WAY Comes Home Review

I am a firm believe in making learning fun. Kids learn best through play. They need activity and hands-on experiences. HomeSchool Scholastics, an i4 Learning Company must believe the same, because their WAY Comes Home Kit is all about learning about health and wellness in a fun, active way.

The WAY (Wellness, Academics, & You) was designed specifically for elementary homeschool. The resources provided help you teach your child all aspects of health through physical activity and fitness, nutrition and healthy eating, health communications, emotion heath, social skills, and critical thinking skills.

The kit comes with everything you need for an entire unit of study for 3 different age groups.

• Parent's Guide --  This book contains everything you need to teach the material. It includes detailed lesson plans for each of the 3 levels, including step-by-step instructions, art projects, fun activities, additional resources, and more.
• Student Journals -- Journaling is a main aspect of the curriculum. It encourages creativity, critical thinking, and language development. The journals have sections for recording personal information, writing reflections, and charting progress. There are blank pages for writing and drawing pictures, but there are also many pages with activities like coloring, marking choices, and more.
• DVD -- The DVD has video clips that enhance the lessons and motivate the students. Each level has its own clips that match the themes. Each theme has an introductory video that allows the students to meet the characters and establish the personality of each program. There are also physical activity videos. Each "deskercise" segment allows is set up so you can be active and healthy while in your homeschool room, the living room, the kitchen, anywhere.
• WAY Comes Home to MyPlate -- The food pyramid has been replaced with a practical, life application-based icon called MyPlate. This booklet breaks down the components of MyPlate and explains them in an easy-to-understand way. It takes the five food groups--fruits, vegetables, grains, protein, dairy--explains their nutrition, benefits, examples, and amounts. Charts are included so you can see how much of each group is an appropriate serving for all age levels. 
• Vocab Cards & Illustrations -- Many flashcards are included. All pages are printed on card stock and provide dashed lines to show where to cut. The vocab cards feature various words to further your healthy journey, like fitness, nutrition, respect, endurance, consumtion, and more. Each word is printed in blank block letters so the student can color them as he chooses. There are also flashcards depicting good choice/poor choice, animals, transportation, and actions. The final illustrations are face masks that can be colored, cut, and attached to string to portray the characters from Health Safari level.
• Equipment Tools -- Various supplies are needed throughout the lessons. Common household things like scissors and crayons are not included, but instead the kit contains items that are harder to find. It includes a stethoscope, stamp pad, 2 foam balls, 3 small baskets, fulcrum balance scale, glitter, vinyl tape measure, eye chart, plastic eggs, and clear counter chips. 

The curriculum is written for 3 ages levels, each with its own theme. Because it was written for homeschoolers, there are tips and activities to expand each lesson to involve children of various ages. Each theme also has its own colors to make it easy to find the sections throughout the book.

• Health Safari -- This section is geared towards kids in kindergarten-1st grade. The theme follows Samantha and the Safari Land animals as they promote physical activity, healthful nutrition, and general wellness. The videos are animated. 
• Me Mysteries -- This level is for 2nd-3rd grades. The detective theme encourages the students to explore everyday health issues through communication skills, physical activity, healthful nutrition, and critical thinking skills. The videos feature kids.
• Innerspace Adventure -- This module is for the 4th-5th grades. The WAY TEAM helps them learn about personal health and wellness. Students will develop writing skills through journaling and focus on important health issues. These videos also feature kids.

My kiddos range in age from 10 years down to 4-years-old. Since we like to do as much schooling together as we can, I chose the Me Mysteries level to use because it's right in the middle range. This curriculum is jam-packed with information and tips. Each lesson is written in the same format: Parent Prep, Lesson at a Glance, Get Things Ready, WAY Vocab Words, What To Do, Art Attack, Weekends with WAY, Pray/Reflect, WAY More Resources, WAY More Fun.  

The kids and I have enjoyed learning about health through many fun activities. Adding clothespins to paper plates to show inner way and interactive way, exercising and charting our pulse rates, coloring a model of the human heart, balancing the calories we eat with the energy we use by placing marbles on a scale, being detectives and figuring out how germs are spread with the help of glitter are some of the ways we learned.I personally found the acting in the video segments cheesy and a little over-the-top, but the kids enjoyed them. I appreciate all the varying activities throughout the book. Even though we used just the one module for all the kids, we did implement some of the ideas of the other levels, like inspecting our thumbprints and noting cause and effect actions.

The kids' favorite part of the study was the physical activity videos. We had so much fun exercising and getting active! Even the toddler joined in on the fun and was dancing around trying to imitate both the kids on the screen and the kids in our house.

One "extra" that I think is pretty neat is the WAY More Fun sections. We liked reading through the facts and learning fascinating new things. Do you know why apples float, which direction Charles Dickens slept and why, eating which food will burn more calories than you consume, or which activity doubles the number of germs on your fingertips? You can learn all these and so many more with this book.

