New Favorites

A few years ago one of my favorite homeschool magazines went digital. There was a lot of disappointment heard across the world-wide-web when the announcement was made. I probably heard more than most as I was a member of the The Old Schoolhouse Magazine Review Crew. Anyone who had a subscription to the magazine had it converted to their venture - Schoolhouse Teachers. 

I began playing around with it a bit. I liked what I saw but never delved in to it much. I kept coming back to it and wanted to use a bit more since I had a subscription for a couple years - I had a long magazine subscription.

Then around the holidays I discovered that a new "daily checklist" had been added. This seemed to help me wrap my head around all the fantastic content on there. In addition, they had a  pretty good holiday special so I bought another year for myself and my sister and really just started delving into it.

I'm really loving what is on there.

Aside from monthly lessons, there are also daily lessons. I have my oldest son (high school) taking these courses:

• Career Exploration  - he's doing the Teen Entrepreneurship module right now that was originally scheduled for last August-September
• Classics-Based Writing - he's using the Mark Antony oration as the basis for this module
• Economics - he's looking at this subject via chocolate - who wouldn't want to learn it that way!
• Media Socialization - this is a logic-based course that is teaching kids how the media influences choices

I also just added in daily spelling and he'll begin Spanish later on in the week.

I'm slowly adding in courses for my younger boys as well. My middle son will also be doing spelling and both will be doing Spanish as well.

And my second favorite....a new scheduling program I first heard about via Facebook called Scholaric.

 

I have been using it this week and I absolutely love it. I really can't gush enough. I have been making up my own daily checklists for my boys for the last two years. It's time consuming, but it's the only thing that really worked for us. That is, until now.

I can track the days or hours (I'm choosing days) under the goal setting. I can share lessons across all three boys so I only have to enter it once. I can repeat lessons and they automatically fill in - even sequentially by number or letter (check out the help link for instructions).

My absolute favorite part, however, is that I can "bump" a lesson to a later or earlier date. This is huge for me. It's allowing me to schedule out the boys more than a day. If something changes, I can bump the lesson and nothing gets messed up.

And I also need to mention that I can still use my daily checklists as I can print each day's lesson out in a checklist form.

I promise to stop gushing, but I truly love this program. You can try it free for 10 days and then it's only $1 per student per month. I'll be paying for this program gladly.




Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the above programs (I am no longer a member of the TOS Crew). I just love them and am using them so I wanted to share.