TOS Crew

Homeschool Programming, Inc: KidCoder Web Series {Crew Review}

July 26, 2013 by Dana

If you are looking for a great way to teach your student Web design and programming then look no further than Homeschool Programming, Inc. Homeschool Programming offers quality products to provide a thorough education in programming with it’s KidCoder and TeenCoder product lines. These programs are created to be easy for the student and teacher to use and understanding, making web creation easy to do.

For this review, we were given the KidCoder Web Series program to use at home. This digital download came with everything needed for my student to learn web programming in the comfort of our home. Our download included the program needed to complete this study along with the student workbook and videos that explained what we needed to do to learn how the web works and even create projects of our own.

The KidCoder Series is created with the 4th-8th grade student and parent in mind. These courses are not overwhelming, yet they pack a lot of knowledge into their wonderful program. This series is a great introduction for students who may be interested in further web creation later on.

Students who use this program, or any program from Homeschool Programming, Inc. should have a basic knowledge of how a computer works. They should be able to create save files on their own and also be sufficient in using a keyboard. It would be appropriate that they have a basic knowledge of using a web browser and searching online as well.

The awesome thing about the KidCoder series is that once you purchase this curriculum you can use it for life. There is no online membership that runs out or limited license with the program, with the exception of schools in which a separate license would need to be purchased for each student. The basic workbook purchased will work for any student at any time within a homeschooling family and a student can take as long as needed to complete the program. It can be used with multiple students within a family as the same time as well.

Since this course is set up to work with your students pace, it can be completed in various ways. What may take one student an entire semester to complete will only take another half a semester to work through, while yet other students may take a year to finish the basic first semester portion. How you chose to work through the program is up to you and your student’s personal needs.

By design, the course is created to be completed in one semester with 13 chapters in the KidCoder Beginning Web Design series textbook. Each chapter contains 3-4 lessons, Work With Me’s, a lesson review and an activity to complete. The final chapter requires the student to complete a final project using what has been taught in each lesson of the program. Weekly dedication to this program should be at least 3-4 hours or longer depending on the student’s abilities.

This series does include instructional videos for the instructor and student to view. These videos are designed to be a tool but not to teach the entire course to the student. They explain the techniques used within the chapters to help the instructor and student better understand the program as they work through it.

Due to medical issues in our family over the course of this review, we did not get as far with it as I would have liked to with the program but what we have completed we have enjoyed. We were only able to work through part of the Beginning Web Design series. I’ve used this with both my daughter who is 10 and my son who is 12, working together with them through the chapters and lessons. Each have come away with a new opinion on web programming and how their computers work. They look forward to completing this program, as do I along with them.

Homeschool Programming, Inc.’s KidCoder Web Series is available for purchase. The KidCoder: Web Year Pack combines both the Beginning Web Design and Advanced Web Design programs for a $120 for courses only or $145 for both courses and videos. KidCoder: Beginning Web Design and KidCoder: Advanced Web Design each cost $70 separately per course or $85 for the course with video instruction.

For more reviews on Homeschool Programming, Inc., please visit the Schoolhouse Review Blog by clicking the link below:

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Christi The Coupon Coach: Couponing Made Simple {A Molly Crew Review}

July 25, 2013 by Dana

I was really excited to see this vendor pop up for the Molly Review Crew this year. I had heard great things of Christi the Coupon Coach through the years and was thrilled to find Couponing Made Simple available for review. Christi has a reputation for making couponing easy for Mom’s like me and I was looking forward to seeing if that was true for myself.

Couponing Made Simple teaches you how to be successful with couponing. Christi has made learning to coupon easy for readers to learn. In her book, she takes you through the process of couponing from beginning to end, showing you tips and tricks to make couponing work. This is not extreme couponing but instead using your smarts and small steps available to you to save money.

From the very beginning, Christi shows you that couponing can be done. The first chapter of this 132 page book shares success stories of both Christi and many others. These stories are written to help you understand couponing, as well as to inspire you to want to give it a try. It works!

In Chapter 2, you learn a new way to shop. Christi teaches you how to look for sales as well as where and how to begin to use your coupons. We aren’t talking about getting items for free, but getting them for the lowest cost you can manage, saving you up to 80% at times.

In Chapter 3, Christi teaches us where we can find coupons, the types available and how to make each of those different types work the best for us. It’s called the Language of Coupons and learning it will help you to best use your coupons to save you the most money.

Chapter 4 teaches us how to organize those coupons we’ve been learning so much about. A coupon organizer, a file box, an accordion file, or a shoe box with dividers can hold whatever coupons you may have so long as they can be sorted and managed best for you. Christi gives you suggestions and teaches you how to best make these work for you.

Chapter 5 brings it all together, taking you through the step-by-step process of couponing from gathering your coupons to using them in store. Christi walks you through all you need to know. Then in chapter 6, she gives additional tips and tricks to help you further your couponing experience, earning you even more savings.