The WAY kit is great for teaching health and wellness for multiple ages. It's multi-sensory format appeals to every kind of learner and keep them engaged. There are many additional resources that will help you stretch out the learning activities and make this a full health curriculum for your family.
 

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If you'd like to see more fun through the WAY Comes Home kit, please read the reviews on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog.

Can Do Cubes

This review goes hand-in-hand with the jollyliteracy.com and just2ducks LLC Jolly Phonics and Grammar review that I posted earlier this week. Like I said before, I loved teaching my first grade students in the classroom to read many years ago, and I love even more teaching my own kids at home now. To me, it's one of the most rewarding privileges of homeschooling the early years. Words are everywhere--books, signs, stores, mail, directions, recipes, letters. Whether it's for entertainment purposes or to increase knowledge, reading is an every-day skill. Literature is the foundation of our schooling, so reading well is vital in our family.

I taught my first 3 kids to read without the use of any curricula. My philosophy for little ones is that they learn best through play. I teach letters through manipulatives, puzzles, games, and typical conversations (saying things like, "Do you see that M on that sign?" and "Look! There's a T just like your name.") Once letters and sounds have been learned, we move to blending into words, using the same methods, adding in writing the words on paper or dry erase board. Any time you can get a little one involved in sensory learning, the lesson is fun, inviting, and productive. These Can Do Cubes are perfect for our style of learning.  

The Can Do Cubes set is used to teach synthetic phonics. The approach, as I described above, begins by teaching simple phonemes (sounds), blending them to make words, teaching complex phonemes, and blending those. The set contains many components to complement any synthetic phonics program.

• Stage 1 Cubes -- 27 1-inch cubes showing one spelling for each of the 44+ sounds that make up the simple alphabetic code.
• Stage 2 Cubes -- 30 individual 1-inch cubes along with 2 cubes connected with a string (to represent split digraph sounds) showing the spellings for the 175+ sounds of the complex alphabetic code.
• Handbook for Stage 1 -- Small spiral-bound book filled with information about reading, such as pre-reading activities, explanation of the alphabetic code, encoding, pronunciation chart, notes, and much more.
• Handbook for Stage 2 -- An identical book to the other, but filled with helpful instruction of the complex alphabetic code cubes, capital letters and punctuation, reading and spelling activities, phonemes charts, and more.
• Teaching Learning and "Sounding Out" DVD -- An interactive demonstration of pronunciation and sounding out of words presented by Debbie Hepplewhite, synthetics phonics consultant and creator of the Can Do Cubes set.
• Phonics Chart -- A large chart that explains phonemes, graphemes, and teaching points for each.
• Word Charts -- Two large charts that list by cube number the words that can be made.   
• Teacher's Guide and Template Book CD -- Includes online templates and worksheets in PDF for easy printing.

The cubes themselves are made of hardwood and laser-engraved. The Stage 1 cubes each have a small number at the bottom, indicating its placement of learning.  There are 8 different cubes: 6 of number 1 and 3 of numbers 2-8.  Each number cube is the same and contains all of the sounds for the number. For example, all 6 number 1 cubes have the letters s, a, t, i, p, n.

The Stage 2 cubes show the spelling variations for the 44 sounds. For example, one cube shows the different long a sounds: ai, ay, a, ey, eigh, ea. There are also cube for capital letters, punctuation, double letters, and split vowel digraphs. Each cube type is arranged in a way to make it easy to find.

The Can Do Cubes are listed in the order of the Jolly Phonics curriculum, so it made it easy for us to use the two resources together. My 4-year-old is at the beginning stages of reading and is just learning to blend sounds to make words. While he does enjoy sitting at the table and reading simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, he much prefers to "play" with his blocks. The multi-sensory approach works very well for him.

There are many ways in which we use these cubes:

• I make a sound and he finds the matching letter.
• I say a word and he finds the letters to make it.
• I make a word and he reads it.
• I make a word and he finds the letters to copy it.
• I put 2 letters and leave a space for another. I say a word and he finds the missing letter.
• I make a word and he finds all the possible rhyming words.

The possibilities of learning with these cubes are really endless. You can say a word, have the student make it with the cubes, and then write it on paper. Or for even younger kids, you can have them find all the matching letters on the cubes. You could use them in a hangman type game or the child makes a word for you to read. If it involves letters, sounds, or reading, you can use these cubes to do it.

The materials are well-made and fit in the main box, making it easy to keep track of it all. The trays have pull tabs on the sides so you can easily get them out. Even my older kids have enjoyed the cubes, both by themselves and helping their learning-to-reading little brother. I love that the trays list which cubes belong where, especially for those times when the toddler like to dump everything out at once, ha.

If you have a student who is learning to read, struggling with spelling, or just needs a multi-sensory approach, we recommend the Can Do Cubes. 


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You can see how other homeschool families used these cubes by reading the reviews on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog.