Embracing a Healthy Family: Reading strategies Reading Success Life Long Learning

The Home School Navigator Reading and Language Arts Curriculum is a comprehensive language arts curriculum that we are reviewing in this post. There are six different curriculums broken into levels: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Indigo. We started with Indigo and for each month, there are downloads that break down the month into weekly assignments, day by day. This is nice if you are the type of educator that likes to pre-plan and know what you are teaching and/or prepare for the week. The beauty with Home School Navigator is it's flexible. It's a tool to utilize as the parent or educator sees fit with each student. You can print the handouts or use a white board to review the assignments and you complete the activities that you feel are best for your student whether it's all activities or just a few.

The Level Guides at the start of each Level includes:

A listing of the entire month's handouts per week.
A material list that includes a teacher's guide.
Handouts and answer sheets where applicable.
Month two begins an activity called "Interactive Notebooks." This activity is a hands on activity allowing the student to use creativity while learning.

Each print out for the Interactive Notebook includes instructions for the student.
The pages are matched to the book that was assigned. For this review, we are focusing on Month Two and the book "Holes" by Louis Sachar.

An answer key follows to ensure the student understands the lesson broken down by chapter.
Vocabulary quizzes.
A final Check-In for the month's portfolio that encourages the student to have goals, to focus on what needs more work, new goals and what they found interesting that they learned for that month.

This is my student working on the "Holes" Interactive Notebook.

After I prepared for the month's assignments, my student was able to begin work. What I noticed about the design of Home School Navigator is there is a routine to the assignments. So once the student becomes acclimated to how to use it, it will become easier. Mine had to get used to opening links and not closing out the Home School Navigator page where she was working. It usually starts out with an introduction video by a Home School Navigator teacher and then the student proceeds to follow the easy instructions on how to proceed.

I like that Home School Navigator breaks the activities into very practical lessons from following instructions to phonics/word study/vocabulary to computer skills, independent reading and poetry. The root word hand outs are an important part of learning how to spell too. There is also the option to upload and save copies of the work or a check box can be clicked to note that the assignments were completed without uploading. If you upload, at the end of the year, the student can download the portfolio. Overall, I think it's a very comprehensive and inexpensive curriculum for students of various levels. I think for the older students, they will learn how to navigate with the various links and videos to where it won't cause them issues. For younger students, I do believe they will require a little more assistance from a parent but to me, that is not a hindrance as I like to ensure my student is understanding what they are learning.

There are also supplies that can be ordered such as the books that coincide with the Interactive Notebooks.