Grade 3 Lightning Lit Set Review

I have a 3rd grader this year. She loves to read and I thought  Grade 3 Lightning Lit Set from Hewitt Homeschooling might be a perfect fit for her. This set comes with a teacher’s guide and a student book. But you will be required to buy some additional books to use the curriculum. This curriculum requires 8 additional books. I already had a couple of the books on hand since my oldest red them last year. The others I could find on the digital library that our local library offers. This helped to cut cost and we can check them out for 21 days so its plenty of time for her to read them before they must be returned. None of the books are all that expensive so I felt it was still affordable even if I were to have to buy all 8 books for her to read.

I like how the teacher’s guide is set up. It's set up day by day and lays out what chapters or pages your child is to read each day and tells what work pages they are to complete in the student book. It also includes the comprehension questions for the reading and the answers. It has the instructions for the weekly composition assignments and all the answers to the student guide. It even has some extra bonus activities you can you do if you feel you need a little extra. The time it takes to complete each day’s lesson will mostly depend on your child’s reading skills. My daughter spends about an hour on each day’s lesson. This includes the time to read the assignment and do the workbook pages for the day.

The student guide is a consumable book that comes in color. My girls enjoyed that it had color. I consider this a complete language arts course because it includes instruction on grammar as well as reading comp a reading journal, dictionary pages, sentence puzzles etc. It uses sentence diagramming, so if you are not familiar with it you might want to read up on it to see if it is a good fit for you.

Each book that your child reads runs for 2 weeks or more. You can get a full school year out of it doing the daily lessons. The books are all age and grade appropriate. The books used in this program are: Sarah, Plain and Tall, Rickshaw Girl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ramona and Her Father, Charlotte’s Wed, The Wheel on the School, The Tale of Despereaux, and the Random House book of Poetry for Children. My daughter was excited about all the books in the selection except for the Random House Book of Poetry. So far this is not a big hit with her but she is tolerating it. Mostly because the poetry lessons are shorter than the regular lessons. Poetry is just not her thing and that is ok. Most of you have probably already read some of these books when you were a kid so I won’t waste your time by telling you about each book. I was impressed with the comprehension question that followed each lesson and I felt that they did a great job helping me to see what she understood each time she completed a chapter. The questions gave her pause and she always put some thought into it before she answered each question. 

My daughter did like that this curriculum covered both Lit and grammar. Having everything in one book was a plus for her. She was a little intimidated about the sentence diagramming and so was I. I had to read the teacher’s guide quite a bit to help her with the diagramming. It was just not something I learned how to do when I was in school. All the lines were a little confusing for the both of us. We struggled with it at first but I do think we are getting a better handle on it the more we have worked with diagramming. She liked the explanations given on each grammar page though. It gave a simple explanation of what each part of speech was at the beginning of the assignment. Each lesson built on the next with some great lit lessons thrown in the mix. 

Over all I am satisfied with  Grade 3 Lightning Lit Set it has great books that she is enjoying and the grammar lessons are working for her. Check out the link below if you would like to read about other grade levels and products offered by Hewitt Homeschooling. 

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CHSH Download Club at CHSH-Teach.com review

We had the opportunity to review the CHSH Download Club  at CHSH-Teach.com. We were given an annual subscription to the site. Currently and annual subscription to the site is $25 so that's not a bad price considering you can find things for pre k -12th grade.  This site is basically a big stash of homeschooling resources that you can download and print. The site says there are over 50,000 downloadable educational fun. At first I really was not sure what I was going to try out on this site. So I did a little surfing around and played with it for a few days just getting the feel of what was on it and how it worked. Then on the third trip to the site I stumbled on to the dinosaurs. Yup, I knew right away this just what I had been looking for. We are going to be visiting a dinosaur museum in a few weeks and I had been looking for something that would fit the field trip but wouldn't be too hard for a 7 and 9 year old to do on there own. I wanted to start learning how to research. So I printed off the dinosaur pages that I found there were a bunch enough to fill a nice notebook. Downloading was easy and I had no trouble getting it to open on my computer. The pages were great, it had a picture of what the dinosaur looked like. Then is had areas for the girls to fill out. It ask for things like scientific name, where they lived at, what they ate, how big they were, how much they weight. It basically ask everything that a kid would want to know about a dinosaur.  This gave the girls a jumping off point to start there research and a great way to record the information that they could review any time they liked.

