Embracing a Healthy Family: Our Calvert Homeschool Online Review: Making Homeschooling Easier

As we move into a new semester, I wanted to try out another online homeschool curriculum to see how my children would adapt to it. I chose to review the Calvert Homeschool Online family plan by Calvert Homeschool. With this review, we had access to all the courses from grades 3-12. This was a nice feature because it allowed me flexibility when assigning courses to each of my children.

Signing up was easy and setting up both of my girls was equally easy. Whenever I sign on now, I see the following in the screen shot below. It's arranged really nice in an aesthetically pleasing flow. The dashboard provides a one stop area for managing my students, messages, the application, reports, and administration. The help feature is also an asset.

DASHBOARD

Once the courses are assigned, click on Calendar to see all the assignments that are due each day. If you have more than one student, it will list them. I like how I can view everything in one location. For this example, I'm going to use Little Women: Theme of Ambition as I click through the calendar.

By clicking on the link, it provides another window that provides objectives, vocabulary words and much more for each lesson.

There are many great features for the teacher/parent to access and to manage their students to include great reports.

STUDENT LOGIN - Geography 300

For my review, I will focus on History and Geography 300 with my older student. The course begins with an overview and an introductory and moves into lessons. First, the student reads the material and then answers the questions. For this course, she had a couple of assignments and then when complete, she had her first quiz. Once started, the quiz has to be completed.

In between assignments and quizzes are projects. After a few assignments, projects and quizzes, there are unit Review Activities which consists of multiple games the student can choose from. These games help the student retain what they learned and can be repeated as many times as one likes. The teacher/parent will be required to grade some questions or assignments.

As the student(s) progress, reports such as this one can be run to see how they are doing:

STUDENT LOGIN - SCIENCE 800

For the next part of the review, I'm going to focus on my younger student who utilized Science 800 - Our Atomic World. The course is set up just like the one my older student used. The videos are nice additions to the learning material and what she liked the most were the duration of each lesson. She is not always a huge fan of online curriculum but didn't mind this one at all given the shortness of each one. She liked how they mixed up reading material with videos and other exercises.

The course assignments started with core objectives. For Safety First, she was able to read the rules of safety and had the option to print off the rules to reference later. As noted above, Calvert does embed videos to compliment the lessons and they also provide a transcript of the video. After each page, they have the option to continue reading or they can proceed with answering the graded questions. Sometimes, Calvert even throws in a pop quiz to keep the students on their toes. Once they move to the question section, they can choose to enter any notes that might want to remember and they have have three attempts at answering them. Once they complete them all, they will get a final confirmation that they are done and then they can mark the lesson complete and move forward.

Overall, both girls liked the length of each section. They thought it was a nice compliment of different ways to teach each lesson from reading to video to projects and quizzes. The only improvement I would have is to return to the course the student was in when an assignment or quiz is complete. I'm suspecting the reason it does not do that is the expectation is once an assignment is complete, the student would move to another subject. Nonetheless, it wasn't a big deal and I really liked how Calvert Homeschool has set up each subject and the curriculum. I think each assignment's length is just right and the projects are pretty cool too. We recommend.