Wordless Wednesday

Journey Homeschool Academy Review

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.



For summer school we tried out Journey Homeschool Academy we used the Experience Biology: Elementary.  This course can be found by clicking here Experience Biology: Elementary.  The course is geared towards kids that are 6-12 years of age. The program does acknowledge God as the creator but does not seem to go much farther than that. The program currently has 16 lessons and they are adding additional lessons as they are completed. There will be 30 lessons in total when the program is finished. This course can typically be completed during 1 school year is you are doing 1 lesson per week. Program cost is $129 and covers the entire immediate family.

Current completed lessons offered are:
Lesson 1: What is Life
Lesson 2: The building blocks of life
Lesson 3: The secret code of life
Lesson 4: Fueled up
Lesson 5: What's in a name
Lesson 6: Biomes Everywhere
Lesson 7: Itsy bitsy teeny tiny creatures
Lesson 8: The junk drawer kingdom
Lesson 9: The fungus among us
Lesson 10: What is a plant
Lesson 11: the wide world of plants
Lesson 12: Mean green energy making machine
Lesson 13: Roots and shoots
Lesson14: The reason for flowers
Lesson 15: It begins with a seed
Lesson 16: Amazing animals

This is probably one of the simplest programs to use. First your child watches the video lesson. There is only one log in for both parent and student. So you log into your online portal and let your kids watch a video lesson about basic biology principles. Next they will do a fun activity or assignment to help them connect the video to the world around them. If you need a little more your child will then explore books from the recommended reading list. You can do some or all of them. You can use them as a read-aloud or for independent reading assignments for each child.


There are 30 videos in the Experience Biology: Elementary and tons of hands-on activities to help your child bring the lesson to life. You will also find some memory work extras and copy work to use as needed. Lessons take around 15 minutes to complete, they are quick enough for those kids that loose interest quickly yet packed full of information. The girls dove right into these videos' and work pages. The girls enjoyed the video lessons the most but felt the worksheets were a little to easy for them however they are both at the upper end of the age range for this program. I felt like the videos were engaging and covered a decent amount of information for the given age range. You can take the lessons a little farther by using the resources and supplemental items that each lesson offers.

Some of the activities were activities that we had done in previous years so the girls felt they were not challenging enough. They said they would like to see more activities and maybe offer some activity options that would be a little more challenging for the kids in the upper age range of the program. For us I don't believe the program would last us a full school year. Just because we do science 4-5 days a week. For a family that just does maybe a weekly science lesson or stretches out the lesson over a full weeks time you could get it to last a hole school year.  Over all I feel like this is a great budget friendly program for kids that are close in age and grade level. I hope you will click the link below and see the other programs that the crew members used.

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CTCMath Review

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

 CTCMath has become our go 2 math program. Over the last few years we have reviewed many different levels of CTC and we have loved them all. CTCMath can be found by following this link https://www.ctcmath.com. We received a a 12-month Family membership which you can find by clicking here CTCMath.  The family membership subscription is currently selling for $148.50 for homeschool families. This package allows you to use the program with multiple students making it a great budget friendly program for families with multiple children.

