As part of being a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, we had the opportunity to review a CD-ROM from Digital Frog software that contains three virtual field trips.

Each field trip has a “Quick Tour” which is an audio-visual explantion of the different ways that you can navigate through the tour. The main concept is a virtual walk-through of the ecosystem where you walk between numbered posts in the area. Each post has a 360 degree visual of the area, and then may have a slide show or additional video content to support the information of the native plants, animals and information about the terrain.

There are also other ways to navigate if you’re looking for specific information about the ecosystem, rather than just a general walkthrough. You can search by keyword, or you can use a web-like “map” of the information available on the disc to visit screens by specific topic. Here’s a screenshot of the map for the desert trip:

Web-Map for the Desert

Each disc is filled with a large amount of scientific information. I’d estimate the best ages for the discs are in the 9-13 year old range. They were definitely above Tornado Boy’s head. They require extensive reading and aren’t quite as interactive as he needs to remain engaged. The discs are developed to be a real scientific tool and they are successful in that goal. They are truly packed with a wealth of information.

The three field trips are available individually for $60 each, or as a set of three trips on one disc (CD or DVD) for $125. You can also preview each field trip on the Digital Frog site. You can also download demo versions of any of the field trips on the Digital Frog site. Digital Frog also produces other contents like frog dissection discs that look fascinating. Tornado Boy saw one at a science museum and he really enjoyed that a lot. I never thought that I’d see a 5-year old virtually dissect a frog and ask to do it again.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 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.

We have had the privilege of reviewing a collection of 8 Schleich animal figurines through The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew during this past month. Tornado Dad was with us when we first opened the package and his response was “Wow, these are way too nice to be toys”. You can immediately see and feel the quality of the items. The figures are greatly detailed and have a significant “heft” when you pick them up. They are clearly a quality product. Each figurine was labeled 3+, but I was still a little nervous as Tornado Boy can be a bit rough on things. I’ve set them aside for now to be one of our “adult supervision” toys. We’ve used them for several lessons and overall he’s done a great job treating them with respect. They seem to be quite sturdy, but I might be a little concerned if he sat on one of the horses or other animals that have long legs. This has way more to do with my son’s tendency to be rough than it does the toys. They are very well made; far better than almost any other toy that I’ve come across.

You can click on the above graphic (the one with the curling page) to view an interactive version of the current Schleich catalog of figurines in a new window/tab. This is one impressive book! We got a paper copy included with our delivery and I think that Tornado Boy enjoyed it almost as much as the figures themselves. The catalog, like the toys, is a lesson waiting to happen. As we browsed through it, we noticed that a lot of the animals had both adult versions as well their young. That got us talking about how the babies of the animal world often have a specific name. We looked through the book and saw that many animal babies were called cubs or calves. We hadn’t talked much about this before, so I also played an old Sesame Street song for Tornado Boy called “What are kids called?” that is about animal babies. One of the other nice things about the catalog is that it gives a graphic representation of what continent each of the wild animals are from.

We received both an adult gnu and baby gnu calf. I never realized before I read the page on the Schleich website that a gnu is also known as a wildebeest. I always thought that they were two distinct animals. The website has a detailed description and some background information on each animal. They are well worth looking at if you want to purchase any of the animals for homeschool lessons. They also give information about the habitat, zoological name for the animal, whether or not it’s endangered and where in the world it is found. Clearly, a lot of work and thought goes into these products.

One of the funniest things that happened as a result of our Schleich toys is that Tornado Boy has a new favorite song. For some reason, the “Gnu Song” that was played many moons ago on The Muppet Show stuck with me, so I went in search of it on the Internet. See, this is why I can’t remember any new stuff, my brain is too clogged up with old song lyrics! Here for your pleasure, is the Gnu song. I’ll spare you Tornado Boy’s version – though it is very funny to hear him as he runs around the house giggling and singing it.

We also had some more “serious” lessons with the animals, including a bit of geography. I had printed out the sheets on each of our animals from the Schleich site and used them as a guide along with our world map. Tornado Boy helped me place each animal on the map based on where it was from. We did have two animals that are found worldwide – the donkey and the Dartmoor Pony. I told TB that donkeys can survive on little water and can sometimes live in the desert, so he put him in Australia. I checked, there are indeed donkeys there. The Pony didn’t fare so well. He ended up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean since we couldn’t find an exact home for him. We had fun using the map, identifying countries and continents and placing the animals on the map:

Tornado Boy also took a little creative freedom and set up a battle between the animals – it was the four farm animals (two horses, a donkey and a pig) vs. the four wild animals (okapi, and elephant calf and the two gnus) vs. three Zhu Zhu pet hamsters. Pandemonium pretty much ensued as soon as the hamsters got turned on, but I’m pretty sure that the wild animals could take ‘em in the real world.