Chapter 7 shows us the couponing ethics, teaching good couponing manners and how to not become couponing Godzilla. This chapter is a reminder of what couponing is not and what it should be.

Chapter 8 brings us to networking and how to use blogs, friends, family, and even the workers at the stores themselves to find better deals. Those we are close to tend to let us in on the best kept secrets which can be used to our advantage. Plus if you get a deal, why not pass the information on to someone who can use it too.

Chapter 9 is called the Bonus Section. In it, Christi discuses other places to receive great bargains such as yard sales and thrift stores. These places should not be discounted as places to find what you need at a good price. Sometimes the very thing you are looking for is the one thing someone else no longer needs and you could be helping out someone in need in the process of buying from them.

The last chapter is Chapter 10. Christi discuses the greatest savings in this chapter: The savings of the Lord through Salvation. Without it, couponing would be meaningless as would so many other things. We should all find blessing in this sweet deal.

Following the chapters through this book is a section to make notes. There are also pages to list important websites to keep them in one place for returning to later. And the final pages are for Rock Bottom Prices so you can keep track of the best deals and where to save.

All of these chapters work together to teach you how to best save money, which is something most of us desperately need to do these days. I found this book to be a lot of help. I already use so many of her suggestions from hearing about them even before reading her book.

One of my personal favorite ways to save is by Thrifting. I enjoy finding gently used items that I can give a new home. I recently bought Laycie an adorable glass cow to place in my kitchen that she can look at daily for .25 cent at a local thrift store. I purchased Jackson’s “new-to-us” walker for $8 from another friend and his Bumbo seat for another $8 from a local lady when I asked for one online. Many of our clothes are found second-hand at thrift stores and toys in the past have been too.

I also stock up at the grocery store when shopping. Here in town we only have a few stores to choose from but when I’m there and I see a good sale, I take advantage of it. The other week canned veggies were on sale and I stocked up with a 10 for $10 sale. I often buy our pasta on sale for Buy One, Get One Free.

I must admit, even after reading Christi’s book and attempting to utilize her couponing ideals, I am still terrible at using them. I often forget I even have coupons until I’ve already checked out. I do always use my store discount cards which helps tremendously. I have one for each store we shop in. Now if Walmart would only come out with one!!

Christi the Couponing Coach’s Couponing Made Simple is a must read book for any Mom or Dad. This book will show you how and where you can save money and it really does work if you put it to use, unlike me! Couponing Made Simple is available for $18.00 in paperback with free shipping for Amazon Prime members. It’s also available for $4.99 on Amazon Kindle.

To read more reviews of Couponing Made Simple from the Molly Crew, please click the link below!

Picaboo Yearbooks {Crew Review}

July 24, 2013 by Dana

Are you looking for something great to commemorate the end of your school year? Would you like to be able to highlight each student, field trips, great memories from your year all in one place? Then Picaboo Yearbooks may be just what you are looking for.

Picaboo Yearbooks asked the Schoolhouse Review crew to create our own personal yearbooks for our homeschools using their wonderful softcover 20 page yearbook. These 8.5 x 11 yearbooks can be designed in any way you chose. You can add in photos throughout and captions or text to go along with it.

Picaboo Yearbooks can be created for an entire school, a co-op, a sports or other team, or just an individual homeschool family. The options are endless. Color schemes and pre-designed photo pages make the creation process even easier but creating your own idea is just as simple.

For this review, I chose not to create a “yearbook” but instead chose to create a family-book for our family’s life together, since we are a blended family. I thought the uniqueness of our family called for a unique album to share about each member of our special family. With seven children, it did not take long to fill up the pages.

Each page of our family-book yearbook is unique to our family, from the cover to the last page. I chose a photo of the Angel Oak as our cover because it is a place we have recently visited together. The branches of the tree wrap beautifully around our cover making it memorable and drawing attention to our book even while on the shelf.

Our book begins with an introduction to our home. We call the property we live on The Hill and it has been in our family for decades, passed through generations of ancestors. Featured in this section are our large pond and important elements of the logging history of our family. These elements are extremely special to us.

Featured on the next two pages is an introduction to our family. Here I discussed how we are blended and introduced some of our favorite things. These pages are filled with photos of our family together.

The next eleven pages feature each member of our family from Mom and Dad to the kids, Grandma and even our pets. Every family member got their own page, uniquely created with elements of things that interest and are unique to them. For instance, my step-daughter, Debi’s page has a background of turtles swimming since turtles are her favorite animal. Her page also features a sand turtle that she created on a trip to the park a little over a year ago.

To finish out the book, there are six more pages sharing images and important events from within our family. I designed each page from scratch except for using pre-designed photo inserts provided by the Picaboo company in the design process. Every single page is unique and different within the book.