CHSH has a wide variety of subjects available on the download club. Bible Studies, Social Studies, Math, Languages, Science, Language Arts and more. We have downloaded a lot of the math sheets to uses as our daily work sheets for the last couple of weeks. We found pages for things like fractions and multiplication tables. I felt the variety was really good and gave us lots of things to choose from. I also printed off a set about volcano's. We have not hit the Volcano unit in our science curriculum yet but I know that these will be a great addition to our unit study and I am excited to see the girls start using them.

CHSH Download Club continues to add new content all the time. So you keep getting new content as you go through the year. As a subscriber you can even share your own units, or work sheets with other Download Club subscribers.


Click the Banner below to see more about the CHSH Download Club. Other Crew Reviewers may have tried out something different on the site that you might want to hear about.

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My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) Review

A new school year is about to begin. Yup its that time of year again where I begin to prepare for the new year. I love trying out record keeping programs to see what they can do for me and my family. I think I try a new one every year. This time we are trying My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping). You can find it here MySchoolYear.com. It has lots of great goodies so I hope you will stick around all the way to the end of the review.

I would like to point out that MySchoolYear.com is designed to work on tablets and smart phones as well as computers. It's an on the go kind of program. You can use it for as many students as you want, it has secure cloud storage and its affordable. I started out by getting logged in and getting my school set up. This included setting up the length of our school year, holidays and length of school day. This was a snap and only took me about 20 minutes. The hardest part was deciding what holidays we wanted and that took up most of my time.

Next I got my students set up. I have two students this year a 2nd grader and a 4th grader. I entered there names and info then I selected what classes they were going to take this year. Once your classes are assigned you can then begin putting in assignments.

With my new work schedule having all my assignments laid out for the year is a big deal for me. There are two ways to input assignments using the create-a-plan section. There is the rapid repeat and quick split.  Rapid repeat will create a pre-selected number of lessons. Quick split will divide up material into evenly spaced lessons. You would use this if you were assigning something like a book that had X amount of chapters. I mostly used the rapid repeat feature. Rapid repeat has a place to put in the starting lesson # and ending lesson #, a place for pre text and post text, type of grade ie test, homework etc. Amount of time spent on lesson and materials used. Once you fill out these areas you can then choose to share the assignments with another student. After that you get to take a look at the lessons and then assign them. I have two classes that the girls share assignments on. This made my lesson planning go so much faster. I completed an entire years worth of assignments for two classes in under 30 minutes. I am stoked that my lessons are planned and assigned before the first week of school. You also have the ability to copy classes/lessons/ reading logs/reschedule classes/lessons and track attendance.

The next feature that is super important to me is the Reading Log. This little gem is straight forward and super simple. You go to your students name in the upper right of your screen click Reading Log. When it opens you hit New Reading. This gives you a place to put in the book title, type of book, reading level, and completion date. My kids read a lot so this is a great tool to keep track of all the books they read during the school year.

Now for my most favorite part of the hole program. I love reports, they just make my life easier. MySchoolYear.com offers some wicked cool reports.This thing will make a report for awards given, course descriptions, events, extra curricular activities, instructional hours, lesson plans, materials-lesson plan, materials-reading log, reading log list, report cards, standardized test, and transcripts. See it does everything but the dishes.  I personally use the reading log list, the lesson plans, course descriptions, materials, and instructional hours reports. The lesson plan and the instructional hours are the most important for me. The instructional hours report breaks down the class/assignment hours by core and non core hours. It gives you a total for each and then gives you an over all total. My state requires so many hours for core and non-core classes and then an over all total number of hours. I love love that MySchoolYear.com went out of the way to add this break down in the reports for us. It saves me hours every year from having to add up my core and non core hours by hand. Reports download as a PDF file and print nicely. The reports are easy to read and should fit most state homeschool requirements.




Home Room is a place in MySchoolYear.com that you can go to get an over all look at your child's progress. It shows a graph for attendance day, attendance hours, events, awards, reading etc. It makes it easy to check on progress for the year with out having to generate an actual report.



There are also places for you to enter the extra curricular activities your kids do and a place to add events. I use the extra curricular activities section for things like summer camp classes that they take and volunteer work. I use the events area to track the field trips we will be taking this year.

Over all I am very please with MySchoolYear.com the price is affordable. I love that they have a price lock guarantee on the annual membership. If I order it this year I will get it at the same price every year guaranteed. You actually save quite a bit by doing the annual membership and and as a single mom that savings means some extra fun stuff for my kids.

Don't forget to click the banner below, every Crew Member liked something different about the program. So you are going to want to read them all. I would love for you to share this review with others. Don't forget to follow my blog so you can keep up with all the great Schoolhouse Review Crew reviews.

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