homeschool

It’s time for an AWESOME giveaway from our sponsors at Essential Skills Advantage!

If you haven’t ever heard of this company, now is a great time to learn more.
With the school year coming up you might be undecided about a few of your curriculum choices,
or you might wonder how to sneak in a little extra practice in a certain area.

Essential Skills is an online educational program used with over 300,000 students and growing.

For over a decade, Essential Skills has been providing schools in the USA and Canada with high-quality educational software for grades K-6. Our programs are designed to motivate students and improve their grades. Now, for the first time, we’re introducing these tools at home.

The Essential Skills Advantage is an affordable and convenient alternative to tutorial service providers. Our programs are based on leading educational research and best practices. Course offerings include: Math, Reading & Language, Science, Geography, and English Language Learning.

The Essential Skills programs are currently being used in over 20,000 schools throughout North America and continue to gain popularity with educators and kids alike. With our skills assessments we can individualize instruction for every student, regardless of learning style or skill level. No other program in the market combines this vast student experience with the stringent requirements and results demanded by professional educators. Over 300,000 students have benefited from Essential Skills.

Essential Skills Advantage set us up with an All Access Student Plan so we could try out their program!

I took plenty of screen shots so you can get an idea of how it works:

Getting Started:
When you first join Essential Skills Advantage your children will see all of their courses. Since we have the All Access Plan, we have a complete grade level of courses. If you sign your child up for an individual course you’d only see that one listed.

Taking the Pretest:
For each of your courses, children will need to take a pretest so that the program will assign them to the correct level of assignments.These pretests are pretty extensive, they take a while to go through and I would definitely recommend doing only one a day.My son could only get through about 20% of the test before he was loosing interest and spending less time answering correctly.
Thankfully, you can Save your progress and return at a later time.

Taking Lessons:
After you complete your pretest the computer automatically configures your lessons to best suit the areas your children need to work on. Children can choose which subject they want to learn. Each subject includes an overview so you can easily see what’s covered.

Here are some screenshots of a grammar lesson:

(clicking “rule” will take you to an explanation)

With each lesson your child takes, they will earn a star on the their chart.

Tracking your Children:
This is one aspect of the program that I’m really excited about. It awesome to be able to check in on a particular subject and see how well your child is doing in that area. I can really appreciate that these reports include the number of attempts and the amount of time spent on the problem. The reports provide you with very specific data on what subjects you might want to review with your child.

PROS:
While the pretests are long, I appreciate that they are individualized by subject. One of the reasons we homeschool is because my children are advanced in one area and struggling in another. This system makes sure they are at the level they should be in each subject.

I appreciate the way the program is offered to homeschooling families. You can choose individual courses or all access. You can even choose the All Access Family Plan for up to 3 children. Just having the choice is nice, because we homeschoolers love to customize our children’s learning experience.

I’m also excited that so many different subjects are covered. I can definitely see putting this program to the test on those Mommy’s sick days….you know, those days when the kids spend the day Homeschooling on Netflix? Well, now they can at least cover the core subjects without any excuse!

CONS:
Slower loading time. It might be my connection, I live on the outskirts of town, and my internet speed is only so-so. It’s not painstakingly slow, but when you have a child (with ADHD) every single second seems like eternity to them. Then again that’s free life skills training right? He hasn’t complained, he’s happy to have computer time, I only bring it up for transparencies sake.

Price The price of the All Access Plan would definitely be a prayerful purchase for our family. However, Essential Skills Advantage is offering you a special coupon code that will take 75% off the price of the course of your choice. You can even use that on the All Access Plan or even the All Access Family Plan. Which means you could get this core program for three children for less then $75. That’s an amazing deal, and if you only have one kiddo, the All Access Plan is still just $33. An Individual Course (like Math, or Science) would only be about $13 for the entire year. But you will need to use this exclusive coupon code: TCC75

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