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Homeschool Curriculum Review: Visual Learning Systems

Posted by Wendy on March 9, 2015 3 Comments

I have a super great science program to share with you guys today. It’s called Visual Learning Systems and I received a full year of access to their Digital Science Online: Elementary Edition (Grades K-5) and Digital Science Online: Secondary Edition (Grades 6-12). Obviously, I’m only reviewing the Elementary Edition since my kids are elementary age.

Science is a tough subject for me. I just don’t care that much about it. I took a little more than was required for me to graduate high school, and despite being in the advanced classes and getting good grades there, I just didn’t resonate with science. I was more a math and language arts student. So when it comes to teaching science in the homeschool, I’m afraid my kids aren’t getting that much. For that reason, I’m always excited to review science programs. I know my kids love science, but I just don’t like teaching it, so if I can access a program to teach it for me (at least do the heavy hitting in the subject), I’m all for that. [Read more…]

Posted in: homeschooling, reviews | Tagged: animations, annual subscription, assessment, assistive technology, biology, closed-captioned, content, content clips, curriculum, deaf, digital, digital subscription, earth, education, educational, elementary, health, hearing impaired, high school, homeschool, images, instructional, iPad, K-12, learning objects, life, media, media assets, middle school, physical, primary, science, science education, secondary, special education, state standards, supplemental, tablets, teacher's guides, units of study, video clips, videos, visual learning, vocabulary

SchoolhouseTeachers.com Sale!

Posted by Wendy on December 19, 2014 Leave a Comment

This post contains affiliate links. By clicking through using my link, your purchase will help support this site at no additional cost to you.

Hey guys! I just wanted to put up a note to let you all know that SchoolhouseTeachers.com, the homeschool curriculum site of The Old Schoolhouse magazine, is having a fabulous sale right now.

Here’s how it works: You can sign up for an account and choose to pay either monthly or yearly. The normal price for the monthly membership is $12.95. If you sign up by Christmas (at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time), you’ll get a 40% discount, making your monthly membership $7.77.

The normal annual rate is $139, which is 10% off of the normal monthly rate. If you sign up for an annual account by the Christmas night deadline, you’ll get a 50% discount, making your fee $64.26.

Now, here’s the best part: If you sign up during this sale, you will be locked in at this discounted rate until you cancel your membership. That’s right: whether you keep it for three days, three months, three years, or more, you will never pay more than the discounted rate. How cool is that?!

In case you’re still not sure if this is a good site for you to invest in, you can read my review from a year ago. Additionally, there’s a whole new crop of Schoolhouse Crew Reviewers doing reviews of the site this week, so you can get an idea of what other homeschool moms think of this valuable resource.

Just click on the above banner to take you to the sale page if you’re interested in buying, or just want more information.

Blessings,

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Posted in: homeschooling | Tagged: homeschool, homeschooling, kids, schoolhouseteachers.com

Our Reading List – December

Posted by Wendy on December 4, 2014 Leave a Comment

December 2014 Reading List - Ladybug Daydreams

Here are in a new month. Can you believe that it’s December already?! A new month means time for a new reading list. Here’s what we’re reading in December.

Read-Aloud – everyone

I found a book called A Newberry Christmas at the library. It’s a collection of 14 short stories by beloved authors including Beverly Cleary and Madeline L’Engle. We’re really excited to dive into this one! [Read more…]

Posted in: homeschooling, what we're reading | Tagged: 3rd grade reading, 5th grade reading, beverly cleary, christmas books, holes, homeschool, inkheart, john grisham, louis sachar, reading

Homeschool Curriculum Review: Mango Languages

Posted by Wendy on March 14, 2014 3 Comments

Mango Languages Review

I love languages. I love reading and writing in my native English, and I love learning new languages. So imagine my excitement when the opportunity to review Mango Homeschool Edition from Mango Languages came up on The Schoolhouse Review Crew. Ecstatic!

I’ve talked before about our foreign language pursuits with the boys. Remember last summer when I posted about our upcoming homeschooling plans? I mentioned that we were going to try to learn Spanish. Well, that didn’t work out too well because I don’t speak enough (read: any) Spanish to have been able to teach the boys. So we switched to French. I speak enough French to have begun working with the kiddos, but we were quickly getting to a place where I needed more help. It has been 15 years since I graduated high school, after all, and since I don’t have the opportunity to travel often, there was no real way for me to continue cultivating my French skills.

