We were recently given a trial membership for Time4Learning to review as part of my participation in the TOS Homeschool Crew. We already have a Time4Learning membership, but for review purposes, I was asked to take a look at the Pre-K to Kindergarten curriculum. I was curious how my son would react to it since he was already using some of the higher level Time4Learning modules. I was pleasantly surprised when he really enjoyed it. The Pre-K1 section – that my son calls “Time4Learning Bags” due to the look of the interface – is divided into topics such as “Feelings”, “Colors”, “Shapes” and Tornado Boy’s personal favorite “Vehicles”.

The Pre-K2 section (shown above) continues with more in-depth treatment of several of the PK1 themes, plus adds more advanced topics such as time and measurement. Each topic typically contains a story or interactive content such as a song along with activities such as matching, painting and making choices. Tornado Boy particularly enjoys the topics that have a music component, like the “Wheels on the Bus” song that’s part of the PK1 Vehicles activity.

The games in the PK1 and PK2 have minimal interface and instruction. This is typically good for a pre-reader, but I found it frustrating when TB wanted help doing something and there were no tool tips for me to work with. In general, a preschooler only needs basic mouse skills in order to use the Pre-K levels of time for learning. The content is fun, educational and easy to deal with.

The Kindergarten curriculum is significantly different from the Pre-K modules. There is a lot more walking the child through the modules and introductory instruction in understanding and using the interface that was absent at the Pre-K levels. The process can be quite tedious, especially if the child already has good mouse skills. One of the things that frustrated me is the “this (ring) means that you have assignments” on the launch page (see above graphic). I wanted to be able to assign certain modules to my son and send him on his way, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to use the feature. It took extensive digging in the background Parent area of the site to see that the feature is not currently in use. I really wish that it would not display. It’s confusing to both parents and students.

The Kindergarten content is divided into Language Arts, Math and a few introductory Science lessons that are actually intended to be part of the 1st grade curriculum. One of my favorite things about Time4Learning is that while there are suggested sequences of lessons, the children are not required to follow that sequence. In several instances, we started with the “test” section of a topic to see if the individual lessons were worth spending our time on, or if we should move on. Also available for the Kindergarten units are extensive lesson plans and worksheets in pdf form. They are in the parent login area of the Time4Learning site under the “additional resources” header. I like having this type of resource for the content because I can review the content in advance and select items that match things that I am teaching in our homeschool. The worksheets typically use the characters that are in the animated T4L sequences online, so they’re familiar to the student. These enrichment materials are not available at the PK1 and PK2 levels.

One of the things that I really like about Time4Learning is the score reporting system. I typically sit with my son as he completes lessons, but I do like that I can easily review what he’s completed and see if there are areas that require review. To access the reporting, you’ll need to click on the “bookbag” labeled “My Portfolio” on the assignments/”launch” screen. From there, you can select reporting by category and time range. The report is displayed on-screen, but can also be saved to a pdf file for printing or later review. Each lesson, quiz and test is shown in detail. You can link to the individual lesson to see the content that the student was shown. The quizzes and tests actually display the student’s answers on the quiz as well. The student can review any content at any time. I love the level of detail that the reporting affords. I feel confident that I can easily identify areas that my son needs more work on.

A parent can opt to allow their child to play on the “Playground” after their lessons are done. There are time settings in the Parent Login area that allow the parent to set the minimum lesson duration and the maximum playground time, either for today or for all sessions going forward. The Playground is the part of the site that I have the biggest beef with. Many of the activities are not at all educational. There is also access to commercial sites like PBS Kids that I want to control my child’s access to. I also don’t want him to waste a half hour playing “Asteriods”. It seems like this section needs to some work.

Some suggestions to improve Time4Learning:

• Offer “tool tips” (pop-up text) for lesson content in the parent areas and the reporting. There is an icon guide, but I can’t easily view it and the reports at the same time.
• Allow parents to constrain “Playground” activities by type, or perhaps select only specific games to access.
• I think that there are a lot of resources on the Time4Learning parent site that aren’t that easy to find. They really do add a lot of value, so it might help to do more to “feature” them.
• The science section doesn’t have the same feel and presentation as the other sections. The tests are harder to take and require more specific mouse skills as the answers require selecting a small radio button rather just touching the object beside it to automatically select the radio button. This can be problematic for small children. I also found several “resources” linked in the science area that were dead links to Internet content external to the Time4Learning site.

