Learn About Your State with Hewitt Homeschooling #hsreviews

Do you want your kids to learn about your state?  I know I wanted my kids to learn but wasn’t sure what to use.  I was so pleased to review My First Report: My State  from Hewitt Homeschooling which is a great company with lots of great different curriculum for your children to use!  

Hewitt Homeschooling provides materials for children to use for homeschooling from a very young age all the way up to high school.  They have been around for quite some time and through this they have been able to develop a wonderful program that is very focused.  They believe that reading good literature and then writing about it is key to development in a child and from that concept they have based their materials.

The My First Report series is a great way to introduce your child to a new way of learning.  It is geared towards grades 1-4.  The specific topic we received of My State can be purchased for $8.95.  Now I know I said it is geared towards grades 1-4, but grades 1 and 2 are going to need more parental help than the older two grades.   I personally feel that this is true.  My daughter and son were using the packet together with one of them writing in his journal. He loves his journal and actually prefers to do any of his writing homework in it so it was wonderful for me.  Anyway.  They are doing mostly third grade with some fourth grade thrown in as well.  They did need some help from me to complete their work, but it wasn’t a huge amount.  Mainly there were words they couldn’t read and I needed to help them with.  Sometimes we needed to look things up in the dictionary which needed a bit of help.  But really, most of the work was within what they could do.

I do have to say that my son was a bit lazy with parts of it and I would have to ask him to elaborate or write more on certain things.  But, I think that is the nature or some school kids.

 

Let’s talk a bit about the specific program we received to review.  My First Report:  My State is a great packet to use with your child.  It is a 68 page already hole punched ready to be put into a binder program.  Through this packet you will delve into:  

• writing skills
• writing in complete sentences with all parts of speech
• where to look and find the required information
• correctly use adjectives and adverbs
• report using correct facts
• ask for help when needed
• use appropriate vocabulary
• finally, illustrate reports(this is one I always had trouble as)

The report itself is broken down into sections.  You have a section in the middle which was our favorite.  This is the unit study section which contains all kinds of ideas for activities and fun related to learning more about your state!  Oh yes.  We’re always looking for more fun activities and things to do.  The unit study section is 26 pages long.  The activities mentioned cover all kinds of learning.  You’ll find activities about:

• Bible and character study
• Field trips(our favorite school activity)
• music
• math
• physical education(one we admittedly don’t normally have set scheduled activities for)
• language
• reading
• geography
• history
• social studies
• health
• science
• art(one that I have a hard time teaching because I’m not artistic)

All in all, this was a great way to learn more about our state.  In the diggings we learned some things that I didn’t even know about the state I’ve lived in my whole life!  We have a long list of field trip destinations now that the kids want to see because we learned about them in our research.  Thankfully we centered our most intense research around our area of the state so that our field trips will be at least within a set radius.  I’m hoping you’ll stick around and enjoy our field trips with us in the coming months.  I’ve named our field trip adventures for this year The Midwest Expedition and will be blogging our journey!

As I stated above, some of the parts are more suited to older students in the 3rd to 4th grade due to the younger needing more parental help.  I found that even my 3rd graders needed some help with some of the vocabulary, but not as much as I expected.

We were very pleased with our Hewitt Homeschooling experience and highly recommend their My First Report series.  They have many different titles to choose from so you’ll not get bored if you use them with more than one child!

Enjoying reading about our experiences?  Make sure to hop on over to the Main Crew Blog Post to check out what other people thought of the products they were given to review from Hewitt Homeschooling.  You’ll find lots of different products and opinions.  You can also visit Hewitt Homeschooling on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google +, and their blog.