The toy figures are sold both online and in retail shops. You can use the locator on the Schleich site to find either type of shop. The prices have a wide range – from a few dollars for some of the baby animals to over $100 for some of the larger play sets. The figurines appear to be in a limited edition format where they’re made for a number of years and then retired. New figurines are introduced several times per year. I found several collector sites that featured pictures of “retired” Schleich animals. I really liked the Schleich toys. They have an heirloom quality feel to them and they really lend themselves to fun, open-ended lessons. If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 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.

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.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

After our quick overnight in a very stormy D.C., we flew on to Michigan. One of my goals in life is to see all 50 states. Tornado Boy is getting dragged into this goal, somewhat by default. Thankfully he seems to love to travel as much as I do. This past weekend we flew to Michigan to attend my cousin’s wedding. While we were there, we took a side trip into Canada to have dinner – simply because we could! This trip brought the number of states that Tornado Boy has visited to 12 – they’re shown in green on this map. The trip to Canada brought his total countries visited to 3 – Bahamas, The United States and Canada.

We didn’t do any “formal” schooling while we were gone, but we definitely learned and saw a lot of different things. Tornado Boy got to learn about passports and the process involved in leaving and re-entering the country while we crossed the border into Canada. We were on a cruise ship for the Bahamas trip and it was long enough ago that he didn’t seem to remember much about it. Canada didn’t look much different than the U.S. – the first thing that we saw when we crossed the border was a McDonald’s! We selected a restaurant for dinner that looked kid-friendly. Not much was different there except that we saw that the bottles of ketchup and the like on the table were labeled in English and French rather than English and Spanish like we’re used to. We were in Ontario, but I explained to Tornado Boy that a large number of people in Canada, particularly in Quebec speak French.

I wanted Tornado Boy to be able to see what Canadian Money looked like, so I asked our server to show him a Canadian dollar bill. She told me that she couldn’t. I haven’t been to Canada in about 20 years and I didn’t realize that they had done away with the dollar bill in the interim. She did show him five and ten dollar bills, though. He was able to see that unlike U.S. money, Canada uses different colors on their bills. We also learned that they have $1 coins that they call “Loonies” and $2 coins that are called “Toonies”. Money has some interesting copyright issues, so rather than including pictures, you can see photos of Canadian coins here and Canadian bills here.

This was the first wedding that Tornado Boy has attended. Ironically, I was also five when I attended my first wedding, and it was the parents of the bride for this wedding. I have no good pictures of my son in his suit at all. I know that my Mom took some and I’m hoping that they’ll be decent. As much as I enjoyed going and seeing my family, it was stressful having a very high energy boy at an elegant wedding. Thankfully the Leapster helped occupy him for part of the time. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to dance, but it got too late and we had to leave before Tornado Boy turned into a pumpkin. Tornado Boy really enjoyed himself and he kept saying that he loved Lauren (my cousin, the bride) and that she was so pretty – which she was!

The day after the wedding we drove up to Ann Arbor with my parents and visited the Exhibit Museum of Natural History. This place was pretty impressive. They have a great collection of fossils including these huge Mastodons at the left. They also had many dinosaurs, including the Edmontosaurus above. The rest of the fossils were in glass cases depending on the classification of the plant or animal that had been fossilized. The upper levels of the museum had a huge collection of Michigan wildlife – stuffed and mounted fish, birds and animals. There was also a section on geology and anthropology. I could have spent a lot more time looking at the exhibits, but someone was getting restless after a couple of hours!

One of Tornado Boy’s favorite exhibits was this one on DNA. Try to bring that topic down to a five year olds level! I think he was fascinated mostly by the helix pattern.

We got a real surprise after we left the museum. We saw a herd of buffalo on the side of the highway! I had to look that one up when we got back because that just didn’t seem like a random occurrence. Evidently they are on the property of the Domino’s Pizza headquarters along with a petting zoo. You can take a hay ride out to see them – or you can nearly cause an accident driving down the road! LOL I was really excited. I don’t think I had ever seen a live buffalo before.