Overall, my son loves the site. He was just as happy playing around with the Pre-K content as he is learning in the 1st and 2nd grade areas. In my opinion, the content is typically well-developed (especially with the extra resources available at the Kindergarten level and beyond) and it seems to be a lot of fun for my child. I really appreciate the flexibility that Time4Learning offers. I like that you have access to 3 years of lessons at any time. I like that we can do the lessons in the sequence that we choose and repeat lessons as desired. I wouldn’t use Time4Learning as my entire curriculum, but it’s worthwhile as an enhancement, especially if I pick and choose the lessons in advance to coordinate with what we’re already working on. It also has helped me to “catch” a few things that I hadn’t thought to teach my son yet, so that was valuable as well.

Time4Learning has varying costs depending on the number of people in your family who want to use the program and typically offers introductory offers as well as lesson demos on their site. The program is entirely online, with no additional software needed. You can access your account from any computer with Internet access. If you need to adjust the grade level (PK-8th) for your child, it is easy to contact T4L and have them make the adjustment for you, keeping three grade levels of content available at all times. There is a great Hints & Helps page here that gives great insight into using the site.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog. Different crew members reviewed Time4Learning affiliated products such as Time4Writing and Spelling City, so you can check to see if any are of interest to you as well.

Thanks for reading!

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

As a background for my review, I’d like to share where Tornado Boy was with his writing when we began this program. He had been working on handwriting activities for about a year. He knew how to write all his letters and numbers, but his writing was not fluent. He required time and typically a model in order to create some of the letters and many of the numbers. When I approached the review, I wasn’t trying to teach him how to form the letters, but rather how to become more fluent in his writing.

I was given a copy of the PDF by Hand – Print software to review as part of the TOS Homeschool Crew. PDF by Hand is a software component that is an extension of the Peterson Directed Handwriting program. I was also given electronic, writeable/printable copies of the three Peterson print e-workbooks. The print workbooks that I recieved do have instructions on how to form the letters if that is where you’re starting. The print program is geared towards 4-5 year olds. The three books in the print program are available for review before purchase on the Peterson website. You can look at the books, but not print from them until you purchase them. If you go to the linked page, search for the PDF By Hand E-Workbooks For Print Writing section on the page and you’ll find links to all three workbook files. In order to fully understand what the PDF by Hand software adds to the program, it is helpful to have some basics on the Peterson program.

The Peterson Program:
Peterson Directed Handwriting is different from many other handwriting programs that I’ve seen in that it is really based in the mechanics of building good fluency in writing. The Peterson website has a lot of documentation for the extensive research that they’ve done into the handwriting process. One of the most interesting things for me was a video that explained why tracing letters with a pencil is such a bad way to start the writing process. In lieu of that, Peterson recommends a four-step process for learning how to write – 1)Explain and model the letters, 2)the student practices “air tracing” the letters, 3)the student moves to “finger tracing” on paper and 4)writing letters on paper with pencils. This methodology teaches the “muscle memory” for the child in order for them to be able to internalize the steps that it takes in order to make the letters.

PDF by Hand is, at its heart, a software that allows a person to be able to write on a PDF file with a Wacom tablet and pen. Tornado Boy and I used the software in conjuction with the Wacom Pen & Touch tablet. I think that for the Peterson program, having both pen and touch possibilities is important, as it allows the child to finger trace directly on the tablet and to see their letters on the computer screen. Most pen tablets only support pen input, a finger on the tablet wouldn’t record a stroke.

The first thing that I needed to do in order for Tornado Boy to use the Peterson program was to teach him to use the Wacom tablet. It wasn’t something that he had used before. I typically use it for photo manipulation and I don’t always have it hooked up to my computer. I used the built-in tutorials to teach him how to navigate using gestures and how to use the pen on the tablet. This process took about two hours of our time for him to understand how to use it and to use it well enough that we could use the PDF by Hand to start working on handwriting.

One of the things that Peterson offers that we didn’t get but I think would be helpful to a new writer is the CD of Animated Letter Cards for $17.95. This disc shows the child how to form all of the letters in three formats: print, slant print (pre-cursive) and cursive. This is a great visual way to show the child how to air trace the letters. You can find examples of the animated letters here. Peterson’s also offers print cards for $12.95 to show the steps to form each letter. I’ve found that having examples posted on the wall above Tornado Boy’s desk has been very helpful for him. It allows him to check the letter if he’s unsure of how to form it.

