Learning.com Review

After I had to give up on Time4Learning, I started desperately searching for something to replace it.  Someone else has to have done something similar, right?  I found the name Aha! Science mentioned on a forum and looked it up.  Thus, I stumbled upon Learning.com.  This is going to be long, because there's a lot to cover.  If you're interested, get a steamy mug of tea and get settled.

This site is not made for homeschoolers.  It is made for schools and school districts.  This presents both some drawbacks and some interesting perks for us homeschoolers - more on those later.  I think it gets overlooked by the homeschool community because it's not marketed to us and, if you stumble across it, it can be hard to see what it can do for you.

Learning.com is basically two different things rolled into one: a market for content and an assignment tracking system.  Both of these functions are built to be used by at least a class, and up to an entire school district.  The assignment tracking system allows you to set up all your classes, enter all the students, make assignments and track their completion and grade.  This is, I'm sure, very useful to classroom teachers, but it is a bit cumbersome for homeschoolers.  I set up a separate class for each of the Boys in each subject.  Then I could assign lessons from curriculum that I had purchased to each one.  Each Boy has a login and can get on and see what his assignments are and then their work is tracked in my (the teacher's) account.

After doing all this, I had some approximation of the "working independently" part of T4L that I liked.  It takes a little more work than T4L to load in the lessons, but it does allow them to get some of their work done on their own.  A lot of the time, however, especially when we are working on a lesson that both Boys are doing together, I just load up the lesson and we all sit around and do it together.  For some subjects, like science, that we do together, it's just easier.

Now to the content.  Once you sign up for a Learning.com account, which is free, go to the Marketplace and start browsing content.  It is worth getting an account to get Aha!Science and Aha!Math alone.  Lots of the curriculum is free; much of it is available elsewhere on the web.  But Learning.com does give you an interface to pull it all together and assign it to your kids.  Quality and pricing on content varies wildly, depending on how it is marketed.  Some programs, which are meant to be used for entire classes (and schools) at a time are $800 per year.  Luckily, there aren't many of those.  But programs like Aha!Science and Math run $15 per child per year.  Yes, that's right - an entire online, interactive science curriculum, including games, experiments and quizzes that grade themselves for $15 a year!

Some specifics on the Aha! curriculum, which is produced by Learning.com.  The Aha!Science covers grades 3-8.  The Marketplace lists two different program, Grades 3-5 and Grades 6-8, which are the same, as far as I can tell.  I think this is a marketing thing.  In my experience, the content is spot on for Middle School and could be useful for advanced elementary science lovers.  There are 33 different topics, including Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Geology and Astronomy.  Each topic contains animated lessons, interactive instruction, experiments, games and a quiz.  What I love about it:  the animations are extremely well done and very informative without being silly or gimmicky at all.  Click on this link to watch several examples.  One warning:  this is not a complete, step-by-step curriculum that tells you what to do on what day in which grade.  You get the 33 modules of content and you decide how and when to use them.  Like everything else we do, I supplement with lots of other stuff:  library books, documentaries, activities and field trips.

The Aha!Math is also divided into grades 3-5 and 6-8.  There are far fewer modules in the Math and it makes a good supplement to whatever curriculum you are using.  Remember that it is only $15/year.  If your child is getting stuck on a concept or needs some extra practice, these are a great supplement.  Click here for some samples.

The third offering from Learning.com is EasyTech.  It is an integrated Language Arts/computer software curriculum that covers word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and a really good keyboarding module.  I haven't used much of this stuff yet, but I plan to next year.  Here's a link to some samples.

Learning.com can be a bit cumbersome to get set up because it is made for school districts, but, in the end, I feel that it is worth it.  The content is excellent, much better than Time4Learning.  And the price - wow!  It is definitely a good supplement for kids who do better with visual and interactive learning.  The Aha!Science is enough content to be a complete Middle School science curriculum, if you don't need a step-by-step plan.  Stay tuned for more reviews of other Learning.com curriculum.