After the buffalo sighting we drove out to get some of the best gluten-free pizza that we’ve ever had at Buddy’s Pizza. I really wish that it wasn’t so darn far away! The crust is so light and fluffy – unlike any other gluten-free crust we’ve had. Tornado Boy was in pizza heaven. They say that the dough is made of a combination of potato, rice and tapioca flours. I’d love to know how they make it. It was so delicious!

Overall we had a fun trip to D.C., Canada and Michigan. I really wish that we could just snap our fingers and travel anywhere. I love to do it, but that return day of driving, buses, flying and then driving some more to get home is always so exhausting!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

After five days of diligent searching, we’re down to our final four in our license plate search – North Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada. Unfortunately, distance and population (or rather lack thereof) are working against us. Strangely enough, we’ve seen 3 different Alaska license plates during this time. Weird!

Some other factoids that we learned in our quest – 50% of the United States population lives in only 9 states. The bottom 25 states only account for 20% of the population. More people live in California than in the entire country of Canada.

We’ve seen four different Canadian plates – Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island. Prince Edward Island has about 1/5 of the population of the least populace U.S. State (Wyoming). We happened to catch a Seafood Tractor-Trailer that was from Prince Edward Island while we did a pass-through at a truck stop. I never would have thought that we’d see that license plate. I also learned that Canada has a new territory (as of 1999) called Nunavut.

That nugget reminds me of what a moving target education is. Since I was out of school we have had the demotion of Pluto as a planet, a “new” ocean named the “Southern Ocean“, and the break-up of the Soviet Union into so many different countries. I remember thinking that the our planet had a set “definition” when I was a student myself, but in truth, things continue to be in flux.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that we’re going to have to do some traveling to complete the game. The good thing is that we’ve both learned a lot and we can still easily use the game board to learn other things about the states. I’m hoping to be able to come up with other games that we can play with it in the car because Tornado Boy has really enjoyed this.

A special thanks to Philip Martin for his awesome free clip art. I modified one of his to highlight the four specific states that we’re missing.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I had in my (very loose) master plan for this year to start studying the individual states of our country. We’re currently participating in a postcard swap and we get one postcard a week. We’re working through the alphabet and we received the Maine postcard last week. I want to use them to start a scrapbook of sorts for our states study.

Fast forward to one seriously cool birthday gift and we’ve jump-started our state study this week. This Melissa and Doug License Plate Game is such a great learning tool AND you can’t drop any of the pieces, they stay attached to the board. The board has a map as the base, and then example license plates that rotate on top. When you see a car with the license plate, you flip that piece and that state and capital are listed on the reverse side. It is a brilliant car game. We were so excited to be able to add this to our travel kit.

We spent three days this week out looking for license plates around town. So far we’ve found 44 of 51 (the map includes Washington, DC) plates. I must admit, we have sort of stacked the deck by spending some of our time driving through hotel parking lots. Tornado Boy definitely likes to be successful and this helps keep him engaged in the game. The good news is that there is so much to learn playing this game, there is far more to it than meets the eye. Here are some of the things that we’ve talked about during the past couple of days:

• The names and pronounciation of the states and capital cities.
• That Washington DC is the capitol of our country, an independent city and not part of any state.
• Mapping/direction skills. I used north/south/east/west directions to help guide Tornado Boy with locating states on the map.
• How “counties” work as some states have them listed on their plates.
• What an “antique” is, since we saw an antique vehicle plate.
• That laws vary state by state – some states require two plates – front and rear, some only rear.
• About some professions since we saw special license plates for things like farm use and government vehicles.
• Inconsistencies in the English language – like the pronunciation of Kansas vs. Arkansas.
• What some of the named areas of the country are like the West Coast, East Coast, New England, etc.
• How a ferry boat works when we saw a license plate from Hawaii. I was shocked that we saw one!
• How different states have different populations, which makes us more likely to see some states plates even if the state is far away. We’re also less likely to see closer states with small populations.
• We talked about the fact that Hawaii and Alaska are not placed in their true geographic position to save room on the board.
• We saw a couple of Canadian plates and we talked about their provinces, and how they’re similar to our states.
• We talked about geographic boundaries like the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Great Lakes.
• We talked about the state motto that some states have on their plates. My favorite is Washington, D.C’s – “Taxation Without Representation.”
• We talked about the fact that Alaska is a relatively ‘new’ state as shown on their 50th anniversary plate shown above.