The PDF by Hand software:

This is a screenshot of the PDF by Hand interface. On the left is a column of available PDF documents. You can use your mouse or pen/tablet to select the item that you want to use. The right side is the “writing” space. You can control how the writing looks by setting the thickness on your pen tablet definitions. As the child selects a practice sheet, they can opt to save a finished copy on the computer or print the sheet before moving on to the next practice sheet. One of the nice things about this is that it allows you to see the child’s progress over time without having to save a bunch of printed sheets. The three Print e-books contain practice lessons as well as assessment tools so you can see your child’s progress in fluency over time as well.

A side-benefit of the PDF by Hand software is that allows you to pull in any PDF file in order to write on it with the tablet. We found this to be fabulous thing to have. This allows you to be able to write on any document numerous times. You can also save or print a copy of the document with the child’s writing on it if you want. This makes electronic documents infinitely re-usable. If you have access to Adobe Acrobat (not just the reader software), this really gives you a lot of flexibility in what you can add to the program for writing on the computer. You use the PDF by Hand software to pull in any pdf file and it will appear on the left window so that you can see a writable version of it’s pages on the right side. This worked great for me as a I had a couple of print workbooks that came with a disc version. We could then play with the pages without having to waste paper printing out copies. I really liked this!

Wrap-up:
We enjoyed learning with the Peterson method, but it definitely had its pluses and minuses. Here are some cons and pros for you if you’re thinking about the program:

Cons:

• The ramp-up time was substantial for me. I had to do extensive reading on the Peterson Website to really understand what the program was about and how it worked. I didn’t feel that the software and e-books on their own were enough for me to jump in and teach the program.
• While there is extensive research and support materials on the website, I found them a bit hard to find.
• The tablet can be hard to use as it lacks the visual feedback that writing with a standard implement provides. While this is intended in the program – the child is supposed to rely on what his muscles “know” about forming the letter, rather than relying on watching the pencil marks – it is a difficult adjustment. Think about how difficult it is to write a legible signature on a credit card pad in a store. Most of us do not rely on this type of feedback when we write.
• The PDF by Hand software is NOT compatible with Mac computers.

Pros:

• I do believe that there is a lot of validity to the research on the negatives on tracing. Tornado Boy did not learn to write well with the tracing program at his preschool. He learned once we looked how to structurally form letters.
• Rand Peterson, the owner of the company was exceptionally helpful and offers extensive support on his website.
• There are numerous product combinations available from this company. Once you understand how the program works, you can pick and choose what you want, or order the materials as a bundled package.
• I used a supplemental finger-tracing program on my Droid cell phone. This allowed Tornado Boy to practice finger-tracing letters and number anywhere we went. This methodology definitely did help build his writing fluency as it made the finger-tracing task more of a game. I really do think that this is a better approach to learning to write than pure tracing with a pencil is.

The PDF by Hand software can be purchased as a stand-alone item or in conjunction with the print or cursive workbooks that Peterson Handwriting sells. The cost for the software alone is $29.95. Bundled with the print software that I received, the cost is $75.00. That price includes the three print e-workbooks that cover material from just starting to learning printing through the slant-printing that is a pre-cursor to work in cursive. If your child is ready for cursive, there are bundles available for that as well. If you own the software, the workbooks are available separately as well.

We enjoyed learning with this program and will continue to use PDF by Hand as a part of our handwriting program. Tornado Boy has definitely made gains in fluency in the past month and is becoming more confident in writing his letters without having a model to look at.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog. Different crew members reviewed different parts of the program, so you can check it out if you’re interested in something like their cursive program.

Thanks for reading!

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

I’m really finding it hard to believe that summer is nearly over and that we’ll be starting our first official homeschool year in less than two weeks. I feel like we never really got to have a summer this year. We didn’t go to the beach, we didn’t travel with Tornado Dad to any of his conferences, we didn’t visit any amusement parks. In early July, I was really ill and it pretty much took me out of commission for a little over a week. Up until the last week or so, our weather was ridiculously hot with stifling humidity. Nearly every day it was 90+ degrees, and we had 11 days where it was over 100. Tornado Boy and I both have incredibly fair skin, so being outdoors was really not much of an option except for early in the morning for most of the summer.

