Schoolhouse Teachers {resource review}

When I first learned that I would be receiving a membership to SchoolhouseTeachers.com for review, I honestly had no idea what this site was all about! I was pleasantly surprised to click over and start looking at all that was available to me.  This site is created and owned by The Old Schoolhouse Magazine.

Huge. Overwhelming. TONS of resources here. Seriously, ya’ll.

There are resources available for every imaginable subject matter that you might be working on in your home. With my children being all elementary age, I mostly perused the elementary section of this site. But there are just as many resources available for high school students as well.

Math is my most difficult subject to teach, so I headed to the math section first, always looking for a bit of math help. 🙂  I was a bit disappointed to find that there are only lessons on specific things being taught…I was most hoping for a list of options so I could start at the beginning and move forward. The math instructor’s audio was not working on my computer either. I think if you wanted to use this site for math, you would just have to be a bit more flexible than I am, and use whatever topics are available. If you weren’t already using a sequential math program, I can see how these lessons would be helpful. {{Update on sound quality: our new-ish computer was in the shop when I tried out the math lessons, now that I have tried it on our newer computer, the audio is working perfectly!!}}

The next subject I am most worried about in our homeschool is writing, for my girls. I have worried that I don’t really know what to teach them or how! So, I headed over to the writing section next. When I first clicked over there, no lessons were available yet for December, so I started looking at previous month’s lessons. October’s lessons are on story setting, which is something that I have not covered with my girls yet. I was thrilled with the pages available for me to print and give to my girls. We worked on “setting” for a complete week. Each page had a paragraph for the girls to read and then questions to answer about the setting of that particular story. It was perfect for my girls.

Some other pages that I thought were very useful:

• tons of planner pages
• expo recording selections of speakers, various topics
• monthly thematic lap books
• printable weekly spelling lists/worksheets
• daily grammar pages

Overall, this site is wonderful, filled with lots of great resources. Being introduced to this website a little more than halfway through our school year did not leave me with a lot of time in my schedule to use these on a regular basis.  I think what would be really helpful for me is to look through this site thoroughly and make a list of what I could use with my children. Then, when I am choosing curriculum for next year, I could plug some of these into our schedule.

Some of you may be more flexible homeschoolers than we are and could just pick up random topics in history or science at any given time. This site would be wonderful for you!! Since we meet with other families to do history and science, I can’t just drop what we are doing! 🙂

There are also some great review possibilities on this site. I’m thinking of printing a bunch of the grammar pages for my girls to just have on hand…doing 2-3 per week as a review of topics we’ve covered but may have been forgotten.

SchoolhouseTeachers.com is available for 5.95 per month and you can try your first month for just $1! You can’t beat that deal.

My thoughts here are truly just scratching the surface. If all of this sounds useful to you, I hope you’ll click over and try it out for yourself!! And, if you want to read a few more opinions on this site, check out the other reviews from the TOS Crew on the Crew blog.