Friday, March 19, 2010

2nd Review--When I Grow Up I Want to be a Firefighter


TOS Magazine's Schoolhouse Store sent us another e-book. This one is from the "Wanna Be Series" to review. They sent us When I Grow Up I Want to be a Firefighter this e-book is only $8.95.


One thing I liked about this e-book is that there is a lot of information and I don't have to go get a bunch of other books to read or search the Internet for reading material. I just had the boys sit and read a lot of the material off of the computer.


This e-book is designed as a multi-age unit study for children ages 4-10, adaptable for the whole family. My boys definitely enjoyed learning about what it's like to be a firefighter. It included information on what firefighters do, the history of fire fighting, equipment that is used by firefighters, etc. It also has coloring pages, handwriting pages (both printing & cursive), writing prompts, suggestions for math, directions for making a Styrofoam robotic arm, discover how God addresses fire with specific bible verses too.


This unit study I found was interesting, but I'd have to say that this might be more of a 3rd to 6th grade unit study. My kids are older so they did just fine with it. I think it would have been a little challenging for the younger ones.


I do recommend this book, especially if your kids are interested in firefighters.
There are other e-books in the series that look interesting and my boys are wanting to check them out also. I will probably be getting them an e-book called "When I grow up I want to be a Pilot."


The only other thing that I can see them doing a little differently is putting some video links and maybe organizing a daily plan.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

My 1st book for reviewing-- Expedition Australia


Please bear with me.. I am new to blogging and it may take me a bit to get this all figured out.

I am currently trying out to be a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew. I am really excited to be a part of this. Be sure to check out their website. I am to write 2 reviews for them. They have sent me an E-book to review called Expedition Australia. You can check this out by clicking the link. My boys and I have really enjoyed this. The series of books is called Download ‘N’ Go. The book costs $7.95, and has about 103 pages of information. I feel this was very reasonably priced for all the information we received.

It says that this material is for ages K-4th. My boys are older and still got a lot out of this. They learned about the geographic location of Australia, animals, words used in Australia. They also worked in math by having them tell how far it is from here to certain parts of Australia and what the time and temperature would be here and there.

I liked all the links that were included in the e-book that were for videos and extra learning links to go along with it. There was a list of books and coloring pages. They did a lot of the research for us. I liked that! It saves us time and are able to do other things that we like to incorporate into our day.

There is several activities that you can do along with the book such as color, cut, and glue to make a lap book. This was our first attempt at making a lap book. They really liked doing it. It is a way to go back and review what was covered in the last 7 days. You can also make a notebook of the information that they printed off and filled in information on. We took off a week of our original home school program and just did this. It was a nice break for them.

My boys really took pride in their lap books and took time making all the notes in the mini-books that came with it. They are already asking if we can do some more of the books in the series. They have one in the series called Davy Crockett that my boys thinks looks pretty interesting. Also, one that is called Pizza Party. That aroused their attention or should I say appetite :) They also can't wait to make a boomarang and a salt dough map of Australia. Those were mentioned in the extra activities that they could do. I just can't get over all the research that went into this and all we got for the price.

Again, we were really impressed with the Download "N" Go Series.