Go Fly a Kite!

It’s the best time of year – SPRING!  Everything gets green again, and the weather is perfect (in between raindrops).  We weren’t able to make the Japanese Garden Kite Festival this year, so we had a little festival of our own…

Spanish for You! Review

Buenos Dias, y bienvenido a la pagina para critica de Spanish For You!  I recently received a sample for review, and thought I would share my opiniones con usted!

With the Spanish for You! program, elementary and middle grade students can learn the beautiful Spanish language by themes.  No boring verb tense drills, here – just lots of relevant words to a main topic (you know, kind of like real life…)

I received the ESTACIONES (Seasons) book.  There are also currently theme books for VIAJES (Travels) and FIESTAS (Celebrations), with more to come.  The books start at $9.99, with an expected learning time of 4-6 weeks.  Class packs are also available, as well as teacher guides, for an additional cost.

The ESTACIONES book starts with some basics… the alphabet, common words, phrases, and commands, and then moves into the units.  Each one established around a topic.  There is “Calendar and Weather”, each of the four seasons, and school terms.  You can see a complete table of contents and some sample pages HERE.

Learning a foreign language is like studying a musical instrument.  It’s best to take it in small bites.  That’s why Spanish for You! recommends studying just 10-30 minutes a day.  In a school schedule, this is more likely to be 3-4 times per week.

When I first received the book, I thought it was kind of on the slim side, but the interior is packed with great information!  It’s easy to see how just one unit can take more than a month to complete!  There are lots of practices, paired with pictures.  (And if the pictures seem reminiscent of child drawings, that’s because they are!  The author’s daughter illustrates her books!)

Each lesson introduces vocabulary words with their accompanying pictures, before moving on to simple sentences.  The audio files are a big help for those without Spanish training or experience, or for letting the student listen to on their own.  I was also thrilled that I could use the same program for both children, eliminating re-teaching and repetition.

Perhaps my favorite (and most fun!) were the Games and Activities listed.  These simple games made learning the vocabulary words easier and more memorable, while letting the kid think they were having “fun time” without the books!  Language-learning versions of “Memory”, “Bingo”, dice games, and “Simon Dice” (Simon Says) had everyone smiling in no time.

Just a few of the highlights of Spanish For You!:

• Self-study, family, or class use
• Affordable - $9.99 for electronic download, $12.99 for print book
  
• Flexible - Go at your own pace.
• Easy to use - Just follow the lesson guide & go!
  
• Time Saving- Use one package with students of multiple grades at the same time.
• Fun - Uses simple games and activities to engage students.
• Your Choice: soft cover book or e-book (currently only our trial pkgs.)

• Lesson Guide: 24-30 week lesson guide for the grades you need (24 weeks for G5-6 & 7-8, 30 weeks for G3-4) (PDF download)

  • *Teacher lesson plans are NOT included. These need to be purchased separately.
    
• Worksheets - self-checking worksheets (PDF download)
• Audio files of entire book (includes bonus audio of native speaker of entire book) (MP3 download)
• Flashcard/activity pictures (PDF download)

You can read more experiences right HERE,at SchoolhouseReviewCrew.com, and in the words of Reading Rainbow’s Levar Burton, “Don’t just take my word for it!”  Read these other great reviews by parent educators like me!

DISCLAIMER

Math Rider Review

My kids LOVE games, and I’m always excited to see a new educational game that will have them working on skills that are not so popular during schoolwork.  I recently had the privilege of sampling Math Rider – the new computer game that helps kids master math facts.

Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – those are the building blocks of mathematical operations and concepts.  We aren’t really the “drill and kill” kind of family, so any excuse to have fun with math is good to us!

From the Website…

Your child is taken into a land of fantasy and quests. Living in the Land of Ray and riding a horse called Shadow, he or she will set out on various noble adventures. Riding across amazing, digitally matte-painted moving backdrops of distinct fantastic lands, they will accomplish their quest, be it finding magical flowers, returning gems to the elves or even rescuing a princess!

The graphics are good quality, with a story text at the bottom of the screen to set the scene.  The narrator speaks very slowly, which may be good for emerging readers following the text, but was annoying for older kids.  The speaker is easily turned off with a click, allowing the very pleasant background music to play.

The horse and rider gallop along the bottom of the screen as various hurdles appear.  A math equation must be solved to jump the hurdles.  Riders get extra bonus points for faster solving times, and each level completes another section of the quest (documented on a nifty map of the kingdom).  You can set the difficulty levels from easy to hard, and choose which area of math facts you’d like to practice.  While tons more fun than a sheet of math problems, it is still computation practice.  There are many online games that do similar jobs, but for a family that has multiple children, limited internet access, or wants to keep individualized records of progress, Math Rider can be a nice supplement to any math curriculum.

This is an ideal tool for daily math practice, and my students enjoyed using it during waiting periods between subjects, or as a warm-up for the day.

Math Rider uses the Adobe® AIR™ runtime, so the game operates on Windows and Mac. The Math Rider website has download links for both of these applications, and it took me less than 4 minutes to be up and playing.

Just a few of the highlights of Math Rider:

• Leveled practice in mathematical operations
• Choose from addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division
• Complete “quests”, follow a story, and earn bonus points and rewards
• Free 7-day trial
• Complete program is $47.00 (includes free updates for life)
• Up to 8 players are allowed, and each player can have their own login and “personal rider”
• Requires 80MB of  hard disk space.
• Requires a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels.

You can read more experiences right HERE,at SchoolhouseReviewCrew.com, and in the words of Reading Rainbow’s Levar Burton, “Don’t just take my word for it!”  Read these other great reviews by parent educators like me!

DISCLAIMER