Passkeys Foundation recently sent a variety of books to members of the Homeschool Crew to review. We received a book from the Good News Express collection for preschoolers {ages 3-5} called The Birthday Gift.

The Good News Express collection has four book that focus on a different character trait: sharing, cheerfulness, friendship, and thankfulness. Each book comes with a CD that has special songs that relate to that book and a full audio version of the book, complete with different character voices.

The Birthday Gift tells the story of Bramwell, a little bear who is on his way home for his birthday party when he meets a new little bear in town who doesn’t have any shoes. Bramwell’s party isn’t as fun as he thought it would be because he can’t get the new bear out of his mind. He discovers that giving is much more fun than receiving.

The CD that is included with The Birthday Gift includes an introduction/closing song as well as two songs that are unique to the book itself. The audio version of the book has great voices ‘acting’ out the story along with fun sound effects. The songs are catchy and Zachary and Kaleb were trying to sing along the first time we listened to the CD. Zachary was especially partial to the birthday song, since his birthday is fast approaching!

Books in the Good News Express series are available individually for $7.50 each or as a set for $20. Passkeys also offers several other book series for various age groups, so be sure to visit their site and browse through their online catalog.

Educational Diagnostic Prescriptive Services {EDUDPS} is a company passionate about providing educational materials for families that are “fluff-free”.

‘Simply put, by “fluff-free” we mean educational products that contain no extraneous material, those that get right to the relevant issues concerned – products that focus on actual educational material only.’

Homeschool Crew members received various products from EDUDPS to review. I personally received Roots and Fruits and Write With the Best Volume 1.

Roots and Fruits is a vocabulary curriculum for grades K through 12 that has over 1,700 vocabulary words and almost 700 roots and prefixes. Children learn vocabulary words that are derived from Greek and Latin roots as young as age 5, helping them develop an extensive vocabulary so that they can flourish in all subject areas. The program is one that can be used with all of your children from elementary to high school, and it distinguishes which roots are appropriate for different ages.

The curriculum provides a simple weekly schedule along with games and activities to play that will help children learn and recall the meanings of words. The vocabulary list is alphabetized to help find things quickly and easily. Overall, it takes around 15 minutes a day to work on the vocabulary words, which isn’t a huge chunk of our school day. McKenna works on one to two words a week and Laurianna focuses on 3 or more. You can view a sample of Roots and Fruits here. Prices vary from $14.95 {ebook} to $19.95 {print version}.

Write with the Best Volume 1 is a writing program for children grades 3 – 12. It uses world literature to teach children descriptive and creative writing. Volume 1 focuses on descriptive writing skills, literature analysis and grammar.Grammar is not an additional subject, but rather included within the writing curriculum. Writing topics and literature include:

1. Describing an Object {20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ~ Verne}
2. Describing a Place {A Christmas Carol ~ Dickens}
3. Describing a Character {Robinson Crusoe ~ Defoe}
4. Writing a Dialogue {The Wind in the Willows ~ Grahame}
5. Writing a Short Story {The Gift of the Maji ~ O. Henry}
6. Writing a Fable {Aesop’s fables}
7. Writing a Friendly Letter {Treasure Island ~ Stevenson}
8. Writing Rhyming Poetry {Wordsworth}
9. Writing Ballad/Narrative Poem {Longfellow}

Each of the nine units provides activities for 10 lessons, requiring very little teacher prep-work {other than reading through the unit first and understanding what will be covered}. Each unit was designed to take 2 weeks to complete, meaning Volume 1 would be finished in 18 weeks {half of a typical school year}, allowing time to work through the Volume 2 for the remainder of the year. The curriculum also includes a grading guide, answer key and other suggestions for different learning styles.

We worked on unit one, which focuses on describing an object. We read a passage from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and talked about why this passage represented good literature. Over the course of our unit, we also talked about parts of speech {nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs}, identified different parts of speech in the passage, learned about writing paragraphs, and wrote our own descriptive paragraph. If you’d like to see how the units are put together, you can view Unit 1 and Unit 2 from Write with the Best Volume 1 here. Prices vary from $19.95 {ebook} to $24.95 {print/binder version}.

Pros

• The curriculum is affordable. Roots and Fruits can be used for your kids entire schooling from K-12. Several different options are available to purchase, from eBooks to print copies.

• Curriculum can be used with children of multiple ages. Both of the books that I reviewed would be easy to adapt and use with multiple children by just adding/adjusting activities based on their abilities.

• Customer service is great. When I had questions or problems initially with my eBook downloads, Diagnostic Prescriptive Service answered quickly and did all that they could to help.

Cons

• Software for running the eBook software is rather tricky in my opinion. They use File Secure Pro which has extensive security features. So secure, I was never able to access the eBooks even after hours of trying. EDUDPS was wonderful and sent me the physical versions of the book instead to review. Before you purchase an eBook, I would highly recommend reading the ‘Special Notes for EBooks’ page on their site.