Tornado Dad works at a small office. About three weeks ago, the other top level employee suffered a massive stroke in the office. He is recovering, but his absence has taken a toll at work, so we haven’t seen all that much of Tornado Dad of late. One major change that this has caused is that I haven’t been doing the bedtime routine with Tornado Boy. This is the little bit of time that they get to share each day, so instead of alternating, my husband does the read/rock/lights out routine most nights.

It feels very strange to say that I haven’t been reading to my son much at all. We are working on independent reading during the day, and Tornado Dad is doing the reading at night. I haven’t been participating in Natalie’s reading meme because I really can’t do much of a review on books that I haven’t read or heard. Tornado Boy has been enjoying a lot of book and CD combos from the library on his own each day. He’s also just starting to read some chapter books on his own. He’s had the capability for quite a while, but he has been somewhat resistant to it. We know that he’s having some visual tracking issues, but the crux of the problem really seemed to lie more his being unwilling to tackle a longer book with fewer pictures. He did read Arthur and the Crunch Cereal Contest on his own and we’ve picked up Nate the Great for him to read next.

One good thing about the change in nightly duties is that Tornado Dad tends to be a bit more creative than I am at times and tonight he had TB acting out the story while he read Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, so the change there was quite positive.

I also had some technology struggles this summer. In the past month I’ve gotten a new computer and a new phone. Both came with some pretty substantial learning curves. I love them both, but transferring and adjusting has taken some serious time. I now have 12 years worth of photographs on my computer. I’m thinking that perhaps it’s time to do some archiving! I also upgraded some software in the transition, so that’s taken some time to get used to as well. The phone is incredible. LOVE it. Tornado Boy is having fun with it, too. The educational applications for the Droid phones seem to be pretty limited, but we’ve found a few fun ones and are looking forward to finding more in the future.

Tornado Boy still seemed to enjoy himself this summer. He spent a lot of weeks attending partial day camp sessions at several different places. This was the first time that we had been able to do that (his previous preschool was year round), so I wanted him to be able to sample several themes. The sports camp that he did the first week and the science camp the last seemed to be the favorites. We did some play dates and hung out a lot at the park. We attended a couple of weddings. We learned a lot together. I can look back through the blog and see that we did things, but I feel somewhat guilty that we didn’t spend mass amounts of time being lazy and swimming. I’m really looking forward to a temperate, productive and fun fall!

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We had another wedding to attend this past weekend. TB is becoming a pro!

Check out more Wordless Wednesday at Five Minutes for Mom.

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We are lucky enough to have a play bank center at our local Children’s Museum. It is a great place for cooperative role playing for groups of children. I love the oversize coins on the wall. Tornado Boy loves to play here. He loves being either a banker or a customer.

Tornado Boy waiting for his first customer.

Tornado Boy presents his savings passbook.

TB doles out money from the vault.

Trading bills with another banker.

It’s pretty easy to setup a play bank at home. We have a great play cash register from Learning Resources. It comes with bills, coins and a credit card that are great to use for playing bank and other money games. We are using the bills and coins to explore adding money and the concept of whether TB can “afford” to purchase something that he wants. It’s a good idea to alternate who gets to be the banker and who gets to be the customer so that the child can see the game from both perspectives.

Additional Resources:

• The Coin Counting Book is a good visual resource for adding coins.
• For more advanced money lessons, the U.S Mint has a nice selection of lesson plans that you can use to help teach your children more about money, too.
• The Mint.org has information on how banks work and more advanced topics like compounding interest.
• Neat Interactive look at the new $100 bill coming out early next year.

Check out what other kids are playing at Childhood 101 and to see what other kids are working on for math, check out Math Links at Joyful Learner.

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

This week, I’ve done a lot of this:
Planning, planning, planning. It is exhausting. This week I got the finalized plans for Tornado Boy’s enrichment classes for the fall (think parent co-op). I got to visit the class site and meet with some of the parents and teachers. I am really, really excited for the fall. TB will be doing a Lego class, a once a week, multi-age kindergarten class and also studying with Five In A Row at home and with the co-op. I’ve got my volunteer duties arranged with the group as well.

