I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined the Homeschool Review Crew this year!  That will mean more reviews, more versatility, and a wider variety of great products and programs that I can share.  Telling others about great discoveries makes me happy, and I hope to help you find products and programs that you love, too.

My Big Helper loves architecture.  I’ll randomly find her drawing buildings, sketching floor plans, or deciding how to rearrange the furniture in her bedroom to create a new look.  She’s been asking for information about architecture, and so I was super excited to find just such a class under the electives on SchoolhouseTeachers.com.  It’s worth a full credit for high school students, too!

The architecture class has thirty-seven lessons, and while clicking around to check out all the exciting elements, I chose to download the Frank Lloyd Wright – Fallingwater lesson for closer examination as I’ve visited that house personally.

The lesson is impressive.  The base of it is text describing the history and style of the house, as well as basic biographical information about Frank Lloyd Wright.  There are many links to more information, including pictures and videos, and there are activities, projects, quizzes, and vocabulary words.  It is a very complete lesson, and with thirty-six more in the class, a student must gain a treasury of knowledge from it.  If all of the classes are as well-written as this one, we’ll have more exciting choices than we know what to do with.

We’re often rather eclectic homeschoolers, though, and sometimes it works best for us to study things in our own way.  This architecture class would be fantastic just as written, working through it sequentially – but it looks as if you could also, because each class is focused on a different structure, match the lesson with your topic of study.  For example, we could have studied the Hoover Dam lesson and the Empire State Building lesson when we were learning about the Great Depression this past fall.

So, still excited about the topic of architecture, I hopped over to the World Book section of SchoolhouseTeachers.com, hoping for great things.  My Little Man loves to sit and read dictionaries, and I think he’d do the same to encyclopedias if any were still around.

Happily, I discovered loads and loads of books about every subject – even architecture!  There are lots of books about animals, though, too, and space, myths, legends, history, science, etc.  My Little Man will love it!  There’s even a classic books section with several hundred offerings – it’s like having access to your own little library.

There’s a video section to SchoolhouseTeachers.com, too, and I was curious as to what that contained.  It turned out to be a master list of all videos found on their website, and I made a few fun discoveries.  “Stevie’s Trek to India” is a 32-minute documentary style video that would complement the India study we just completed.  There’s even a worksheet to go with it, if that’s your thing.

But the BEST PART about the videos?  They have DRIVE-THRU HISTORY.  ALL OF THEM.  We love those! – but we only have a few. We will definitely be making use of this resource. 

My Big Helper is currently in seventh grade.  Time is flying by, and I know I need to be planning ahead for her high school classes, but it seems like such a huge  and daunting task that I’ve procrastinated doing research about that.  There’s a whole section of the website called “Member Resources” that contains ebooks, one of which is all about getting into college – CLEPs, transcripts, etc.  I really like the printable section of that area, though, too – there are gradebook pages, GPA pages, college prep printouts, and more.  These will all really come in handy, and I love that they’re all gathered together in one place.

That’s a lot, right?  A lot of great things, and a lot of things in general.  It might even seem overwhelming (kind of like the thought of sending my firstborn off to high school), but there’s another fabulous feature to SchoolHouseTeachers.com that’s definitely worth using: the chat-and-help feature.  

Somehow, after joining the site, I lost my password.  I’m not sure how – but the next time I wanted in, I couldn’t figure it out.  Since it was only my second time logging in, I thought that maybe my registration had gone wonky or something.  After learning about the chat feature, I starting type-talking to a super nice person who was able to find my info and get me access in minutes – and the problem was my own Christmas brain and not a registration problem.  She solved my problem on the spot and offered help for anything else, too.  How great is it to work with a customer service rep who’s really, really nice?

All in all, I can’t wait to begin using SchoolhouseTeachers.com with my kids.  Since we’re still on Christmas break, they’ve explored the site with me a bit, but we haven’t resumed classes yet.  They’re excited about these new options, though, and they’re going to love it!