Through the Picaboo Yearbook designer I was able to add in colored backgrounds to represent my children’s favorite colors or choose a background in prints like cow print for my youngest daughter. I was also easily able to add in my own personal images for each child on each of their pages. I simply uploaded the photos and put them into place.

It was also very easy to move around the photo inserts and reposition or size photo boxes to fit my needs. Some pre-designed elements needed to be tweaked to better fit my images. By selecting the corners and dragging or pulling, I was able to make them work best for me.

Text was very easy to insert into each page too. The pre-designed pages came pre-equipped with areas to include any writing that I may have needed. I found myself deleted many pre-included text boxes and adding in others where I felt the text fit my pages best. There were tons of fonts to choose from. I was able to change font colors too but I chose to keep my lettering all the same color to bring together the books design.

I did edit all of my text boxes to have a see-through background in a complementary color for the page it was included on. This was done simply by choosing a color using a digital dropper to select a color I liked from the page. I then adjusted the opacity of the box background to make it blend into the page while making the writing stand out.

It took me two days to fully create my family-book yearbook. One day was spent choosing my pages topics, adding backgrounds and selecting pre-designed photo pages. The second day I spent adding in loads of photos, tweaking pages to fit each family member and adding in text.

It literally took me around 20 hours over a two day period from beginning to end to create this original yearbook for our family. It was well worth the work as contained within the twenty pages of this book are memories that will stick with our family for life, unique and special only to us.

The cover of our family-book is soft. It’s made of a sturdy cardboard and I chose glossy print for the image. The inside pages are made to be sturdy too. The texture is hard to rip but the images are clear.

Many hands have touched our family-book yearbook since it arrived leaving goo and prints on it already. These have easily been wiped clean using a mildly damp cloth without causing damage in the process. Needless to say our family book is well-loved.

You can order a Picaboo Yearbook to fit your family or even your co-op through picabooyearbooks.com! The softcover 20 page 8.5 x 11 yearbook that I received costs $8.95 plus shipping. You can add extra pages for a small fee. It is possible to include as many images as you’d like too. My book contains close to 100 personal images of our family.

To learn more or order your own Picaboo Yearbook, visit picabooyearbooks.com!

Dig-It Games: Mayan Mysteries {Crew Review}

July 15, 2013 by Dana

Dig-It Games brings to life the world of the Maya through it’s interactive game, Mayan Mysteries.

Mayan Mysteries allows children to become archaeologists in this fun game. Children learn about history through play.

Dig-It Games was founded by Suzi Wilczynski, professional archaeologist and former school teacher. She created Mayan Mysteries and Roman Town to bring to users a fun, interactive way to teach ancient civilizations with archaeology. Through 10 years of experience with digs in Greece and Israel, Ms. Wilczynski created a way to bring her experiences to students everywhere.

In Mayan Mysteries, players learn about the history of the Maya civilization and culture. Created for children in grades 5th through 9th, ages 11 and up, this game walks students through a world that would otherwise be forgotten if not for historical digs and documents. Throughout the game, users discover artifacts, decode ancient glyphs, explore the Maya calendar, visit ancient cities and much much more.

The game itself works as a puzzle with pieces leading to fit into each other in order to open up each level of play. Included activities test reading comprehension, geographical skills, spatial reasoning, math, science and history skills. Scientific and analytical thinking skills are practiced throughout gameplay too.

Users begin playing Mayan Mysteries by joining up with Team Q to find the mysterious thief, Landrone. This leads the user on a chase that spans over the great ancient Maya cities through over 300 expansive challenges and 12 hours of gameplay. On the journey, the user learns key facts, geographical data, finds countless artifacts, solves glyphs and more.

Users gain achievements for every quest completed, such as the Golden Trowel for collecting 8 artifacts or the Genius Decoder for solving all spirit companion Glyph riddles without using hints. These achievements are rewards for completion of the mysteries and lessons throughout the game.

There are tons of artifacts for the player to find throughout the game too. Through gameplay and digs, the player will find things like a ball player figurine, a ceramic flute, a flint knife, obsidian arrowheads, stingray spines and many more. The player will learn about each of these items through play as well, leading to an unforgettable online history lesson.

Landrone clues are also provided throughout the expedition to find Landrone. These clues are kept in Charlie’s journal and can be accessed at any time during gameplay.

Team Q is who you are helping to find Landrone and solve the Mayan Mysteries. Team Q consists of Dr. Alex Quinn, the extraordinary archaeologist, and leader of the expeditions. The twins, Fiona Quinn, future archaeologist extraordinaire and Charlie Quinn, future detective are also a viable part of Team Q. Along with your help they are sure to solve the mystery and find Landrone.