We also went to our first homeschool gym class – LOVED it. It was well run and Tornado Boy had a great time. He seemed to be engaged and involved. There were a lot of kids, but they did a good job breaking into groups and keeping them occupied. Today we went to sign-ups for a local homeschool group. They do so many trips, tours, exchanges and other activities. I was completely amazed at what they had to offer. I finally feel like we’re becoming part of the homeschool community here and I’m really excited for the upcoming year.

I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate my plans for the year with the classes and group activities. One thing that’s become abundantly clear this week is that we are going to be spending a lot of time in the car – probably 3-4 hours per week. I need to figure out how to leverage that time and use it for car schooling time. It actually works well for us because Tornado Boy is strapped in, so he can’t go anywhere. I can play educational videos or audio books. He can also do some lap work, but he’s still prone to dropping things, but he’s getting better about that. I just need to make sure that I can set him up with activities that are independent so that I don’t get distracted. I am trying to figure out how to leverage our existing curriculum into unit studies that we can incorporate car components into. It will be interesting to see how it all goes.

Camp/Science:

Tornado Boy puddle jumping on his way into camp.

Tornado Boy was at science camp this week while I was hard at work with all my planning and errand running. He really enjoyed it and his absolute favorite experiment that they did was the mentos in Diet Coke explosion. He drew this picture of the experiment:
Evidently the top thought bubble says “camp” and the left one is him exclaiming “Ooohhh!”. The exploding bottle has “DC” for Diet coke. He was so cute and animated when he explained the experiment to us. Tornado Dad says that we can re-create the experiment at home this weekend if Tornado Boy is good, but we’ll see. Listening and following directions has been a huge issue this week. It’s been wearing me out.

Geography:
At home, Tornado Boy continued to be interested in learning more about the United States. We used this neat PowerPoint presentation that I found on ABC Teach. If you’re a member, you can find it here. The interactive map allows you to click on the question mark to reveal the name of the state and capital city. TB enjoyed this activity and was able to name about a quarter of the states and capitals based on knowing the outline and location of the state. For the ones that he didn’t know, I would give him clues – either the name of the capital city, something that the state was known for (i.e. potatoes for Idaho) or something like the state starts with ‘O’ and has 4 letters for Ohio and then he would take a guess. I like that this document could easily be used independently by the child, if desired. Good stuff!

Language Arts:
We did some work on identifying parts of speech this week. We talked about nouns, verbs and adjectives. We used the demo for Destination Reading, Course II to reinforce some of the concepts. We also used a Venn Diagram for the first time to talk about adjectives. We read a story and then Tornado Boy used the Venn Diagram to place adjectives that described two different characters in the story. I found a nice resource for some graphic organizers. They’re in pdf format and you can type directly on to them if you choose. On a technical note, if you use Firefox with the “Download Them All” add-on, you can download them all at once – it’s a huge time saver.

Physical:
Our fun activity of the week was bowling. Trying to get a picture of Tornado Boy bowling was close to impossible. Talk about always in motion! I think that this was the first time that he’s gone “big ball” bowling. We did candlepin last year when we went to New England, but we haven’t been since. They had gutter guards up, so he did okay when he wasn’t totally lobbing the ball. We had fun, so we hope to go again soon.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

An oldie, but one of my favorites!

Check out more Wordless Wednesday at Five Minutes for Mom.

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Overheard this week:

Tornado Boy was talking to his Cordouroy stuffed animal this weekend when I heard him say:

“Cordouroy, you’re really lucky because you’re the main character in your story and that means that you’re really, really important!”.

Darn… I guess he was listening, after all!

Find out what other kids are saying, or link up and post your own story at Tiny Talk Tuesday at Not Before 7.

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We went to a great drop-in science class this past week. I posted this picture earlier of Tornado Boy holding a balloon with a wooden dowel passed through it. Here’s what you need to pull that off:

• A small balloon – one with some ‘give’ to it. Don’t blow it all the way up.
• A wooden dowel stick with a pointed end.
• A jar of vaseline.

First you blow up the balloon and tie it off. Make sure that it is not full stretched, it will need some slack. Dip your finger in the vaseline and carefully coat the dowel stick all over with it. Pass the stick from the middle of the top side of the balloon (the dark spot where the rubber is thickest) to the other end of the balloon right next to where it is tied off. It helps to work with your child to slowly twist the stick in order for it to get through the balloon. It’s like magic! The balloon will slowly deflate once the stick is through, so take your pictures right away!