How many toys can you say help you learn about language arts, math (probability), history, geography and government that a young child can really enjoy? Probably not too many. We had such a great time this week. I’m going to have to figure out a way to really celebrate when we find the rest of our missing states.

That was our major schooling this week. We still have a lot going on here with camp, Tornado Dad’s birthday and general summer activities. Tornado Boy and I were able to see a youth theater production of Willy Wonka that was a ton of fun. In true little boy fashion he told me that his favorite part was when Grandpa Joe burped the fizzy lifting drink. Such a boy!

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

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We are adjusting to our new curriculum here this week. I must say that I am absolutely thrilled with both Five in a Row and Math-U-See. Tornado Boy responded very positively to both. We used Five in a Row to guide most of our week. We started the curriculum with the book “The Story About Ping”. I was unnecessarily concerned with the whole “read the same story five days in a row” thing. Tornado Boy was more than happy to read the book each day. He also requested it twice at bedtime.

The concept with Five In A Row is that you read the story each day for a week and then you look at it from a specific perspective for your lesson. You may do geography one day, math another, art, language arts or science, etc. Each day enhances the child’s understanding of the book and it also allows you to explore some of the topics in more depth if you choose. We explored China – her people and culture, maps, math (counting Ping’s family members as well as our own), and had a discussion about the illustrations in the book. It really is amazing how much you can learn when you start with one really good children’s book as a basis for your lessons.

We took a look at what life is like for children in China in the book “Children Like Me“. I really love this book. I bought it used at a homeschool curriculum fair and it has been such a great purchase. It features several different countries around the world. Each country has a two page spread with information about a child, and their family. It also gives some history of the country, some customs information plus things like their food and language.

We ended up our week by watching a video about pandas (click the video tab), an animal native to China, and taking a look at Chinese writing. Tornado Boy was pretty fascinated with the characters. There are so many when compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet, and they are so intricate. We found a cool site that allows you to translate English words into their Chinese character equivalents. Once you’ve translated the word, you can click the word details (magnifying glass icon) link to see more about it. If you then click the yellow pencil icon, you can see an animation of the characters being drawn. This was really neat! Here is Tornado Boy in simplified Chinese characters:

One of the best things about Five in a Row is that so many people use it. The curriculum gives you plenty of ideas to work with; but there are tons more lesson plans and ideas posted on the Internet, too. We could easily spend another week exploring ideas related to Ping. There is so much flexibility and it is so easy to create lessons that work for the level and ability of your child. I’m so excited to work with this program!

Want to see what some other Pre-K/K kids are up to this week? Visit Homeschool Creations for more ideas.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We are super excited to be participating in the 2nd Annual Great American Postcard Swap. Tornado Boy was jumping up and down at the thought of getting something in the mail each week. Aimee at Adventures and Pursuits still has some state openings in the 1st and 2nd sections; so head on over and check it out if you’d like to participate. One of my favorite things about this is that you can purchase postcards or create your own. I’ve seen some great deals out there to create your own, so I’m looking forward to using that option.

DK State by State Atlas

I’m going to use this exchange as a basis for studying one state a week for the next year. I went ahead and picked up the DK State-by-State Atlas yesterday to help us as well. I think this is going to be a really fun project. Now I just have to figure a creative way of storing/displaying all of the cards that we’re going to receive.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Expedition Australia Unit Study

I was offered the opportunity to review the “Expedition Australia” Download N Go unit study for The Old Schoolhouse.  Before I get to the actual review, I think it would be helpful for my readers to know exactly what a Download N Go unit is.

The Download N Go series is a production of The Old Schoolhouse, developed with a team headed by Amanda Bennett.  Each unit is $7.95, but you can also purchase unit groups at a discount if you like.  You can choose your own package of four units (mixed or for a specific month) for $30 (currently on sale for $27), or you can buy six months (19 units) for $114 (currently on sale for $96.90) or one year’s (38 units) for $190.  The multiple subscription options also include some bonus free items with your purchase.  These are beautifully produced pdf format booklets that you can use to do an in-depth topic study in your homeschool.  These booklets are intended to be used online.  I don’t recommend that you immediately print everything! Save yourself some ink and a few trees.   You can find a sample of the Australia unit that I’m reviewing here.  You’ll be able see the introduction, table of contents and the beginning of one of the units.