• You are only allowed two printings of the eBook. The computer program will track the printings. In my opinion, the physical print books are really worth paying a little more, especially in light of the time it took me to try to download File Secure Pro. For both books I reviewed, the printed version is only $5 more {plus s/h}.

• ‘No fluff’ is really no-fluff. No frills. No graphics. Just the basics. While that is not necessarily a bad thing, I am a highly visual person, so it made it a little more difficult for me personally to get excited about it.

Out of both of the programs, Roots and Fruits is one that we will keep around to use in the coming years, since it does offer such a wide variety of vocabulary. EDUDPS offers several other books, including diagnostic screenings and guides for children with special needs. Be sure to check out the EDUDPS website to read more about the company and their products.

The foods that we eat affect our body in so many different ways ~ for good and for bad. Over the last few years our family has been making changes bit by bit in an attempt to eat healthier, change bad eating patterns and habits and gain a better understanding of nutrition.

Growing Healthy Homes recently sent our family Nutrition 101: Choose Life! to review for the Homeschool Crew. At first I was a little overwhelmed with the product because the e-book is 448 pages. Over the last few weeks as I’ve looked over the curriculum and started working through it, I am rather impressed with the depth and flexibility it offers.

About the Curriculum

Nutrition 101: Choose Life! is a complete curriculum for all ages covering a wide range of subjects: science, nutrition, health and human anatomy and ‘understanding the real relationship food has on our bodies.’

The curriculum is broken up into six units {with 4 chapters each} that cover:

1. The Brain and Nervous System
2. The Digestive System
3. The Respiratory, Olfactory, Auditory and Visual Systems
4. The Muscular and Skeletal Systems
5. The Cardiovascular and Immune Systems
6. The Endocrine System and Emotions

The chapters were designed to be covered in a week’s time {24 weeks total} but are flexible and can be extended if needed. Units contain discussion questions, activities, recipes, additional resources, an activity guide, and appendix for related charts, tables, and articles that elaborate on the text. The curriculum is Biblically-based and includes over 80 recipes for you to try with your family along with hands-on projects and experiments.

My Thoughts

I mentioned that we’ve been steadily changing things in our own house in the area of nutrition. Our kids have become involved and are understanding more and more the impact of how our food choices affect so much more than our immediate hunger. As I’ve been trying to learn more, this curriculum came along and is a wonderful opportunity for us to learn together as a family.

The units work well as a lapbooking or notebooking study {this is how we’re using it}. We’re working at a much slower pace right now ~ just a bit at a time. Having our kids involved in the process encourages them to be more proactive in their choices and when they help with recipes they are more likely to try and enjoy the results!

We have the e-book and personally, I would prefer the CD/book combo, mainly because I am a hands-on kind of girl. We are very happy with the e-book we have and have been printing off much! Why do I suggest both? Both have the same info, but the CD allows you to reprint copies of charts, recipes and other pages without having to photocopy ~ much more convenient if you have multiple children.

Find Out More

If you would like a peek at Nutrition 101, Growing Healthy Homes has a sample of the curriculum on their site available for download/review. They also have a video summary on their main site.

If you are interested in purchasing Nutrition 101: Choose Life!, it is available in several different formats:

• CD-rom for $79.95
• Print book version for $99.95
• Print and CD combo for $129.95

Rocket Phonics is a reading program created for children ages 4-10 that is full of fun games, jokes and multisensory activities to engage children in the reading process. It is designed for children with all different learning styles {auditory, visual and kinesthetic} with the goal of creating readers who love to read. Children using the program go from “non-reader to fifth grade reading in two years or less.”

The English language can be tricky to learn. Even though there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, combinations of letters create all new sounds and blends that honestly don’t make sense to little kids. Trying to explain how it all works can be even more difficult. Rocket Phonics focuses on 36 symbols made from letter combinations to help children learn to read with more comprehension and more quickly.

The program provides ‘helpers’ for your child to that show how to pronounce various words. As your child progresses, the helps are removed. By the end of the program, your child is even learning how Greek and Latin roots affect how words are pronounced. This is an example of how non-phonetic words are worked through in the program {blue letters keep their sounds and the other blends/combinations are shown below the letters}.

How We’re Using Rocket Phonics

We were sent the full phonics program to review as a part of the Homeschool Crew and over the last month we’ve been using it with Zachary ~ and both he and I are really enjoying it! Zachary started the program knowing all of his initial alphabet letter sounds and we are focusing on some of the extra sounds {ay, ch, sh, th, ea, ou and oa}. The lessons are taking us between 15-20 minutes to complete and we are working four days of the week.

Depending on the day, we might play a bingo sound game to identify sounds/blends, use the ‘peeker’ to help Zachary focus on one word at a time, or play ‘Go Fish’ with sounds.