Review: Review: Let's Go Geography

When it comes to homeschooling, geography is something I've blogged a lot about. My kids love studying geography. It's a very popular activity in our family as both of my boys participated in a geography bee last year, and Isaac has taught himself the location and flag of every country in the world. (He's currently working on capitals.) For this reason, you can understand why I was so excited to review this homeschool geography curriculum from Let's Go Geography. 

The concept behind this program is very simple. You purchase one of three plans. You can buy a program for the semester ($14.99), the year ($21.99) or make two payments of $12.99 each.

There are 30 countries every year set up to run on a three-year curriculum plan. Our world is so interconnected. And yet despite the fact that this is the case, most kids do not know where places are on a map. This needs to change! And Let's Go Geography is one way to get that done. They pride themselves on not just touching the surface of geography which many programs for kids do. Instead, this digs deep into various countries.

Whichever financial option fits your family best, the results are the same. You get one or two semesters with full access to all the lessons. You get a reminder email each week telling you which country you will be exploring for that lesson/week. Let's Go Geography takes your K-4th grader on a tour of that country with hands-on-activities, crafts, coloring, studying, etc.

Here is a sample of the three year breakdown in the curriculum:

Here is a video that discusses what you can find on this very reasonably priced program:

There is coloring, cutting, gluing, music, watching videos, writing and much more. I used this program with all four of my children (ages 4, 6, 8 and 9). My four-year-old did some of the coloring and "pretended" to be studying with her big siblings. However, my older three totally followed and really enjoyed this program. Usually someone complains when we do a program at our house. But this one did not receive any  complaints. And in fact, they were often asking if we could do it on that particular day.

Here are some personal photos of our experience with this product:

Each of my kids created their own "My Travel Journal" for use as we moved from country to country.

The kids loved coloring these American maps. (Although we realized we have a shortage of good reds in our home.)

Abigail loved all the coloring assignments. She always took them seriously and did a fantastic job on this part of the unit.

Basically, each unit required us to open up an email, click on the link, and zip around that particular PDF document. You can pick and choose what you would like to do or not like to do. There are videos you can watch and things you can color and maps to print out and online links to navigate to. You can do some or all of what is listed for a particular country.

If you were doing every single thing in a unit, my guess is that there would be about 2-4 hours worth of work in that unit. However, you could zip through a country in about an hour if you wanted to do it more on a surface level.

The only negative thing I can note was simply a difficulty in clicking and then returning to the original document. Sometimes after you opened a document and then went back, you'd end up back at the beginning of your document. However, I learned that if I could simply open the link in a new window, this problem was eliminated.

You can find more information on this fun homeschool geography curriculum for kids by visiting Let's Go Geography on Facebook and Pinterest.

 

Review: The Crafty Classroom

I get so excited to write a review on a product I absolutely LOVED. This time it was the USA Activity Bundle from The Crafty Classroom. We loved this product, and we also loved the price. All THREE of these books are just $15. That is just $5 for each of the downloadable PDF's. This is soooooo worth the price. Seriously! I am raving. (Can you tell?!)
I was able to use this product with my three oldest kids: ages six, eight, and nine. In fact, I even printed out a page here and there occasionally for my three-year-old so that she could feel like she was "in" with her big brothers and sister when we were doing our USA Activity Bundle. In addition, my nieces came into town, and I printed off some pages for them to "homeschool" with us. They loved them as well. Everyone had a blast doing these!
Here is a picture of the three books. Remember these are downloaded products, so they won't look exactly like this. But you could easily put it together to look like this if you wanted:
You could put it together in book format, put it in a folder, or print them out as you go along. It is really whatever fits with your family. I decided to print out all of the pages of each book, and give each kid a folder. I was trying to make it as simple as I could:

You do not have to buy the books that "go along" with each of the downloadable books, but I decided to. They were very reasonably priced on Amazon, and just very cool books. The book recommendations are listed in the downloadable document so you can easily find what is suggested.

Here is Abigail working on her "Vermont" page of the book. She is using the correlating page in the purchased state book to answer the questions. (If you didn't have the book, you could easily find what you needed online.) Abigail was my youngest participant, but she loved working through this, and she did a great job finding the state flags, capitals, etc. in the correlating book and writing them down in her printed packet.

Here is Sidge working on Texas:

My kids absolutely loved working through these. There is coloring and writing, and each of my kids could decide how creative or detailed they wanted to be. Sometimes they really took their time and made pages look great. Sometimes they went a little faster. I was especially impressed with how well they did copying over the lakes and rivers in each of the states onto the paper. (You can see that a little bit in the outline of Texas on Sidge's paper above.)

I really suggest you check out this company on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. This is a FANTASTIC product for the price. You are getting an entire unit right at your fingertips, and if you buy the book, there is very little parental involvement at all. You can simply say "Get out your USA Activity Bundle and they are off!