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Hard Lessons

Today, we learned one of the hardest lessons there is - how to say goodbye.

This is Sanga.  She was our first family dog and the boys doted on her.  Sanga has been a part of our homeschooling from the beginning.  Every volunteer trip to the park included her and she loved running through the trails and sniffing everything.  She was our PE teacher and foot warmer.

We knew that her cancer was spreading and that it was only a matter of time.  Still, I had hoped for a few more weeks with her.  She didn't seem comfortable walking far lately, so we would take her for a shorter walk along the creek and let her sniff as long as she wanted.  But last night, it was obvious that she was having a hard time breathing.  When it wasn't any better this morning, we took her to the vet.

This is one of those times that I am so grateful that we homeschool.  I'm not sure how I would have handled the situation if they had had to go to school.  Lie to them and say I think she's ok?  Send them off to school not knowing?  Or tell them what was probably going to happen and then make them go?  Keep them out for the day?  I don't know.

As it was, we didn't have to worry about that.  We were able to be with Sanga and help her through to the end.  I asked the boys if they wanted to say goodbye and leave or stay with her and they chose to stay.  We all sat around her on the floor and comforted her until she was gone.  It was by far the hardest lesson we've done yet.

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Ah, the reality....

Just recently, I posted a homeschooling article on my Facebook page and added a disclaimer about how this article painted the rosiest of pictures of homeschooling and how I felt that we do a disservice when we don't include the realities of what it's really like to homeschool.  And then I realized, I was the pot calling the kettle black.

My Facebook page is full of posts and pictures of how much fun we're having and all the fascinating things that we are learning.  I often post the cute and insightful things my kids will say while we're studying something.  I advertise when we are spending a beautiful Spring day outside exploring Nature instead of sitting inside doing worksheets.  And, while all those things are true, they don't necessarily paint the entire picture.

You see, when I mentioned going outside to explore Nature on a beautiful Spring day, I was met with moans and eye rolls.  That's right - my kids thought it sounded stupid.  I laugh when I read other peoples' curriculum reviews when they say "My kids beg to do their Math!" or "They don't want to stop when we finish a lesson".  Maybe they do.  I don't know.  That never happens to me.  No one has EVER begged me to do math.  My kids still groan when I tell them it's time to start our lessons.  Sometimes they huff and stomp their feet when it's time to come back from lunch.

So maybe I should preface all my Facebook posts with "Once I dragged them outside..." or "After several minutes of threatening...." and then go on to extol the virtues of hands-on science experiments.  We have had meltdowns, tears, screaming and tantrums.  Outright refusal to perform assignments and near mutiny have happened in our happy little homeschool.  Against everything I believe, and knowing full well it was the worst thing I could do, I have threatened to march my kids down to our local middle school and sign them up.  Right now.

Once, when my oldest was a preschooler, I asked my Mom about his contrary nature and his defiance.  She looked at me, and with a deadpan expression, she replied, "You were expecting complacent, compliant children?"  She's right, my kids were never going to be compliant, unquestioning rule-followers, and I don't really want them to be.  Still, I had hoped for that excitement about learning to come back.  They had it when they were little.  Their lack of it was one of the reasons I pulled them out of school.

Maybe it's too soon.  Maybe I'm not doing it right.  I don't know.  I do know that, after the eye-roll and the moan, and once we get started into the lesson, something wonderful happens.  The kids start participating.  They are making connections.  They start skipping along the stream bank, pointing out Cypress knees and trying to find out what kind of snake that is.

I also know that my kids are learning in a meaningful way.  They will not grow up to be good at picking out the one correct answer to a multiple choice question.  They will argue vociferously that A, C and D could all be correct under certain circumstances.  They will point out inconsistencies and question authority.  And I guess that's what I really wanted for them in the first place.