CTCMath is marketed as a complete math curriculum. This math curriculum is completely online. Your student will log in and view a lesson video. This video will give you student step by step instructions for each lesson. The videos are around 4-9 minutes in length depending on which lesson you are in. It seems as thought the higher the grade level the longer the video which makes since because the problems are more complex. They may watch the video lessons as many times as they wish. They can also pause, rewind and fast forward as needed. Once they have completed the video they will move on to completing interactive questions and worksheets. The interactive questions and worksheets are designed to test your child's understanding of concepts taught in the lesson. When you child submits an answer on the interactive questions the system logs the answer and stores the results for each student. As the teacher or parent you can then view and print a report of how they are doing. The student can attempt the interactive questions multiple times. Your student also has the ability to print a paper worksheet. For this your child sill complete the worksheet with pencil and paper the traditional way and then submit his or her answers into the program for grading. Once the solutions have been submitted a printable fully worked solutions becomes available to show every step that should have been taken to reach the correct answer. Something new that was added this year is called a one page summary. This is a single page summary that provides the student with concise and complete notes from the tutorial video. My girls love this new feature. We have taken a binder and made a CTC Math Notes binder to store all the summaries that they are printing off. Now they have something to go back to if they have trouble remembering how to do something down the road. On the teachers side of things the parent will find reports. There will be a report built for each of your students. Every lesson they attempt is logged and the results are compiled into a report along with statistical information that details when they passed a lesson. It tells you what they scored and how much time they used to pass that particular lesson. Also as the parent/teacher you can assign task to each student. You can use this as a way for you child to know what they need to work on each day or as a way to remind them they need to do a lesson over.

Since I reviewed Grade 6 not to long a go I thought we would take a look at Elementary Geometry and Elementary Measurement since each of the girls worked through these lessons for summer school. Both of these courses would last roughly a semester give or take how many days a week your student works and how quickly they master it.




Elementary Measurement has roughly 29 lessons in it.  It covers lessons on parts of a circle, circumference of a circle, perimeter of a sector, finding a hypotenuse, finding a shorter side, composite prisms, volume of prisms, capacity, introduction to volume, area of Rhombus and Kites and many more.

Elementary Geometry has about 42 lessons in it. It covers topics like angle sum of a triangle, special triangles and their properties, mixed examples on angles, exterior angle of a triangle, test for congruent triangles, measuring angles, bisecting a line, bisecting an angle, constructing angles I and II, transformations, solid shapes, nets of solid shapes, faces vertices and edges.

The girls seem to do ok with the video lessons most of them were easy enough to understand. The video part of the lesson is quick and we love that we can pause and rewind as needed. The interactive questions take them about 20 minutes give or take depending on how well they understood the lesson. The printable worksheets take them about another 15 min. I ask them to complete both the interactive questions on the computer as well as the printable worksheets. If they don't score well I will back track watch the lesson with them and we will try again with what ever additional explanation I can offer. If that still doesn't work we resort to an internet search for additional explanations which doesn't happen real often but we do need to do this from time to time. We would love a way to send a message to the instructor when we run into question or something we are just not understanding from the video.

Navigation is easy for the kids. You can use the task feature if you wish. This is where you will go into the parent account and assign what you want them to do each day.  If you do this they will go to the task tab and it shows them which lesson you would like them to do for the day. I don't use this feature very often because its time consuming for me to go in and enter each assignment. My girls are old enough now where they can start with the first topic and just move through each lesson in order with out much difficulty. I can see the task feature being helpful with younger kids that need a little more help with what do each day.

I love the reports. We have been using CTC for several years now and each year is saved for me on my account. I can select which grade level I would like to view from the drop down for that student and bam it gives me all the stats for that level. Everything is downloadable and printable for long term storage. I will eventually download all of the girls scores for past years onto one flash drive. Since they work more independently now I use the reports to quickly tell me what they need to go back and work on a little more. It makes things efficient and I use less paper by being able to view scores and stats digitally.
Over all we are still very happy with CTCMath and I am impressed with the improvements and additions to the program. We would love for you to click the banner below and see what the other crew members think about CTC.

My new River Shirt. I found this great svg file on etsy and a youtube video on how to do a hombre screen printing in one step. I think it came out great for a first shirt using this method. I got the image a little low on the front of the shirt so next time I will do it 3in from the neck line instead of 5. But other than that I am very happy with it and I cant wait to try it agian.

I decided to try my hand at this cup making fad. I found a non toxic product called Crystalac that you can use instead of Epoxy. Its safe to use indoors and doesn't cause the same health issues that prolonged exposure to Epoxy does. I jumped in with both feet on this project. I couldn't start with something simple I want a two toned glittered can cooler with writing. This is my starter cup and my base color. The paint has to cure for 48hrs and then I can begin the glittering process. Stay tuned for updates on this crazy project.