We used books from the library, and when I was given access to SchoolhouseTeachers.com, we used the French lessons on there. But I was still itching for something even more. Mango Homeschool Edition turned out to be just the thing!

About Mango

Mango Homeschool Edition is appropriate for almost everyone in your family. The suggested age range is 7 and up – like a board game … You’re never too old! It has over 50 languages to choose from, most of them “serious,” but also a “silly” one or two, including Pirate. That was the first one my husband wanted to check out, of course! He’s just a funny guy to his core. But for the kids and me, we were pretty serious about just doing our French. Mango Homeschool Edition works using a translation method, meaning they say to you (in English) “Here’s how you say ‘Hello.’ ” Then a native speaker comes on and says the word and/or phrase so you can hear proper pronunciation. Then you get a turn to try it out. You can connect a microphone to the computer if you have one for pronunciation comparison, or you can just speak aloud to yourself.

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The program uses a “slides” system, meaning it gives you the information in short bursts. You click through from one slide to another. Some of the slides, like the one above, are words or phrases that you’ve already learned. They give you a little clock, and your goal is to come up with the correct translation of something you’ve already learned. If you’re stuck, you can add more time while you think or you can just get the answer. If you don’t remember the phrase, be assured that it’ll come up in a future slide. They’re really good about repetition in Mango Homeschool Edition.

Other slides, like the one pictured below, are culture slides. They tell you things about the culture of the language you’re studying. Those are just as important as the language slides, in my opinion, because you want to know what you’re getting yourself into if you ever travel to a country in which you’ll use your learned language (and that is, after all, the ultimate goal when learning a foreign language).

Mango 4 sc

Similar to the culture slides are grammar slides. It’s important to remember when learning a new language that even though they may use the same alphabet as English, they rarely follow the same grammatical rules. French, for instance, is a Romance language and uses masculine and feminine markers for nouns. We don’t do that in English, but it’s a vital part of their language, so it was one of the grammar slides.

What to Expect

Beyond the explanation I just gave with how the program works, you need to know that Mango Homeschool Edition is completely web based. You have to have a good internet connection and the current Flash player. It does not work on mobile devices.

Additionally, each member of you family will have his or her own account. If it’s just you learning, the price is $18/month or $125 a year. For each additional member who wants an account, it’s an extra $10 a month or $50 a year, up to 5 members. For 6 or more, there are special group rates, depending on the size of the group.

The program works in “Chapters,” each one based on a conversation. You hear the conversation in the first lesson of the chapter (if you’re completely new to your language, it sounds like gibberish!), and then throughout the next 4-6 lessons, you learn each piece of the conversation. By the end of the chapter, that conversation that sounded impossible to decipher is something you can actually understand!

How We Used Mango Languages

We don’t have a mic, so I sat with the kids during their lessons each day to help them with their pronunciation. It took a little more time than it would have if I’d been able to send them to do it themselves, but it was good for me, too. The kids did their lessons separately – otherwise they argued over whose turn it was to say the phrase first, and honestly, it was better for them to each have to come up with the correct answer on their own rather than repeating what their brother said.

My husband and I did lessons, too. One of our family goals is to spend some time living in France (not forever, but 6-12 months), so we’re all learning French. I took a placement test that was offered at the beginning of the course, and remembered enough from high school to be placed at lesson 17; everyone else in the family started at lesson 1. In addition to brushing up on my French, I also started started a Spanish-Latin America course. Our church is bilingual (English-Spanish), so I want to learn some Spanish to be more integrated there. (Most of the Hispanics speak English and Spanish, but not all of them.)

Pros and Cons

Mango Homeschool Edition is a really good program. It really took our foreign language lessons to the next level – something I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. The system is attractive and easy to use. The only thing I was unsure about was the fact that it uses the translation method. In my mind, it seems like it would be harder to become fluent using the translation method because you’re always having to go back and forth between two languages in your head to say anything. On the other hand, the more you practice, the better you’ll get – regardless of method. So in the end, I think it’s a fine way of teaching languages.

In Conclusion

Mango Homeschool Edition was a great fit for our family. We still have a long way to go before we can move to France, but we’re way better off than we were two months ago in our pursuits of the French language and culture.

