The Download Club at My Teaching Library – Review

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

If you’re a one-stop-shop kind of person, then you’ll love the resources from the Download Club at My Teaching Library. This website features digital resources that can be purchased, downloaded, and printed for use over a huge array of subject areas for students from kindergarten to seniors in high school.

These resources are searchable from the main menu in lots of different ways, and that’s important because there are just so many. You can search by grade level, subject area, or theme. You can also, in some instances, search by type of resource, like notebooking or lapbooking.

Many of the high school resources are simply digital downloads of books. These are all older classics that have no copyright, so you can find them for free easily online. This was a bit redundant to me, but I suppose that it would be helpful to have so many books easily located in one place.

The other resources are all downloads that are meant to be printed. Some will then need to be manipulated in some way, like flash cards that will need to be cut apart, or lapbooks that will need to be cut up and then reassembled; but the rest are worksheets.

These worksheets take a variety of forms. Most are straight question and answer types, while others are games or puzzles. If you’re one of those people who like worksheets, then this is the site for you!

Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people. I prefer my students to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in other ways, and I use worksheets only as a last resort. Even so, I did find some neat resources here.

There are several textbooks for high school students. We’ll incorporate parts World History Part I next semester because it includes events leading up to World War II and Holocaust history.

I also found some novel studies that I like. The one about The Giver is basic but would be great for checking comprehension if that’s your student’s preferred way to work. It includes vocabulary, questions, a character chart, and a double-sided story map, all in five-chapter chunks. Unlike most worksheets, though, these don’t really have room for writing on the page itself. I would recommend allowing your student to write their answers out on a separate sheet, in a notebook, or even to type them into a document.

Over the course of this review, My Teaching Library has published many new resources to the site. That’s great, because that means that if you purchase a membership, it will keep increasing in value.

Joining the site is two of the ways that you can access this resource. You can purchase a membership to the DownLoad Club, either annually or once for lifetime access. Either of these options allows you to download everything on the site for free for the duration of your membership.

The third way you can access these resources is by purchasing them individually. Unlike most membership sites, you don’t have to join to search it, so you can search the site, find the perfect resource to meet your needs, and get just that one, if you so choose.

While the site includes resources for all grade levels, I feel that it would be most helpful for younger students – at least, that’s when I would use the most pieces from it. There are flashcards for vocabulary words, site words, and words in foreign languages. There are printable word searches and holiday-themed Bingo sheets (there are quite a lot of holiday-themed sheets, actually). There are copywork pages and grammar pages and shape books like I used to use with my first-grade students.

If you’re looking for more help for the teacher, there are printable sheets that share recommended skills and concepts to teach for each grade level. The high school grades are combined into a High School Overview, with just the order of specific classes listed separately. These are all very broad, very generic recommendations, but you could design your coursework around these, and you would find many applicable resources within My Teaching Library.

While the vast majority of the resources available are print-based, there are just a handful of digital instructional videos, and there are some PowerPoint resources, as well. I can definitely see a need for more of these on this site, as these are very limited in both number and scope, but perhaps more are on the way.

So if print-based worksheets, puzzles, and games are your jam, My Teaching Library is the site for you. Log on here and see what all it has to offer – but don’t take my word for it. Click here to read other reviews on the Homeschool Review Crew’s blog hop.