I’m so excited to share with you a brand new online homeschooling program called Homeschool+, from the creators of ABC Mouse and Adventure Academy. I’m going to give you an overview and walkthrough of this brand new program as well as my honest review. So if you’re excited to learn about this new homeschool program, let’s get started and check it out!
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Homeschool+ Homeschooling Program
First let’s talk about the subjects that Homeschool+ has to offer. Just like most homeschool programs, they offer a complete curriculum in math and reading. In addition, they also include lessons in Science, Language Arts, Social Studies, Art and even Spanish.
For the parents, there are easy to use lesson planning tools, and helpful information so you can keep track of your child’s progress. You get all this for $39.99 a month (or $299.99 a year if you sign up for the full year at once). That is a little on the pricy side for an online homeschool program, but we’re going to check it out and see if it’s worth the money.
Right now you can get a 10 day free trial of Homeschool+. But before you sign up, keep reading so you can learn all about the program and decide if it’s worth trying out or not.
Getting Set Up
Ok so let’s start with the basics. The most important thing to understand is that this program is specifically for kids in PreK through 2nd grade, or ages 4 to 8. So if your kids are older than that, this is not the program for you. You can check out this article for some online homeschooling programs that are more suited to older kids.
If your kids are in the right age range for Homeschool+, let’s take a look at how you get set up. Compared to other online homeschool programs, this is very simple to set up. Just sign up, put in your child’s birth month and year, and it will recommend a schedule for your child right away, which of course you can modify at any time.
Homeschool+ sets the lesson schedule up by days of the week, so you can plan your child’s lessons in advance, and then they will log on and see what lessons they need to complete for that day. It’s a very bright and inviting main page, which makes sense since it’s geared toward the younger crowd.
When you want to modify the lesson plans, you just go over to lesson planner, and then you can plan all your child’s lessons from there. You can also print out the lesson plans for each day of the week. They have additional offline activities that you can do with your child.
Getting Started with Homeschool+
When your child first signs up for Homeschool+, they will do some activities to assess their current level in math and reading. It is recommended that your child starts there so that Homeschool+ can personalize your child’s learning path for these subjects.
I just want to mention that if you do sign up for the free trial, take the time to complete the assessment portion before deciding if you like it or not. The assessment portion was not the best representation of the way the lessons are actually designed. You can tell once you’ve moved past that initial assessment and a lot more interesting lessons begin to pop up. So use your free trial wisely so you can really see what this program is all about.
Creating Lesson Plans
The lesson plans on Homeschool+ are set up week by week. My Math Academy and My Reading Academy, which are the biggest parts of this online homeschooling program, are set up by time per day, and they have these set for every day of the week. You can shut them off for certain days, and you can adjust the time to spend on them.
Then there are additional lessons in subjects like science, social studies and more. Homeschool+ recommends 1 to 3 of these additional lessons per day. The lessons have several activities each, and some of them are a bit long for a young child – so I agree with their recommendation, especially for the younger kids.
You can customize your child’s weekly schedule however you like, which is a nice option for parents. I like online homeschooling programs that let parents do the planning like this. Of course if you prefer not to, you can just stick with the defaults that Homeschool+ suggests. However, as far as I can see there’s no real way to completely change the order of things. There’s no option to view the full catalog of lessons the way you can with some other programs. If you like things to be simple then this is a good thing right? Not everyone wants to go through every lesson and plan it all out in so much detail.
Once you have your week mapped out, you can also print the daily lesson plans. These are nice because they give you some offline activities to do with your child. I think that’s really nice that they include that, especially for the price. It’s important, in my opinion, not to rely only on using an online learning program for homeschooling.
Homeschool+ From the Student’s Perspective
When your child is ready to work, they are just going to see their lessons for that day. They can go in any order they want, but they can only view the current day. They can just click on start to get started on any of the lessons. For math and reading, once they have done their time for the day, a pop up will notify them that they have completed the days work for that subject. The progress bar below the lesson will also be full. But they can keep going if they like. It doesn’t stop them.
For the other lessons, there will be a few different activities in each lesson. Once completed, the yellow progress bar below the lesson will be full.
Once your child has completed all of their lessons for the day, a new section opens up called “free play activities.” There are books, puzzles and games that remind me a lot of ABC Mouse or other popular learning apps for kids. If you don’t want this option, you can disable it by unchecking the box in the lesson planner section.
The progress tracker is where you can view your child’s progress through the lessons and subjects. You need to choose from the drop down for either Math, Reading, or the other skills. You can view the time spent working on the subjects, overall progress, and what your child has been working on. They have this categorized in 4 skill levels. In progress, prior knowledge, completed, and needs support. This can give you an idea of how your child is progressing in the different areas.
Homeschool+ Review – What I Like About It
After testing out the Homeschool+ online homeschooling program, here are the things I like about Homeschool+. For one, it’s from a company that you can trust. ABC Mouse and Adventure Academy are great products from the same company, Age of Learning. They put a lot of work into this latest edition, and you can tell.
Another thing I love is how bright and colorful it is for kids. My 3 year old twins were really interested in watching me go through the lessons while making this video. It really grabbed their attention, although they’re a little too young just yet for a program like this. I also really love the simplicity of it all. If you’ve tried some other homeschooling websites for yourself, you know how complicated some of them can be. Homeschool+ is very user friendly for parents and kids.
Homeschool+ Review – The Negatives
Ok, so now for the things that I think need to be improved about Homeschool+. Number one is the price. This is one of the more expensive online homeschooling programs out there. Now it does allow you to add multiple children without increasing the price. But I really think it should be less expensive for one child, even if it is a full curriculum.
The other thing that is kind of a drawback is if you are a parent who likes a lot of freedom to play around with the schedule and lesson plans, this is a very basic set up. Which may be great for some families, but it may be a negative for others. Their analytics section is also very basic. They don’t have reports to print out and things like that that other online homeschooling programs offer.
Finally, as it is a new website, I have noticed some glitches. Sometimes, especially when working in the additional courses, you have to go out or reload the page a bit to get things to work. It’s not bad at all, but it does happen, and may be difficult for a small child to figure out how to fix.
So that is absolutely everything I can think of to tell you about Homeschool Plus. Thanks for reading!
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