Blessings,

Wendy

You can connect with Mango Languages on Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.

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Posted in: homeschooling, reviews | Tagged: home school, homeschool, homeschool curriculum, homeschool foreign language curriculum, homeschool high school, homeschool online, homeschooling, how to homeschool, Mango

SchoolhouseTeachers.com {Review}

Posted by Wendy on December 16, 2013 3 Comments

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Welcome to my first official review for the Schoolhouse Review Crew! I was given a yearly membership option to SchoolhouseTeachers.com in order to write a review on the site. I can sum up my feelings about the site in one word: amazing. But that’s not a review, so let me go over some of the many wonderful things you’ll find there.

I’ve spent most of my time in the “Pre-K/Elementary” tab, simply because that’s how old my kids are. There’s so much information there that so far I’ve barely been able to scratch the surface. Take a look at all the topics:

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We’ve already used the French lessons. I’ve really loved having a lesson plan. I know the basics of the language, but not necessarily how to teach it. The printouts (for teaching the lesson and worksheets for the kids) are wonderful. We’ve done the first two lessons so far: the French alphabet and accent marks. Some of the things in the later lessons (counting, primarily) are things I’ve already taught them, so we’ll breeze through those more quickly than we have thus far. I just love knowing that they’re getting the foundation they need for the language.

The Science tab is also pretty cool. There are YouTube videos from Jason Lindsey explaining some of the basics of why things are (or happen) the way they are (or do). There’s a new video up each week, and they’re designed to be hands-on experiments that you can do with your kids with things you have around the house. This week’s video answers “why do cranberries pop when you boil them?”

For the parent who wants to homeschool but is completely unsure where to begin, SchoolhouseTeachers.com has a “Dailies” tab that will give you a straight up, daily lesson in each subject. No (well, very little) planning needed. Just go to the site and print. Easy.

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There are topics in the “dailies” category ranging from copywork (which Munchkin is working on right behind me as I type this post) and math to spelling, art, and even tests if you want to go that route with your kiddos.

I think my favorite thing (that I’ve found so far) on the site is the planners that are included absolutely free with your paid membership. There are 5 of them, and you can download, modify, and print them to fit your teaching style/homeschool situation. There’s the basic planner for moms; a planner for parents of special needs kids; and student planners for elementary, middle, and high school kids. All I’ve had time to look at thus far is the elementary student planner, but it’s absolutely wonderful. It includes not only the planner pages (calendars), but also articles specifically geared toward the kids and pages of “important lists” – things like the planets in order and a times table.

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You can start your very own membership at SchoolhouseTeachers.com for only $3. That’s right – $3 buys you your first month of full access to the site. If you like it, you can continue your membership for the low monthly price of $12.95. Based on the amount of content on the site, and the fact that not only is updated regularly but the back lessons are archived for access later, $12.95 a month is a real bargain. But it gets better. Buy a full year all at once and you’ll save 10%, bringing the price to $139. And during the month of December, if you sign up for the annual price, you’re locked in at that rate, and you get an additional membership to gift to a friend. Believe me, any mom with school-age kids would be super blessed by this gift! Oh, and one more thing: the price, whether monthly or yearly, covers the whole family. There’s no hidden “additional kid” fee.

Keep in mind, too, that just because my review focused primarily on the elementary part of the site, that’s not all there is. There’s something there for every age range from toddlers through teens. Perfect for any family!

I’m not the only one reviewing this site this week. Head on over to the Schoolhouse Review Crew to find even more opinions on the site before you buy in. It’s always best not to rely on just one person’s opinion, after all.

Happy learning!

–Wendy

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Posted in: homeschooling, reviews | Tagged: homeschool, product review, schoolhouse review crew, schoolhouseteachers.com

K5 Learning Reading and Math {Review}

Posted by Wendy on November 26, 2013 Leave a Comment

K5 Logo 400 px

Disclaimer: I was given a free 6-week trial to K5 Learning. I was not compensated in any other way or paid for this review. This post contains affiliate links. If you subscribe to K5 Learning using a link on my blog, or list me as a reference when you sign up, I will receive a small commission. All words and opinions are my own.

K5 Learning is an online program that emphasizes reading and math in various grade levels. You start by creating a login account for yourself, the parent, and one for each child. My kids loved having their own login information and password. You can make it easier for the kids to be sure that they’ve typed their password correctly by having it show up as they type it (as opposed to bullets) if you want.

