Monday, July 19, 2010

Travelling The World . . . Homeschool Review

As my first review with the TOS Crew, we got to review the Schoolhouse Planner June Module ebook Travel the World from the TOS Store.

The timing was PERFECT! TOS sent us this ebook to review just as we finished up our main unit for the 09-10 school year and with just enough time to use this for 2 weeks before we head off on some travels of our own.

The Schoolhouse Planner modules are stand alone unit studies on a plethora of awesome topics. There is no need to actually own the Schoolhouse Planner (though I got it a couple years ago and it's an awesome product too!!!) to use the modules.

This particular module is a world geography study. I didn't see a stated age range, but this would be a great multi-grade study for the whole family!!! From coloring pages and some cute little puzzles that preschoolers could enjoy, to a high school expansion, there's something for everyone! There is SO MUCH in this e-book. Tons of hyperlinks to information, games, etc, which makes the 56 pages seem like so much more. Wonderful integration of Bible texts throughout the unit, reminding us that God created our wonderful world. All for only $7.95.

This unit starts out with easy to understand information about reading maps and globes, that easily captured and held the attention of my 7 yr olds. Next we learned some fun "new" verse to the song "He's God the Whole World In His Hands" that helped the girls quickly and effortlessly learn the continents, and then we moved on to learning about each continent individually.

There's even a "lapbook beginnings" section., which, for us (we're far from being die-hard lapbookers, but it's fun to do one occasionally), is just the perfect amount to do a quick lapbook without getting bogged down.

Depending on your needs, this would be great to use for a couple days, or do what we did and spend a few minutes per day for a couple weeks. We spent a day or 2 learning about maps, then took a day per continent, then another day or two to review, put together our lapbooks and wrap up the loose ends.

The girls weren't sure about it, going into it . . . we tend to choose our topics based on their interests and neither had a burning desire to learn world geography right now, but once we got into it they enjoyed it. My perfectionist-child (A2), started to get bogged down when I added the rather detailed coloring pages into the mix, it was "too much coloring" and she was stressing about it (did I mention she's a perfectionist and a worry-wart?) but when I told her she didn't HAVE to color them, I'd just given them to her (and A1) in case they WANTED to color them, all was fine again.

I'm keeping the links to the online games on my computer to pull out on rainy days or this winter, since the kids don't spend alot of time in front of the computer now, while it's summer and they have lots of outside time, but I love having these games "up my sleeve" for when we need to mix things up.

All in all, this was a great product!




Disclaimer: I received the above mentioned product in exchange for an honest review. No other compensation was received, my opinions are my own.

5 comments:

Dawn said...

Visiting from the Crew - GREAT review! (and good job getting the #1 spot!) :-) Have a wonderfully blessed day!

Catherine said...

I'm stopping by from the crew. What a nice review!

Cara (aka Temberton) said...

Another Crew member stopping by to say hello. Congrats on your first review. I'm new too! :o)

the Mcclanahan 7 said...

I'm from the crew too, nice review.

Rachel said...

I'm also from the crew. Nice review!