Station 2 had earthworms to observe. The instructor had schematic drawings of earthworms to help the kids identify their different segments. She also had some photographs of an earthworm dissection that she had done with an older class of students so that the kids could see what the different organs were inside of an earthworm, and to compare them to their own bodies. The kids could scoop the earthworms out of their dirt container and observe how they moved on a plate.

The third station that we visited had a microscope and lots of different things to look at. I wish that we had a microscope at home, but I really don’t want to make the investment yet. Tornado Boy can be pretty rough on things still. He did have a great time looking at different things under it, though. They had salt crystals, crayons, pencils, playing cards, rocks, Lego blocks, feathers and other objects to look at. Tornado Boy enjoyed this a lot. Since I don’t plan on buying a microscope any time soon, I looked up virtual microscopes and I found a couple of possibilities: Kbears Interactive Microscope and for older kids, Discovery Education has a Virtual Electron Microscope.

Station four was a sense of smell experiment. There were six small film containers (remember those?). Each was capped and contained something for the kids to sniff. There were blindfolds to use if the kids would let you (no way!) so that they couldn’t peek and were truly only using their sense of smell. Tornado Boy had a really hard time with this one. The items that I can remember were coffee, bread, and laundry detergent. Each container sat on a piece of paper that had the answer for the item written on the back of it. For non-readers, you could put a picture of the item on the card.

The final station that we visited went way over Tornado Boy’s head, but he enjoyed watching the reactions. The experiment started with three containers of purple cabbage juice. To each container, the student could mix in a different item and watch the juice change color. They had lemon juice, dish liquid, sugar, Dr. Pepper and vinegar. The juice reacts and changes color depending on if what is added to it is an acid or a base. There are more instructions if you want to perform this experiment here.

This class was really fun and had a great mix of experiments that can be done with children of various ages. We were really glad that we went!

For more fun science lessons and activities, check out Ticia’s Science Sunday post at Adventures in Mommydom!

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Are you looking for a great way to get your home AND homeschool ready for the upcoming year? Do you have tons of great ideas rolling around in your head with no “special place” to write them down? If so, take a look at the 2010 Schoolhouse Planner. When I think of a planner, I think of a calendar. This is a calendar and so much more. You get calendars, recipes, grade sheets, lesson ideas, bible study guides, and many more charts and forms. There are four main sections in the planner:

• Monthly Features – things like tips, study ideas, resource links and recipes for each month of the year. I was really thrilled to see that the planner includes 12 gluten-free recipes. I love to be able to try new things with Tornado Boy!
• Calendars – annual, 2-page monthly and blank versions.
• Homeschool Forms for things like curriculum tracking, attendance, planning and grading.
• Household Forms for things like addresses, budgets, meal planning, and home inventory.

You can purchase an electronic copy of the planner from The Old Schoolhouse Store for $39.00. The planner is over 600 pages long, so if you’re on dial-up Internet access, you may want to consider purchasing the CD version for $44. Thankfully all of those pages are linked in the table of contents, so you can jump directly to the page that you want.

My very favorite thing about the planner is that you can type directly onto the planner pages using the free Adobe Reader software. I’m an electronic girl, so not having to resort to putting pen to paper is a big deal for me. My handwriting is pretty much like chicken scratch, so a neatly typed page really helps me. Of course, if you want to, you can print all or part of the blank planner if you choose.

One of the areas that I’m most excited to use is the one for menu planning. This is an area that I am totally committed to improving in our home for this year and the planner has several great forms to help me out with that goal:

Still not convinced? Be sure to download a free peek here. You’ll see about 1/10th of what is included in the planner, including the full table of contents so that you can get an idea of the broad range of content in the planner.

For today (August 15th) only, you can receive a free add-on of last years supplement modules with your purchase. Each of the 12 modules is filled with great unit study information that you can use in your homeschool.

Happy Planning!

I am a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, an independent contractor with The Old Schoolhouse magazine. I received a copy of the 2010 Schoolhouse Planner and have used the Planner in order to write this advertisement. This is not a review, but an entry in an ad-writing contest.

©2010 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.