There are some subjects that we choose to supplement in our homeschool, like specific math concepts and parts of history that my kids are interested in but are not being covered in our current curriculum. My kids love learning online, so when we were given 12 months access to Educeri Lesson Subscription Service by Educeri ……. Educeri a division of DataWORKS to review, I was really interested to see how we could implement it into our regular studies.
For simple browsing, you can just view the pictures correlating to each lesson, or you can do a picture with description, or you can just look at a list view of the lesson concepts. You can also sort through the lessons by grade level and subject.
I decided to do a variety of lessons with each of my school-aged kids. I started with some Language Arts with my 1st grader. Here is what the description page of one of the lessons looks like:
As you can see, there’s a fun colorful image, a description of the lesson’s focus, and information about how it should be taught. There’s also a section you can see where there’s an Additional Resource. In this case, it was a student handout with more practice problems.
As we navigated through the lesson, I was grateful for the table of contents that was easy to access by clicking on the little icon in the bottom left. That made it easy to get back to a lesson where we left off if we had to split it up. For this one, we did split it up over a few days because that’s all we had time for during that particular week.
The lesson had a lot of visual clues while reading, as you can see. They highlighted the things that characters did in green text and the major events in blue. It included some vocabulary and gave definitions relevant to the lesson as well. It was easy to go from page to page by clicking the arrows on the bottom.
The lesson itself was very interactive and did most of the teaching for me.
There were plenty of opportunities for my son to practice the skills that he learned and went over in the lesson. Below is an example of one of the practice sheets that went with the lesson.
The lesson was Common Core aligned, which I really don’t mind. However, I did feel like it was a bit difficult for him to grasp. We haven’t quite reached this level yet with him as a first grader, so I may wait to try again when he’s a little older so I know that he’s understanding the concept fully.
I also tried several math lessons with my daughter. She found it to be a little dry compared to her other online and computer-based math programs. It really was like working through a worksheet on the computer.
I had her complete the work and then we clicked the arrows. As we clicked the arrows, it revealed the correct answers in red on the blank spots on the page. We were able to check them one at a time this way before moving to the next screen.
This one also came with a supporting document. It had a two page PDF of more practice problems related to the concept of calculating a percent of a quantity. I love that it has extra practice, which is easy to assign to a student later in the week or even later in the semester for review.
Our Thoughts
We did several different lessons in these and other subjects. While I found that the lessons were complete and thorough, we all found them to be a bit dry. My kids don’t normally do a lot of worksheets. When they work on the computer, they usually work on educational games, so they had to do a sort of mental shift to be able to concentrate and just complete the work.
This no-frills approach would work extremely well for students that just need to get the work done without distractions. It also has great self-checking built right into the lessons by filling in the answers for students, one at a time, as they click through.
I was hoping that this would be more of an independent activity for my students to complete while I was working with their siblings, but we all found that my kids needed me there to help teach and explain the lesson. I know a lot of homeschool moms love this approach as it gives them full control, even when the curriculum is pretty straightforward like this one.
I think it would also work well in a co-op setting. For homeschool, it would be great for those that do the “school at home” method and prefer more traditional school lessons for their families.
This will continue to be used as a supplement for us. Other families gave it a try, too. See what they thought by clicking on the banner below.
