Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew. Please understand that affiliate links are used in this post.
Welcome all! It’s a brand new year with the homeschool review crew, and like always, it’s time to tell you all about the SchoolhouseTeachers.com site. It’s a fantastic resource for homeschoolers with loads of courses for all ages. I can’t wait to tell you all about their Ultimate PreK-12 Annual Membership.. For this review, we focused on public speaking courses for highschool.
SchoolhouseTeachers.com, details
So first off I wanted to share with you some of the details about what makes SchoolhouseTeachers.com special.
- They have over 475 courses for you to peruse, allowing you to tailor your education to your specific student. Many of these courses are interactive. This online curriculum continues to change. New courses are always be added, and older courses are being updated.
- School Boxes. This something new this year. Within SchoolhouseTeachers.com you can find boxed curriculum. An excellent place to start if you need a starting place.
- Each course comes with lesson plans tailored to that particular course, I’ll talk more about this later. 🙂
- There is an extensive video library.
- World Book online. So basically you have an interactive encyclopedia right in your home!
- Categories to make searching for things easier. Like highschool courses, electives, science, math etc.
- Resources such as the Focused Learning Centers, the Literacy Centre, and helps for Special Needs.
SchoolhouseTeachers.com continues to work hard to make sure their online teaching resources are helpful to a variety of homeschoolers. They want to meet the needs that you have with your students.
How We Used It
One of the things I love to do is to walk my son through the courses that he’ll take. He’s learning to figure out how much work he needs to do if he wants to get his work done in a certain time. So it’s nice when looking at a course to be able to show him the weeks and workload involved and how much credit he’ll get upon completion.
My son has a fairly busy school year so I made a point of picking something it would be fairly easy for him to work in around his other studies. Since he was unable to take Drama at the local highschool this year, I thought taking the public speaking course would suit him well.
I went to grade 10 course selections, and then to the drama and speech electives.
I looked at two courses on SchoolhouseTeachers.com for public speaking, and since I can, I thought I’d combine them for my lad. Isn’t that part of the joy of homeschooling? You can use materials in a way that suit you best.
I mashed these two courses to make a full credit course for him. I added some speech analysis for him from different sources around the web, and from an older review. It will take him the balance of the year to completely finish as he’s doing it as an add in around his other courses.
Lessons come as PDF’s to download. They were also easy to view online. Printing them off was completely optional. My lad likes to jot notes down. I found the downloads were handled differently for each course. In the Introduction to public speaking the lessons were one complete download, in advanced the downloads were divided up. My son preferred the separate downloads.
Each course delineates what to expect each week. If desired, you can print this sheet off to facilitate completion.
What we liked
I liked how the advanced public speaking course encouraged critical thinking. Looking through a number of ways to evaluate speeches, and then coming up with a system that worked for that student.
A fun assignment was to pretend you were on Shark Tank. We’re Canadian so we used the Canadian version called Dragon’s Den for our inspiration. My son has a love of ants, so decided to talk about selling a formicarium for ants. This gave him something to demonstrate as he talked about why his product was better than the competition.
It was good to see him take something he loved (ants) and be able to use that in honing new skills (public speaking). With their all in one curriculum, SchoolhouseTeachers.com has allowed to use some of his passion in developing skills for the future.
I have reviewed this digital curriculum several times in the past. Every time I have focused on different aspects of this tremendous resource.
- Four Approaches to SchoolhouseTeachers.com.
- Reasons to Consider SchoolhouseTeachers.com.
- Review: SchoolhouseTeachers.com.
- Interesting Courses through SchoolhouseTeachers.com.
Social Media Links
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SchoolhouseTeachers/ and https://www.facebook.com/SchoolhouseTeachers
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOSMag/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tosmagazine/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/tosmag/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7i0BRyoTPYT3chTcj52UmA
Read SchoolhouseTeachers.com Reviews!
One of the amazing things about the crew is that everyone uses SchoolhouseTeachers.com differently. Need proof? Read the reviews from all members of the crew. Our review types are varies: Video, social media, and blog posts. Click the image below to read them!
I liked the public speaking course but it was a lot of writing to add to another full-on writing course for my girl that I tried it with. Creating a speech is not a quick and easy thing but I really liked the way they approach it.
yes, it takes time so we haven’t done a whole lot with it, needing to work around a lad’s already busy schedule. 🙂