Homeschool

Study skills are important for all students, especially as they get older and are dealing with high school and college courses.  One thing I have learned from my two oldest kids is that while some children are good at organizing and studying others need to be taught the skill explicitly!  So when I had the chance to review the Victus Study Skills System for my fourteen year old son I figured it was excellent timing.  My son is in 9th grade, so classes are getting harder and this is perfect time to establish good skills that will carry him through more difficult course work.

The Program

I received the Student Workbook and Teacher Edition to review.  This course is designed for children in grades 5-12, and the Student Workbook retails for $20, while the Teacher’s Edition costs $40.  The program is designed around three foundational cornerstones, which are designed around three questions that the student needs to answer:

I am always looking for ways to add variety to our homeschooling, and keep learning fun.  I recently had the chance to review a Note Pack from In the Hands of a Child.  This company specializes in creating lap books and notebook project packs, mainly for homeschoolers.  These can provide hands on learning, which most children love.

My son has never much cared for lap books, and now that he is 14 he finds the cutting and pasting they involve tedious.  So I was interested to see that In the Hands of a Child now offers Note Packs, which are designed for older kids.  These encourage children to make a record or portfolio of what they have learned.  The pages include graphic organizers and writing prompts, and can all be collected in a three ring binder when they are finished.

My 14 year old son has learned some computer programming over the past two years, and written programs in Basic.  Now that he is starting high school it makes sense for him to learn a higher level programming language and improve his skills.  So when I had the chance to review a programming course from Homeschool Programming as part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew I figured it was great timing for him.

Homeschool Programming has computer courses for children from 4th grade and up.  There are two high school level courses, one for learning programming in C# and one for learning programming in Java.  After some research I decided that either language would be good, and I ended up receiving the TeenCoder Java Series for my son.

One of the things I realized during the past school year is that my son has terrible handwriting for a 14 year old.  Sometimes he can’t even read his own writing, and with high school starting next year he needs to be able to read what he writes, and so do others.  I realized this is a part of homeschooling I neglected, and set out to remediate it. So the chance to review a handwriting book designed for older children from Classical Conversations was a perfect opportunity for us.

History is my son’s favorite subject in school.  But this year we haven’t really done any history at all because he has been doing a year long geography program. So when I had the chance to review a Lap-Pak program from Home School in the Woods I knew he’d be excited to actually do some history.  The program we received to use is Hands-On History Lap-Pak: The 20th Century in America.

This Lap-Pak is a downloadable pdf file that comes with 22 projects on all kinds of subjects related to 20th Century history.  Some are the standard things you would expect, like World Wars, Political Events and the Space Race.  But it also includes projects on things that frequently are overlooked in history study, like Architecture, Slang, and even “Dining Through the Decades”  Each project has a hands on activity to complete, to help cement the information in your child’s mind.

Learning to write well is a critical skill for children to learn. I never had to worry too much about teaching my two oldest kids to write well, because they seemed to intuitively understand the process. I just gave them lots of writing assignments and they produced good essays without much angst.  The process with my 13 year old son however isn’t quite as easy.  His writing is ok, but he is very much a “just the facts” kind of person, and is having trouble making his writing interesting, compelling and organized.  I recently received a writing curriculum from Essentials in Writing to use with him and review.

Box of I.D.E.A.S. is a company dedicated to providing interactive unit studies for homeschooling families.  I don’t use unit studies in my homeschooling very often, especially now that my children are teenagers, so this was something different for us.  We received a product organized around the theme of Salt, and had a blast exploring the many ways salt has influenced the world and shaped history.  The box had activities on history, geography, science, language, political systems and more.  Salt is something that we use every day, but rarely think about, and it was interesting to see how many different directions this one idea took us in!