Schoolhouseteachers.com--A review

I am happy and excited to share with you my first review for The Schoolhouse review crew! It is SchoolhouseTeachers.com, and it offers courses for all ages from preschool up through high school and even beyond that to families and Moms and Dads. Some of the courses include art, math, science, electives, bible, history and geography, and more! We received the Yearly Membership for our review.

We had fun exploring just a few of the courses for our review period. There was so much we wanted to do, but we had to start with just a few. I plan to do more courses throughout the school year even after the review is over. There are online classes, printable classes, and a lot of videos to go with lessons too. There is a lot of hands on learning there!

I told miss April to pick from the high school offerings what she wanted to do, and of course she surprised me. The one that really surprised me was Architecture from the electives course offerings. She even read the first lesson on her own. That inspired me to do the elementary level "hands-on architecture" course with the boys who are elementary age.

A view of the first architecture lesson that I printed out.

We did the first elementary architecture lesson with all the boys, which April wanted to join us for because it was building with marshmallows and toothpicks. Her first lesson (in the high school level) didn't have that fun hands on project, but it did include some neat videos.

The boys of course loved this. We have done buildings with marshmallows countless times, but I love that this time I had a lesson and a point to go with it.  Even Alex had fun making some interesting shapes and structures.

There are 2 children each working on a different science course from SchoolhouseTeachers. April was needing a change in science so she is doing the Physics course for high school. Her first lesson included 3 experiments. She had fun sharing them with everybody, especially the diaper one which she didn't want anything to do with (so I had to do it for her).

Here she is making an experiment from the 2nd lesson work. I love all the experiments with this course.

Aric is doing the Everyday Astronomy course. He wanted to learn about the solar system and space, so I thought this would be perfect as there are a lot of lessons on each planet. The first lessons are about the sun. Here he is doing some copywork in his notebook.

There are a lot of lessons for each planet. I am thinking we might have to skip some lessons just to get to all the planets. Lots of information in each lesson, so it's hard to choose which to skip. The sun has 17 days of lessons by itself!

There are many resources available at SchoolhouseTeachers as well. One resource that I am excited about is the planners. I downloaded all of them, but I only printed up a portion of the high school planner for now as my printer is on the fritz.

I wanted the weekly planner pages, from the high school planner, for April. I have been looking for exactly this kind of weekly planning set up for a long time. I was thinking I might eventually make one, but was happy to find it here!

For now I have put it on a clipboard, but may eventually get it spiral bound.

Now something for me!


Like I said earlier there are even some courses for Mom (or Dad). I picked one that I'm really excited about from the "Just for Parents or the whole family" category. I am doing the Whole Foods Cooking with Sue Gregg course. I am so glad I clicked on to find this course for me. I have wanted to learn more about whole food cooking for so long. This has inspired me to get started.

I read through the first lesson, but couldn't do the cooking portion yet because I didn't have the ingredients on hand. But, I did make this soup (that was a gift in a jar, not a recipe from the course) (Recipe: Lentils and pasta soup mix for ground beef), and included things my kids hadn't even tried yet like lentils. I just don't cook with lentils, so I was excited to start introducing some new ingredients to them as I prepare for this whole foods experience.

In the first lesson she talks about a rating system to use with kids as you are introducing the new foods and ingredients because a lot of this is going to be all new to them and maybe a little hard. I tried this rating system out with the kids on this soup. It was awesome, and I'm excited to use it as I go through the whole foods cooking experience. Also, she suggested "bridging between the familiar to the unfamiliar" by changing only a few ingredients at a time to make recipes with more whole foods over time so that it's not too much of a shock putting a whole new dish in front of them, so I added extra noodles to this soup so that they would be attracted to that aspect and be more willing to try it. It worked like a charm!

Review wrap-up:
Overall I was very impressed with SchoolhouseTeachers.com. It fits very well with my eclectic style of homeschooling, and there is a lot to pick and choose from there. One thing I'd like to see that would make it even better is an app for a device. I really don't want to print every lesson if possible. Right now we use the computer in the dining room, but it's not convenient. It does work though. I would just like to be able to bring it up on my ipad to have at the table in my hands for school.That's just a convenience thing, but it sure would be nice!

SchoolhouseTeachers is offering a discount for my readers! You can get a 50% discount for the 1 Year Membership. Just click on over to SchoolhouseTeachers.com and enter the coupon code CREWFOLLOWER when you check out. This code is valid through 1/31/2016