It really helps to have a basic understanding of lapbooking before you start using the unit. You’ll be creating a file booklet for all of the work that your child produces during the course of the week. All instructions and a lapbook introduction are included in the booklet.  It is recommended that you collect your child’s work each day and then compile the entire lapbook at the end of the week. Lapbooks are a great way to have a lasting example of your child’s work.  They’re great for sharing with grandparents or as part of a portfolio of your work if you use them in your homeschool.  Here’s a link to a “moon” lapbook that we made earlier in the year so that you can see what a completed lapbook might look like. The Australia unit has the paper lessons that you will adhere in the back of the book. Instructions for each item about how to put them together and how to mount them in the lapbook are included.

The Download N Go lapbook is a five day unit.  Each day has several topics to explore including things like the Geography of Australia, animals, language and history of the country.  Before you start, you might want to reserve some of the recommended books from your local library.  The document contains an extensive supplemental reading list.  I’d also recommend that you have a globe or perhaps the Google Earth application available. Seeing is understanding in our house!  Google Earth is really neat because you can see the topography and explore specific cities (like Perth) that are mentioned in the unit study in more depth.  Here’s a picture of what Perth looked like in the application – it was neat for us to see that it was a very metropolitan city directly on the water.

Google Earth view of Perth, Australia

As you work through each day – you will have lesson content – usually something like a video to view, or website content to read. After you complete the lesson, there are activities for each day. Some lessons have fill in the blank questions on the lesson content, others have writing prompts, small games or things to draw. Each lesson has worksheets built in that can be printed out and then later used in the lapbook construction. Some of the exercises contain questions that require the use of online tools to answer – such as computing measurements of how far you are from a specific place in Australia. Each lesson ends with additional resources, vocabulary words and optional activities. At the end of the book is a “Certificate of Exploration” that can be completed by the child and kept with the lapbook.

The intended audience for this unit is children in Kindergarten through 4th grade; but for the child to really be able to fully use the unit, they should be comfortable with writing and drawing.  We struggled a bit because several exercises ask the child to draw items (such as animals indigenous to Australia) and Tornado Boy (age 4 1/2) just doesn’t have that skill level yet.  There are plenty of optional exercises and things in the “Family Fun Ideas” section to keep the older children interested in the unit.  This could easily be used with children of different ages by amending the included exercises based on the children’s abilities.  The main document should be used directly on the computer since there are many links to things on the Internet or within the document.  It really doesn’t work the same way if you’re just reading from a printed copy.  It would help to have the parent go through and print out some of the exercises that will be used for the specific day’s content in advance.

We used most of the content as an oral lesson. Tornado Boy’s favorite part of the unit was learning more about the animals of Australia. He’d never heard of a wombat before; and he was excited to learn more about kangaroos, koala bears and the platypus. You can see more about these animals at the Australia Zoo.

These are some sample pages from Expedition Australia booklet.

My only real concern with the content of the unit is that I wonder if the links to the Internet resources will still be available in the future?  They add a lot to the printed content and they link to a lot of different resources that The Old Schoolhouse does not control.  It is likely that there may be some broken links in the near future as the web is always a moving target.  My child is slightly younger than the target audience and I’d like to know that we’d be able to fully use the unit in the future.

The major pro to this series is that it is a huge time saver.  You and your children will learn a lot about Australia. If you use Unit Studies in your homeschool, these are a steal at the $7.95 price point.  You could put this type of information together yourself, but it would take a ton of research and hours and hours of your time.  The graphics included are professional and engaging – this is a high quality product.  If the topics are things that you are going to cover, having this sort of prep done is a huge advantage.  While this is primarily a geography study, it does contain plenty of other elements – writing prompts, drawing, math (measurement and temperature), watching videos, reading, vocabulary, creativity and problem solving. It truly is a comprehensive solution for a school week.

The Old Schoolhouse has a list of current and upcoming units in the Download N Go series on their website.  This is useful to see if one of their units may fit in with your current schooling plans.  Since we’re very laid-back this year, and I’m mostly letting Tornado Boy pick what we study, I’m excited to see an upcoming unit on Benjamin Franklin.  He’s quite a hero in our household and it’s truly amazing to see how much he accomplished in his life as well as how influential he was in the birth of our nation.  I look forward to seeing what Download N Go will have about him.

We were given this unit to review.  All of these materials represent my own opinion and experience with the product.  We enjoyed it and look forward to being able to fully utilize it in the future. G’day, mate!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.