Review: Hey Mama! Print Schoolhouse Planner 2016-2017 (TOS Review) #hsreviews #tosmagazine #homeschool #schoolplanner #schoolresources

I got to check out the Hey Mama! Print Schoolhouse Planner 2016-2017 from The Old Schoolhouse for this review!

It was perfect timing too, to start planning for next school year!

The Hey Mama Planner has lots of great pages for the Homeschool Mom to plan and stay organized all school year long! 

It comes with year calendars for 2016, 2017 and 2018.  Each month (starting in July 2016 – June 2017) has a page for notes, a month calendar and a Hey Mama page with inspirational and motivational talk to keep your spirits up when things get hard (we all know they get hard!).  These are followed by blank Weekly Planner pages (about 80 pages), for the fine details (and some more Hey Mama pages).  Next up is Monthly Goal sheets, Semester Goal Sheets and Yearly Goal Sheets, Attendance Logs, and Curriculum Planning Sheets for up to 5 students.  There is also 4 Reading Logs, A Homeschool Contact List, Writing Prompt Ideas, Story Starter ideas, timelines, dates and other facts.  Last, but not least, there is information on how to create a transcript and pages to do so.  PHEW!  

It is filled with a lot of great stuff!!

Honestly I am not much of a paper planner, I don’t plan ahead, I fly by the seat of my pants most of the time (I know, those who know me are probably shocked!)  I have a general outline of what we are going to do each day, but I definitely do NOT plan out my year in advance (I tried that at first, didn’t work).  I plan to use the weekly planning to write what we DID to that week, it will be great for my yearly reviews to have this all written in one spot!  It will also help me in my ‘What we did this week’ blog posts. 

It will also help me stick to the general routine I have set up, and keep me on track as far as school days go. 

The monthly calendar will definitely come in handy to keep track of all the goings here and there!  As ‘home’schoolers, we rarely stay home.  (Though I am trying to cut back on some of our extra curricular this coming year). 

The goal sheets will be useful too, I have wanted to start working with my oldest (almost 10) to have him start setting some goals.  There was a class offered at a recent conference I went to (LDSHE) and it was on goal setting with your kids.  I didn’t attend it, but a friend did and she filled me in!  It sounds like a great idea! 

I’m looking forward to implementing these plans and this planner in the next coming month! 

From now until July 15th you can get this awesome planner for $19 shipped!

However, you can also gain access to all Schoolhouse Planners in digital format by subscribing to SchoolhouseTeachers.com!  Schoolhouseteachers.com is an all inclusive online curriculum for only $12.95/mo.  ($1 for the first month).  It gives you access to over 250 classes for preschool through high school, and even some for parents! 

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Field Trip #204 Friday Blog Hop (ROAD TRIP!)

Blog Hop designed to share 'FIELD TRIP' related Blog Posts(does not have to be a 'home school field trip', can be any trip to any place with your children!)

**NOTE:  Before linking up please review guidelines HERE!

After stopping off in South Dakota we headed to Cheyenne, Wyoming.  We planned to head to Yellowstone and spend the day there but discovered the temps were below freezing and they were calling for snow!  So we hit a dinosaur museum up that was local, and then drove through Yellowstone. We have the Kids in Every Park National Pass that was issued to 4th graders, so we got in free! 

Review: Essential Skills Advantage (TOS Review) #hsreviews #literacy #onlinelearning

For this review we used Complete Home Learning Suite by Essential Skills Advantage. 

This is the second time we have used this product for a review (you can see our first review).   They have added a lot more to the program since we last reviewed it.

I used this program with my 5 and 7 year old boys.  We used it 3-5 days a week.  To be honest up front, my 5 year old liked it, my 7 year old did not.  My 7 year old is the ‘difficult’ one, when it comes to finding review items he LOVES, so I am generally more surprised when he LOVES something than when he does not.

We used the Kindergarten and First Grade Levels during this trial.  It is important to make note that this is not really a TEACHING curriculum, It’s more of drills to practice things already known, to fine tune skills. It says it “teaches while it tests’, but it’s more of a learning through trial and error, in my opinion.  I can see that it could be effective with some children though.

Some of the activities my 5 year old did, were clicking on the animal picture, whose name they said, matching animals to sounds, identifying letters, identifying numbers, one-to-one correspondence when counting, etc.  He worked primarily in Math and Language section. My 7 year old also worked primarily in Language section, mostly on phonics. 

There are a lot more subjects that are offered, we looked at science for first grade, however, a lot of the activities requires reading, and my son is not a confident reader, so he was not interested in doing them.  It was the same way for Kindergarten, and my 5 year old is not reading at all.  It could have been done with me reading it for them, but my 7 year old prefers more independent working.  If it had an audio option for those questions that would be great!

Subject choices are Reading, Language & Grammar, Math, Science, & Geography.  All (except Geography which is only for 4-6th grades) are offered for Kindergarten through 6th grades.

Each lesson is fairly short, I let my kids complete as many as they felt like in one setting, which for my youngest was typically a 2-4 and my oldest was typically just one. 

One problem we had with the lessons were the arrow at the bottom of the screen, my kids were constantly hitting it on accident, thinking it was taking them to the next problem, but it actually takes them to the next lesson…and then when they would go back to the lesson they were on, it would start them over at the beginning.  This was  HUGE frustration with my 7 year old.  He would be near the end of the lesson and make this mistake (it seemed almost every time!) and he was so disheartened when he would have to do it all over again!

In my previous review I had mentioned that I wish they used REAL pictures instead of cartoon illustrations, this opinion still stands.  I also found a few of the exercises weird, such as they would have two columns of abcs and you were suppose to match them, I feel like it would have been beneficial for the program to say the letter name as they matched them (but it didn’t).  On the other hand, in a one-to-one correspondence counting drill, there was a number and they had to touch that many of the item, it counted with each item they touched.  I felt like this was basically giving them the answer.

We used the program on the iPad or our touchscreen laptop.  This was a nice new feature that I appreciated a lot!  Also new are report cards and activity reports.  They also have printable certificates. 

I wouldn’t really say this is a complete curriculum.  It can be a great supplemental tool, however.  It’s affordable, only $7.99/month (or $12.99/month for multiple students).  Internet access is necessary to use the program (so it can’t be an on the go activity).  I plan to continue using this with my 5 year old, but my 7 year old is not interested.  So, goes to show it can work well with some, and not others!  There was definitely things I liked and didn’t like about it, but overall it’s a decent product.

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Blog: http://buyesa.com/blog/