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BrainPop Review

 At the same time that we started using Time4Learning (see my review here), I paid for a year of BrainPop.  I was worried at the time that it might be redundant, but I had heard such good things about it that I went ahead and got it.  Boy, am I glad I did.

BrainPop is a site that provides hundreds of short videos starring Tim and his robot, Moby.  Tim and Moby explain everything from who Amelia Earhart was to the Pythagorean Theory to how wind energy works to how to organize an essay.  Seriously, I can't remember a time that I looked for a topic and couldn't find anything on it.  The videos are usually only 2-3 minutes but pack a lot of information into that short time.  The site is extremely well-organized and easy to navigate.  Obviously, this is not a full curriculum.  But these little videos make a great introduction to a new topic, or a good way to recap a lesson.  Sometimes, it is just fun to pick a random video and watch it.  Or, if a tangent topic comes up in something we are reading (Who was Marie Curie? or What is an isotope?), we know we can get a good explanation here.

Each video also has a 10-question quiz associated with it.  Kids can take the quiz for just review (they are shown whether they got the correct answer right away), or they can do it as a graded quiz and have the results sent to your email.  Each topic also has extra written information available and sometimes, other activities that you can add.

One of the best parts of the site are the games that they have added recently.  Games related to a topic you are watching are shown on that video's page, or you can browse through them from the games button on the homepage.  Now, there is nothing I hate more than pointless online games.  And my kids hate them too.  So many of the online "educational" games either have very little educational value, or are no more than "drill and kill" exercises with aliens added.  Not these games.  These games rock.

One of our absolute favorites, that we discovered during our study of elections last fall, is the Executive Command game.  In it, you play the POTUS.  You have a limited amount of time to propose legislation, meet with legislators to advance your chosen agenda, react to foreign aggression, and fly around the world to meet with global leaders.  As the game progresses, it become a frenetic race to keep up with all the emails coming into your inbox while you race around Washington and the world trying to put out fires.  It gives us a little glimpse of what a day in the life of the President must really be like.

Another game is called Win the White House.  In it, you are running for President.  You choose your party, your running mate and your platform.  Then you travel around the country raising money, making speeches, deciding where and when to run advertisements and almost obsessively watching the electoral college votes as states change allegiances.  We played this game several times as we followed the election and nothing brought home the importance of  the electoral votes than this game.  We found ourselves saying, "Pah, you can have Arkansas! Get me on a plane to Ohio so I can make a speech!".  And, sure enough, when we checked where each candidate was spending time that week, they were visiting the same states we were in the game.

A few notes on the games.  These games were not all developed by BrainPop, and I believe they might be available elsewhere on the web.  But I have never been disappointed by a game we've found on BrainPop, so I think they have very high standards for which games they use.  Also, the games are one of the features of BrainPop that is free - so you can use them even if you have not bought a subscription.

Speaking of free, BrainPop has several videos in each topic that are free.  So you can check them out if you are looking at buying a subscription.  They also have a large free section called BrainPop Educators.  There, you will find lesson plans on hundreds of topics, resources, planning tools and professional development.  I haven't used this section much, but it is packed with information.

We regularly use several BrainPop videos and other resources a week and I feel like we are getting good value for the price.  We bought the family membership for $99 for a year.  The Homeschool membership is $199 and gives you up to three separate logins.  We usually watch the videos and do the quiz together, so I haven't felt the need for separate accounts.  They also offer BrainPop Jr for younger kids and BrainPop Espanol.  I highly recommend BrainPop as a resource you will use over and over again.

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Time4Learning Review

I've been promising to do some curriculum reviews, so here's my first try.  Over last summer, I spent a good deal of time thinking about how our first few months of homeschooling went and how we should proceed.  Of course, this meant spending hours and hours looking at curriculum options online.  Curriculum shopping can be very addictive.  Math books are like crack to us homeschooling moms.

