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Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew.

My family enjoys looking at issues from all sides and considering every angle – that’s why we were excited for the opportunity to review the Homeschool Court Student Worktext from Homeschool Court.

This student text – my copy is a digital .pdf – comprises of 108 pages. It is very organized and structured, describing the purpose of mock trials and how the American court system works in a detailed way. This workbook walks students through these steps and includes history, vocabulary, and spaces for writing. That’s perfect, because you could easily print out this book and use it as a curriculum for a co-op or special event. Teacher materials are available, and they even detail how to teach this at the high school level for credit.

This text isn’t the only one available. A teacher manual is available for the student worktext, as well as supplemental material for students and three case files (with teacher guides) for final work.

I appreciate the layout of the student worktext. Not only is it structured well, but it’s designed with students in mind. With white space that clearly points to chunks of text as primary and large spaces for writing, it’s useable for a wide range of students and abilities.

This curriculum was designed by a lawyer, so you can be sure that it’s accurate according to her courtroom and legal expertise. We appreciated that – and also the flexibility written into it. As per the book, one could work through the student text at several different schedules, but then the summative mock trials could take different forms. One could hold an actual, physical trial with lots of players, but students could also write a paper about how it might work.

Our family chose to discuss it. After reading material from the book and the Forging Mama’s Signature: Validity of a Will Student Case Summary, we set up shop in our living room to discuss the case. We quickly realized that while everyone agreed on a case outcome, the reasoning wasn’t the same. My Big Helper, My Little Man, and DH all took turns explaining their rationales for each step of the case, and sometimes it got rather heated! My people all got really into this case. While they agreed on what happened, they had each focused on different evidence. This rather intense discussion helped everyone dig into the case, discussing details of the law and the evidence. I love when people get so excited about learning!

Personally, I found the case to have many more details and to be murkier than I expected! Of course, it’s difficult to debate something that’s completely straightforward, but I was happily surprised to find just how complex it was. That makes it very flexible and adaptable to a wide range of grades. It will work well for most middle- and high-school students.

I was also happy to discover that the case studies provided for the summative mock trials are real cases! What better way to study the law and the court system than with the real thing? There’s also great variety in the case studies. Besides this forgery case, there’s also one about school prayer and a dog bite.

The teacher materials that came with each case study were very helpful. As legal matters are very low on my knowledge scale, I found it helpful to read about the details of the case before my family met to discuss it. This not only helped me to follow their fast-moving discussion but also to be able to answer questions and help as needed.

While it may be obvious that adults would need to be involved in the mock trials, adults are intended to be rather central to the entire curriculum. The worktext does provide ways for students to do much of the work themselves, with the teacher simply checking over student answers, but there is much fodder and potential for discussion. This could be a great way to take the work deeper and to personalize it for your own particular students. In this way it would make an excellent text for co-ops or for whole family use like mine, when students are close together in age.

Our chosen schedule worked well for our family, but while there are suggested schedules included in the manual, you are not limited to these. The author, Deborah Morris Burton is willing to work with buyers to help customize her course so that it will be a great fit for your family’s needs.

All in all, I think that these Homeschool Court materials are excellent options for students interested in legal matters or for use as part of a civics class – but don’t take my word for it. Click here to read other reviews of Homeschool Court.

Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I’m a Type A planner person. I like things to be organized and structured. I like color coding (hello, elementary teacher!) and alphabetizing and systems. Which is not to say that I’m not messy or cluttered, but that’s a story for another post.

That’s why the idea of The Family Journal by Byron’s Games intrigued me. Weekly family meetings? Family goals? A family motto? Hmmm ….

Honestly, I’ve tried to institute some of this loosely before. I’m all for writing down goals and knowing where you want to go. I like the idea of a family mission statement and knowing why that’s a choice destination.

But not everyone in my family thinks that way, and my attempts to start a conversation around these things hasn’t always been well received in the past. With this fancy bound book in hand, though, I thought things might be different.

As soon as My Big Helper opened the journal, it was. She immediately jumped on board and became the scribe for the project. As the writer of the family, putting everything that’s important to us into words and down on paper properly was important to her.

Which may be both the pro and the con of our results.

My Big Helper led our meetings. She read the info from the book, asked everyone for their ideas, and was generally all into it. She listened to what everyone said and then wrote it down. Often the book asks for multiple drafts of important statements, so she read them when she finished and wrote another draft if the directions called for that.

That means that all of our work is beautiful and lovely – but it sometimes took a little while. We’re all old enough to handle that, and we talked while she was writing, but with younger kids, I think some of these meetings might need to be broken up into multiple sessions – or maybe you could ask the questions in one meeting and then put it together on your own, then discuss it at the next one. We already play games and talk during dinner, so it was a natural extension of this process for us to stay around the table just a little longer to do this. I could see this working with littles if you discussed it one night at supper and then followed up with finished products the next night. If you did that, each session might take only a few minutes. For us, it was sometimes about an hour while we talked and then waited for all of the writing to happen.

Writing our yearly goals was a smoother process than our family mission statement, because while we don’t have any major disagreements or anything, it was difficult to fit it all in there clearly. Writing yearly goals was still a tricky process because our likes and talents lie in different areas, but by keeping them broad and encompassing, it worked out well. It was really interesting to see what kind of goals everyone wanted to set for our family for the coming year, as well.

While we haven’t worked through many of the formal family meetings located further back in the book, I like the structure. There’s room to review the previous week’s family and individual goals and set new ones. There’s an inspirational quote and space to record things for which you’re all thankful. Setting goals and intentionally being grateful are good habits to have.

The next section of these weekly meetings is a connection activity – basically, an activity designed to help your family bond and make memories. Some of them are simple, short things that you can easily do at home, like play Tic-Tac-Toe or Charades, while others are much more involved, like visiting a historic site or volunteering as a family. Others would help teach skills, like cooking dinner together, while some would instill family values and history, like creating a family tree or scrapbook. I like all of these ideas, though with teens and high school workloads, it would be difficult to go with a preset schedule of activities like this.

I don’t see why you would necessarily need to go in order, though, so I think anyone could make it work with just a little tweaking. What I realized, though, is that we already do many of these activities as a family – and I love that. I hope that when my kids are grown and gone and parenting on their own, that they’ll have fond memories of cooking with me or taking field trips or volunteering. I hope that spending time together creatively will be priorities for them with their families, too.

Maybe our kids are just on the upper end of the age curve for this book, but there’s great value in it. We’re talking more about goals and how and why to do things than we ever have. If that hadn’t already been a priority with our teens – if they were younger, if that wasn’t a parenting goal of our own, or if we were overcoming some kind of trauma or becoming a blended family – I think The Family Journal would be just the thing to help us solidify our goals and make memories together.

If you want to make memories intentionally and show your children how to set goals and form good mental habits, consider adding The Family Journal to your parenting arsenal – but don’t take my word for it. Click here to read other reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew.