it for him before he begins, but it’s always in the box so we can find it. I have never once had even an iota of hesitation from him over it. And he is learning. I love watching him make the connection between just counting and reading/recognizing numbers. He gets excited when he realizes what he’s seeing, and it’s magical to watch. I know it sounds like he’s my first kid when I gush like this, but the fact is that it doesn’t matter that he’s the fourth – watching your child learn (every child), is the most gratifying thing in the world.

Grasshopper, on the other hand, is much like his oldest brother. He likes to learn, but he doesn’t like formal lessons. That said, he liked tracing the letters in the cursive lessons. I am convinced that if it wasn’t for his broken arm, he’d be more engaged in the lessons. Even though the cast is on his non-dominant arm, he still has to hold it at an awkward angle in order to hold the page in place.

Page a Day Math is a fantastic product, and I’m so glad we’ve had the opportunity to review it. It will definitely keep a prominent place in our lessons through the summer. Both boys will be using these workbooks for many, many more weeks.

Blessings,

Over 50 members of the Homeschool Review Crew are reviewing Page a Day Math this week. Make sure to click through to read their thoughts, too.

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review, nor was I compensated in any other way.

Many people dislike their own handwriting. I am not one of those people. But I was interested in reviewing the Perfect Reading, Beautiful Handwriting ebook from Everyday Education, LLC anyway because it promises to be able to teach you how to write in italics. The idea of that really appealed to me, and that was my intention of how to use the book. But then when I started working on it, a couple of my kids (Grasshopper, age 7, and Scorpion, age 13) showed some interest too, so we went back to the beginning and worked on it together. And that made it even better!

Janice Campbell, the owner of Everyday Education, used a book when her first child was young that taught reading and handwriting at the same time. She loved its approach, and was excited to use it again when she had another child ready for that teaching. Imagine her dismay when the book was out of print! Many of us would have given up at that, perhaps feeling sorry for ourselves for a few days, but we would have eventually moved on and found another curriculum. Janice didn’t do that. She tracked down the author, Caroline Joy Adams, of her beloved book and convinced her to republish the book with Janice’s company. This way, Janice was sure to have the book in print for a very long time, for any homeschooling families who might want to use it.

The book has six chapters, and the first five are primarily teaching a child to read (although the writing is intimately involved with that process). Chapter 1 is an overview for the teacher. Chapter 2 teaches the alphabet. Chapter 3 is basic English sounds and blends and words that use them. (For example, “short a,” “short e,” “sh, th blends,” “compound words,” etc). Chapter 4 is similar to chapter 3, but with different sounds (long vowels, more complicated blends, etc). Chapter 5 are the most complicated parts of English: silent letters, endings, contractions, and more). Chapter 6 is where the author suggests starting if your main goal is to simply improve your own handwriting. This is the chapter for people who already know how to read and are learning more beautiful handwriting techniques. This is where I would have spent most of my time except that, as I mentioned before, my kids joined me. Even if it had just been Scorpion and me, we would have worked there, but Grasshopper doesn’t read very strongly yet, so we started at the beginning with all of us.

The PDF ebook is printable, and because of the nature of the book (lots of practice pages), that would be a great approach for a lot of families. For us, I just set up my iPad on the table to the right page, and we all worked onto regular paper instead. When you’re learning the alphabet (which I actually recommend, even if you’re mostly interested in the italics portion of the book), the instruction/practice pages teach you the letter, an example of a word with that sound, and how to write that letter, stroke by stroke. It’s that last part that makes me recommend going through the alphabet pages even if you’re already a proficient reader. Most of these were “normal,” but a couple of them were different from the way we (my family) normally write. I’m thinking specifically the lowercase e, the capital M, and the capital Q.

I have really enjoyed doing these handwriting lessons with my boys. It gives us something to do together during the school day, and those types of things can be few and far between when you’re working with as wide an age range as I am. And for me to be able to join them was really special too. Because Grasshopper was joining us, we moved slower than we otherwise would have, but that was okay too. I fully intend to keep going with these lessons, and we’ll make it through the entire book soon enough.

Don’t forget to read more reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew.

Blessings,