Pitsco Education Review

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
STEM products are very popular in classrooms today. Pitsco Education at https://www.pitsco.com/. Has some amazing products that are perfect for homeschooling families. We were given the opportunity to use the Middle School STEM Creator Pack designed for students in grades 6-8. and it can be found here https://www.pitsco.com/STEM-Creator-Pack at the time of this post the creator pack was on sale for $49.95.

This kit is designed for 1 student and comes with several activities or projects.
Projects included :
Catapults
Balloon cars
Da Vinci bridges
Friction climbers
Inventions

What you get in the box:

• Project books (1 book per hands-on project)
• History of Pitsco Mad Lib
• “I Can Make Neat Stuff” sticker
• Laser-cut building elements
• Balloon Car templates
• GT-FX wheels
• Transparent tape
• Masking tape
• Aluminum axles
• Modeling clay (1 stick)
• Brass washers

• Straws
• Balloons
• Craft sticks
• Structures glue
• Rubber bands
• Plastic spools
• Cardboard wheels
• Chipboard
• Basswood rectangle
• Kite string

Some of the topics covered in this kit are:

Science: acceleration, modeling, force and motion, friction, Newton's third law. Technology: Art tools and techniques, cutting and folding, design processes, troubleshooting, drawings and diagrams. Math: Logic, 2 and 3-D shapes, logical reasoning, patterns, prediction, calculating speed, measurements, data collection and analysis. Engineering: Cause and effect, problem-solving, prototyping, safety, testing and evaluating solution, engineering design.

This kit came in and the girls were excited for a some summer projects. The website says this kit is designed for 1 student but the girls are in different grades within the target grades and I though it would be good to see how it worked each grade. They chose there projects based on the picture that was on the front of each bag. Neither read the description of the enclosed project. One selected the Catapults and Balloon cars kits and the other did the Da Vinci bridges, Friction climbers and inventions.

Over all the kits were very easy for both grade levels to follow with out much assistance from me. They quickly pulled out the Project Books and read through them for the first project selections. they located all the items they would need for the project. I loved that all the items they needed were included in the bags. We did find a couple items like string that needed to be used in more than one project kit. Each project book gives the student some easy to follow directions on how to build or what to do for the project.  Once they read through the Project Book they got started working on the projects. We ran into a small issue on the catapult. It ask her to use a small rubber grommet to hold a little aluminum peg in as a pivot point for the arm of the catapult. This little rubber grommet would not stay on. Every time she would pivot the arm it would pop off. Me being the mechanic I am substituted the metal peg and rubber grommet for a small plastic body clip used to hold on fenders on modern cars. We also tried a small metal safety pin that we use on trailer hitches but it was a bit to long and we went back to the body clip. After that modification it worked great. So be aware you might need to improvise a little on this project. The balloon car went together with out incident as they had built something similar a couple of years back and already had an idea of what to do. We discovered the cat likes to chase them when it races across the floor. 

Once the projects are built they will find some activities in the project book. These activities get them thinking how the item works. They also help get them thinking about how they can improve what they have just built. Some of the activities involved doing things  like  testing the catapult for accuracy and distance giving them a chart to track the results. For the DA Vinci bridge it has the student test different numbers of craft sticks with the amount of weight held and includes things like span distance and height.

Pitsco Education is hosting a give away for this very kit that my family has just reviewed. To enter all you need to do is follow this link http://www.pitsco.com/Creator-Pack-Giveaway. Fill out a little information like name and email and you are in for a chance to win this fun education kit.


Overall this kit is a great way to get in some extra learning in a fun hands on way. We had fun with all the projects included in the kit and I think it fits a price range that works for many homeschool families. You can click the link below and see some of the other kits that the Homeschool Review Crew has tested out with there families.