The next thing to do is to have your child(ren) take the assessment “test.” I’m hesitant to use that word, test, but it’s the best one I can think of right now. That involves a series of problems to solve, some at the grade level you’ve assigned them, some below, and some above. This isn’t designed to frustrate your child, but rather to get a true assessment of where they are academically. Once they’ve finished, you can log in to the parent-side of the site and view their results, or you can wait a few hours and receive and email with the results in it. I printed a copy of the boys’ results for my own records.

Once your kids have been placed in the appropriate grade-level for the program, the fun starts!  There are animated lessons in a variety of topics. The program placed Seahawk in “upper 4th/lower 5th” grade for math, so he worked mostly on place value. It challenged him a lot more than our workbooks because it went up through the millionth place. That was good for him, even though it took him a little longer than he was used to. (Previously, he’d only gone up through the hundred thousands in place value work.) Munchkin was placed in “upper 1st/lower 2nd” in the program for math, which I’m not 100% sure was right for him. He does 3rd grade math at home. His work was mostly geometry – shapes and colors. It was really easy for him. I’m sure I could have gone in and adjusted what it had him doing, but for a fun, supplementary thing, I didn’t stress about it.

Because we do a Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling (using real books and real life to learn instead of textbooks), we didn’t use the reading side of the program past the assessment. My kids are prolific readers, and we insist that they read a lot, plus we read a lot to them, so a reading lesson isn’t necessary for our family.

The only thing I would change about the program is to allow it run on mobile devices. We only have one computer in our home, and my husband works from home doing a graphic design business, so he uses the computer during the work/school day, which made it impossible for the kids to get to use the program every day. Having been able to access it on our Kindle Fire would have been much better for our particular situation.

The assessment I mentioned is free on the site. You don’t have to sign up for anything to have it done. Once you’ve done that, if you want to continue on with the program, it costs $25 a month for the first child and $15 for each additional child. Or you can purchase a year at a time for $199/$129. They also have a 14-day trial that’s absolutely free – you don’t even have to put in your credit card and remember to cancel before the end.

–Wendy

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Posted in: homeschooling | Tagged: education, homeschool, K5 Learning

K5 Learning

Posted by Wendy on October 9, 2013 Leave a Comment

K5 Logo 400 px

K5 Learning has an online reading and math program for kindergarten to grade 5 students. I’ve been given a 6 week free trial to test and write a review of their program. If you are a blogger, you may want to check out their open invitation to write an online learning review of their program.

I haven’t tried this with my kids yet, but I plan to start it tomorrow. I’ll let you know in six weeks what I think!

–Wendy

Posted in: homeschooling | Tagged: homeschool, K5 Learning, kids, math, reading

Spear a Potato

Posted by Wendy on October 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Would you ever think you could stab an ordinary drinking straw into a potato? Neither did I. Or my kids.

Until our science experiment last week.

But here it is.

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A straw in a potato.

Here’s how to do it. You know, in case you have littles at home you want to teach about inertia.

First, soak the potato in water for about 30 minutes. Don’t worry – it’ll still be raw (read: hard). Using a strong, fast thrust, push the straw into the potato.

It won’t break. The straw, that is. The potato will. Its skin, anyway.

Why it works: basic inertia. An object at rest (the potato) wants to stay at rest. An object in motion (the straw) will keep moving until it can’t anymore.

Each time we do an experiment, the kids also do a little paper. Very basic. It lists the name of the experiment, the procedure, what the kids think will happen, what actually happened, and why it worked.

–Wendy

Posted in: homeschooling | Tagged: experiment, homeschool, inertia, science

Science Experiment: Fun with Colors

Posted by Wendy on September 20, 2013 3 Comments

We did a science experiment in our homeschool last week – those are the boys’ favorite things to do! I looked through the book on simple experiments I’d picked up from the library and found one that didn’t require a trip to the store first. Here’s what we came up with.

Tear a paper towel into strips and put a dot of green food coloring (or marker ink) about two inches from the bottom.

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I made sure to get a strip of towel that didn’t have any printing on it when we did this.

Next, place your strip in a glass of water, making sure the green dot is about an inch outside of the water (but inside the glass). Wait 10-15 minutes.