This fun, fun archaeology game is sure to bring hours of interactive lessons to life for users. I know we have enjoyed playing and learning more about each artifact and place visited via the game. My children, ages 10 and 12 have worked together to play through this game and enjoyed learning more.

You can purchase Mayan Mysteries from Dig-It games online for $21.99 for a one year single-user license. This gives you access to the full game for a year to play. Mayan Mysteries is also available as an App in the Apple Store or iTunes for $9.99.

Motherboard Books: Let’s Make A Webpage {Crew Review}

June 10, 2013 by Dana

Do you know how to make a webpage? Could you teach your children how? Is this something you need assistance in learning or teaching your children how to do? Then look no further than Let’s Make A Webpage from Motherboard Books!

Let’s Make A Webpage teaches your child, or you, everything you need to know about building your own webpage from scratch. Using CoffeeCup HTML Editor you will learn the basics of webpage building and so much more. Let’s Make A Webpage makes webpage making easy!

The first step in using this e-book is to create an interview to use in preparation for your webpage. The student needs to choose several questions of their own creation to ask someone they wish to know more about. This could be Mom, Dad, the neighbor, their sister, cousin, aunt, the librarian, etc. Whoever the student wishes to interview.

My son chose to interview Dad. These were his questions:

1. What is your job?

2. How long have you been doing it?

3. What exactly do you do?

4. Did you learn anything during school that helped to prepare you for your job?

5. Is this the career you expected to have?

My daughter chose to interview her Grandma. These were the questions she asked:

1. What year were you born?

2. What was life like when you were a child?

3. What were you like at my age?

4. What was schooling like for you at my age?

5. How are things different from your childhood until now?

6. How are you and I different at this same age?

After they both conducted their interviews, we then wrote out a short report explaining all of the things they learned from their interviews. This gathered information was used in the process of creating their webpages. We also saved a photo of each person interviewed to use within our webpage.

The next step was downloading CoffeeCup HTML Editor to use for creating our webpages. After downloading, we input our information, page title, etc. Then we clicked save so that we could work with this file throughout the process.

Then came the fun stuff: learning how to use text boxes, HTML codes, color and all the other fine details that work together to make a webpage a webpage. These details are the simple, yet complicated things that everyone should know when building a webpage. Let’s Make A Webpage made them easy to learn and easy to use!

Through these 10 easy but thorough lessons in the Let’s Make A Webpage e-book, the student learns all the important details in creating their own personal webpage. Once a student completes this program, they should have enough knowledge to be able to build any basic webpage they would like.

In the later chapters of Let’s Make A Webpage, students also learn to use animations, add in photos, how to safely use the internet and much more. These details combine to create a webpage that is catchy and attractive to the eye. And best of all it’s all easier than many people may realize.

Let’s Make A Webpage from Motherboard Books was written to be used with children ages 8 and up. It’s available as an e-book download for $19.95. It is designed to be used with the free download version of CoffeeCup HTML Editor. This program also encourages experimenting and creativity in working with computers. Don’t forget to check out Motherboard Books other programs too!

Math Mammoth {Crew Review}

June 7, 2013 by Dana

Math Mammoth was created by Maria Miller to help homeschooling Momma’s who were completely lost at teaching math be able to provide a better learning experience for their students. Being an ex-math teacher, Maria was able to create an exceptional math program that is easy to use and understand by both teacher and student. Math Mammoth provides a complete math education that makes math easy.

Last year, we used Math Mammoth’s Light Blue series for second grade. You can read our review for that curriculum here: https://www.luvnlambertlife.com/2011/11/tos-review-math-mammoth.html. This year, I chose to review Math Mammoth’s Light Blue series for first grade.

I chose this curriculum for two reasons: to review math fact basics with my daughter who struggles with them and to begin my youngest daughter’s education in addition and subtraction. The first grade level of the Light Blue series worked great for both of their needs. And since it’s easy to use, my older daughter needed little help from me to work through it. She is able to read on her own and follow through with her work. She was also able to help my younger daughter out along the way, when I was unable to.

I chose the Light Blue series because it’s a complete curriculum. This allowed my daughter to completely relearn the concepts she struggles with instead of just working on reviewing facts that she didn’t completely understand the first time. We basically started all over with Math, only this time the lessons were much easier for her to comprehend. And though we’ve only been using the program a short time, she is definitely catching on fast.

Math Mammoth’s Light Blue Series for Grade 1 covers addition and subtraction concepts and strategies, whole number and place value relationships to 100, measurement of length, geometric basics, time and money. Even though we are using this curriculum for a math review purpose, we have started from the beginning and worked through. The program is not boring or overwhelming to my students, and as I’ve mentioned more than once, it’s extremely easy to use and comprehend.

Math Mammoth Light Blue series is available online for $34 for the full set of Grade 1 as a download or on CD for $39 plus shipping. It is also purchasable as individual sectional downloads through the website.