Anyway, I wanted to try something more structured and I was hoping to find something that would allow the Boys to work more independently.  I found Time4Learning.  A complete, online curriculum for K-8, covering Math, Language Arts, Science and Social Studies.  Each lesson has an animated instructional video that your kids can watch and then a quiz.  Most of the videos are funny and a little campy, but some of them (that are obviously older) are pretty cheesy.   The explanations are very clear and my kids had no trouble understanding or following any of the content.

There are many advantages to this curriculum.  It is complete and follows most state standards.  If your child is old enough (as mine are), they can work independently.  All your planning is done for you, as is all the grading and record keeping.  The cost is very reasonable for a full curriculum - $19.95/month for the first child and $14.95/month for siblings.  One of the best things is that you can cancel at any point, so if it's not working for you, you're not out any more money.

Another advantage is that you can use different grade levels for different subjects.  Both of my boys are summer birthdays and so they tend to fall between grade levels.  They are way ahead in History and Science, but are either at grade level or even one grade level below in Math and Writing.  T4L allows you to decide which grade level you want each child to be at in each subject, and then you are given access to the grade above and below that level.  This really allows your child to work at their own pace.  And isn't that one of the greatest things about homeschooling?

I had no intention of using it in such a way that my boys would be sitting in front of their computers for several hours every day.  They were able to complete their Math and Language Arts lessons in about an hour to an hour and a half every day.  We usually do Social Studies and Science together with lots of hands-on activities and experiments.  So I continued with what we were studying and used the T4L lessons as a supplement when we needed them.  I found the Social Studies and Science instruction to be the weakest in T4L.  At the 5th and 7th grade level, it was either just text from a book or some older animation that I found to be very poorly done.  The narrator character had a very high-pitched, nasal voice that was hard to even understand.

This whole set-up is such a great idea, and there's really nothing else out there that covers as much as T4L does.  I just wish it was done better.  What it came down to for us is that my Boys got really sick of the campy animation and bad jokes.  Listening to that every day was making them dread doing their lessons.  My feeling is that this is a better fit for younger children.  I also think that relying on it for everyday instruction is just asking to get burned out on it.  It can be an excellent spine to keep you on track and keep records for you, but I would recommend mixing in lots of other activities.

If you have middle school kids, I highly recommend Learning.com and their Aha!Science and Aha!Math programs.  You get the same advantage of having instructional videos, but they are much less campy and silly.  In addition, they are more interactive and also have games and quizzes for each topic. The quality is just way beyond T4L.  And the price is spectacular - $15/student/year.  They also have tons of other curriculum available, some of it is free.  I use the Aha! lessons, along with BrainPop to help cover the material and then we add in plenty of activities, projects, documentaries and field trips.  Now I'm just waiting for them to come out with Aha!Language Arts.

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New Year

Well, our new school year has started.  Several things are changing this year and several are staying the same.  First of all, we are continuing our volunteer work at our local park.  We've been twice already and are very glad to be getting back to filling the bird feeders and clearing the trails every Wednesday morning.  We are really looking forward to being in the park as Fall comes and seeing the change in the colors.  We are also continuing with our co-op, which is now growing.  We look forward to a year of great projects with our friends.

What's changing this year?  Well, after spending a lot of time this summer looking at different curricula and trying to decide how to more forward, I have decided to give Time4Learning a try.  It's a complete online curriculum for K-8.  We've been using it for about a month now and, so far, I'm very pleased with it.  I want to give it another few weeks and then I'll do a more in-depth review.  We are using it mostly for Math and Language Arts - I still really love our Unit Studies for History and Science.  That's where we get to do all the fun stuff!  But I can pull certain lessons from T4L to supplement our Unit Studies.  With a Grandparents Grant, the boys now each have their own laptop and work/read independently for much of the morning.

Ah, the beauty of the Periodic Table!