What’s supposed to happen: your green dot should disappear, leaving your water yellow and your paper towel blue as the dyes separate.

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Ours didn’t work perfectly, but we did a get a bit of blue on the paper towel, so it wasn’t a total misfortune.

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And the most important part was that the kids had fun learning!

Happy weekend!

–Wendy

Posted in: homeschooling | Tagged: experiment, food coloring, homeschool, kids, paper towel, science, water

Homeschool Prep

Posted by Wendy on August 7, 2013 3 Comments

I’m sure you know by now that I homeschool my boys. I don’t really keep that a secret. I’ve been doing it since they were small, but never very well, I don’t think. Now, I know they’ve learned stuff; I just have some major improvement to do.

In the early years, we did the “all workbook, all the time” approach simply because I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t want to miss anything. We had workbooks for math, reading, language arts, spelling, and writing. We did a lesson from each one every day.

The boys hated it.

And if I’m being perfectly honest, while I was comfortable in knowing I wasn’t lacking as a teacher, I didn’t love it either. It wasn’t what “home school” was supposed to be. I’m not of the unschool philosophy; that’s taking it too far. But learning should be fun. If all I was going to do was have them fill out worksheets all day, they could do that in public school and at least have a park (playground) to play at during specified times.

Last year, we just did the workbook for math. We did unit studies for everything else. There were some successes, but by and large, I don’t think it was enough.

So I’m going to try yet another approach this year. I came across Ambleside Online a few weeks ago. They offer completely free curriculum from Kindergarten through high school, in the Charlotte Mason style. For those of you who don’t know, Charlotte Mason was a British woman who lived from 1842-1923 and spent her life developing a teaching method for children using “living books” (real books by people who care about their topic rather than textbooks). She believed that children are not blank slates, but small people and should be treated as such. She had three main mottoes regarding education.

“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.”

“Education is the science of relations.”

“I am, I can, I ought, I will.”

I like these phrases. I like the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education. So I’m going to try it with my boys this year. For the first time in our homeschooling career together, I’m excited for the school year to start.

Here’s what we’ll be studying in our first term (we’re going to do three, 12-week terms):

Bible:
Old Testament: Genesis 1-15
New Testament: Matthew 1-10

History:
We’ll be using mostly books that are available for free online, through the library, or inexpensive through the Kindle store.
A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer (this is available in volumes through our library. You can also get the book as a single volume from Amazon)
An Island Story by H.E. Marshall (this is available for free online and is a history of England)
This Country of Ours by H.E. Marshall (available free online; a history of America)
Trial and Triumph by Richard Hannula (available free online; a series of biographies)
Little Duke by Charlotte Mary Yonge (available free from Amazon for the Kindle version; historical fiction)

Natural History/Science:
The Burgess Animal Book for Children by Thornton Burgess (free online)
Tree in the Trail by Holling Clancy Holling (available in my library; the story of a cottonwood tree growing in the Great Plains and its contribution to the history of the southwest)

Literature:
Shakespeare: We will be reading Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet this term.
Parables of Nature by Margaret Gatty (available online)
Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (available online)

Poetry:
We will be reading one poem a day by Walter de la Mare. There’s a collection available online.

We will also be reading 800 words a week of Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.

We will be studying Johannes Brahms and Vincent van Gogh for our music and art lessons. I have curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler for those.

We will be doing daily lessons of math, copywork (handwriting), reading (silent reading of the kids’ choice), and foreign language (Spanish, because we attend an English/Spanish bilingual church). Math will be a workbook simply because that’s the most cost-effective way to do it. For Spanish, I’m going to start us with an app on my phone. Eventually, I’ll probably ask one of the Hispanic members of our church if they would be willing to give us lessons once a week or so, with assigned homework.

I think that about covers us for the first 12 weeks. 🙂

–Wendy

P.S. Wherever I say “available online” and don’t provide a link, those are on the Ambleside site. I would’ve provided specific links, but I’m short on computer time and don’t want to make this post from my phone ;).

Posted in: homeschooling | Tagged: ambleside online, charlotte mason, homeschool
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Welcome!

Welcome to Ladybug Daydreams! My name is Wendy, and I’m glad you’re here. I am a homeschooling mom to 5 boys. I write about homeschooling, homeschool curriculum, yarn (both knitting and crochet), and more! I hope you enjoy what you read.

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