Homeschool Review: Growing Healthy Homes (and a COUPON!)

I was excited when I heard I'd get to review Nutrition 101 from Growing Healthy Homes.  I've been considering it as a science/nutrition option for our family for quite awhile but kept putting it off. 

Nutrition 101 is available as either a "real" book ($99.95), or an electronic version on CD-ROM ($79.95). A combo pack including both is also available for $129.95

Nutrition 101 is a Nutrition curriculum written by moms as they sought to learn how to feed their family nutritiously. It's designed to be used for both elementary and high school students, so families can use it multiple times as their children grow older. This 400+ page book (or e-book) is full of beautiful color pictures. The print book and the electronic version have identical content. The benefit of purchasing the combo of both lays in being able to read the print book, but then print individual recipes, charts, checklists, etc. from the CD-ROM. It is suggested that each lesson be use for one week. What we found worked best for us was to read the chapter, and go over the discussion questions the first day. While we were doing that I would also glance over the activities and decide which we would be doing and make note if there was anything I needed to gather or purchase for the chosen activity(ies). Some weeks, if the activity was short and/or I anticipated we would be short on time later in the week, we'd do an activity that first day as well. Also on the first day we'd read over the week's recipe together and make our grocery list if needed. Then, once we'd been to the grocery store (if required), we'd make the recipe another day.  So far most of the recipes have made nice lunches, which work well in our schedule since we try to be done with "school" by lunchtime. 

This is a very comprehensive nutrition and anatomy curriculum. You can see a sample .pdf of the book, including the table of contents, here. I'm finding that, for my girls (age 8), I needed to skip over a good amount of the text, it's just way too detailed and technical for their level of understanding. They concur, when I asked them what they thought of it, Sassy told me "too many big words"and MiniMe said "say that it's over our heads". I can see this working well in a multi-age family, including young elementary children, but for us, I'll be setting this aside for a couple years and then re-visiting it when they're older. The suggested activities are great, and do a good job of including a variety of ages and learning styles.  This really is an amazing product, but the text itself, I would classify as more of a high school level.

I'd absolutely recommend this product to anyone looking for an indepth study on nutrition, just be aware that it IS in-depth. I'd love to see this product include some type of shortened, simplified text for younger children. I'd recommend this as a junior high or high school level curriculum OR a great study for moms (or dads, or any adults) looking to learn a LOT about nutrition and how our bodies really use food. Given the size and complexity of this book, I would highly recommend spending the extra to buy the print book rather than just the electronic version. If you're planning to use this with multiple children in a homeschool setting, you will probably want to choose the combo pack so that you can print copies of recipes, charts and checklists for each child.

In addition to Nutrition 101, Growing Healthy Homes offers several other books to help in your family's journey toward better health. You can see them here.

Growing Healthy Homes has generously offered a coupon code for my readers. Use TOSCREW11 to receive 15% off your order.

I reviewed this product as part of the TOS Crew, visit the TOS Crew blog to see what others thought of this product.

Disclaimer: I received an electronic copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. No other compensation was received and all opinions are my own.