I'm also using BrainPop, another online resource to supplement all of our subjects (again, I plan to do a more in-depth review after a few more weeks of using it).  It's a great way to introduce a new topic and the boys really enjoy the animated videos with Tim and Moby.  I'm still cobbling together a lot of different resources, because I don't want the boys on the computer all day, but using the T4L curriculum gives me a strong spine to work with.  It also gives me reassurance that we are covering everything they need to cover.

So, to get us started this year, we are doing units on Chemistry and the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages is another one of those units like Ancient Egypt - there is so much to do, I can hardly squeeze it all in.  We have studied knights, the Feudal System, Heraldry, the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Crusades, and the Plague.  We have read two great historic fiction tie-ins (Crispin by Avi and Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix) and watched several movies/documentaries about knights, vikings and Robin Hood.  For projects, we made mosaic tiles and some really cool stained glass window stick-ons that now adorn our back door.

The Boys' mosaic tiles displayed with the painted ones they did in  co-op.

I loved how these turned out so much, I had to do one too!

We are going to finish up with Charlemagne, the Vikings (including some more cool mythology) and the Magna Carta.  The Boys have already started on their final projects - one on the Black Death and the other on the Crusades.

We are doing a Chemistry unit because the boys really liked that last year and because it has a lot of connection to the Middle Ages.  After learning about atomic structure and phases of matter last year, we are focusing on elements, compounds, bonds, and the periodic table.  So of course, we started with alchemy and then learned about Mendeleev and his periodic table.  Our first experiment was the electrolysis of water.  At first, the boys were a little disappointed that there was not some big explosion when I hooked the battery up to the pencils sticking in the water.  But when they saw the bubbles of gas forming on the ends of the pencils, they were fascinated.  We let it run all day.

For our chemistry unit, I am using a combination of the second Chemistry unit from Intellego and a wonderful resource I found from Ellen McHenry (http://www.ellenjmchenry.com/).  She has some great unit studies and a lot of free resources on her site.   All of her units have lots of experiments, board games and activities.  I love her hands-on approach to science.  Check out the Brain Hat - I can't wait to try that one!

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Field Trip!

So, what have we been doing since Ancient Greece and the Iditarod?  Well, we've been preparing for and going on our huge field trip to Washington DC.  Our friends over at Intellego have several excellent Unit Studies that we combined to give us an overview of the American Revolution, American Government and the Presidents of the US.  The Boys really enjoyed going through all the Presidents and finding out what they were known for and what was going on during different periods of history.  It gave us a good introduction to US History that we can build on as we go through it in more depth.

We also did a lot of planning, looking through the Smithsonian website (an excellent resource) and finding other interesting spots to visit in DC.  We checked out a few Washington DC with Kids guides and came up with long lists of what we wanted to see.

Then, finally, the trip came.  Needless to say, our list was much longer than the time we had to spend there.  But we got through our top picks:  Natural History, American History and Air and Space of the Smithsonian; the Mall, the Spy Museum, the Building Museum and the National Geographic Society.  The Boys loved riding the Metro everywhere and learned quickly how to navigate.  We also came back to the hotel most every evening in time for a swim in the pool.

Perhaps the highlight of the trip was at the National Geographic Society.  We went to see the new exhibit on the sinking of the Titanic (always a fascinating subject).  While we were there, watching the film about Bob Ballard finding the wreckage of the Titanic under 2.5 miles of ocean, who should walk in?  Dr. Ballard himself!  He was gracious enough to pose for a picture with the boys.  We've read more about him and his very interesting career since we got home.  We also found out about his Jason Project, a great resource for teaching science to middle schoolers.  We'll be using their Ecology unit in May.

The trip was full of interesting new discoveries and opportunities to see some of the things we've already studied.  We will be working on a scrapbook of our trip and possibly a project on the Titanic over the next few weeks. 

In May, we will be hosting our Homeschool co-op and planning four units of activities in History.  Needless to say, we have a plethora of materials to use!  We will also be doing a unit on Biology and Ecology.  I'm sure there will be several trips to zoos in our future.

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