Lobster Network is a social networking site, on which you can share, sell, buy, or keep track of certain items.  The items can include anything, from books to movies to household items.  The best part is, it’s free to sign up and use.

For me personally, Lobster Network is a great tool to help me keep track of items that we own.  For insurance purposes especially, this could be quite useful.  If you just want to keep a private inventory of your items (for example, the homeschooling items/books that you have acquired), you can, and noone else can see your inventory.  However, if you’d like to sell your stuff or share your stuff, you can do that too.  Lobster Network has its own messaging system for this purpose.  With the click of a button, you can borrow a movie from a friend.  If you’re simply looking for something that you’ve been wanting, you can list that desire on your board.  You can include picures, as well, on any listing.  This is a great homeschooling tool, especially if you’re like me and homeschooling on a budget, trying to find the best deals on the things you need for next year.With this network you can invite friends onboard with you.  You and your friends can have your own “community” within Lobster Network.  All you have to do to try it is to sign up for a free account; it’s that easy.

To read more reviews, visit the TOS Homeschool Crew blog.

For those of us who homeschool, finding things to keep our toddlers busy while we do so, is quite the challenge on a daily basis. With our situation right now, if I don’t keep my toddler, Jaden, busy, then he’s going to keep me extra busy by doing things he shouldn’t do….for example, he decided to take a red stamper to my living room the other day….oh yeah, that was fun! I believe he stamped the fireplace and pictures on it, the tv, etc. I’ve found that when I keep him busy with small learning activities, we both have a much more peaceful day.

Ideal Curriculum is a company that is geared towards younger children. They aim to help preschoolers learn oral language, math concepts, and even reading. Their products are made for the purpose of helping individual students have better opportunities for learning, meaning that you, as the parent, can slow things down if need be….or if your child is learning and a little bored, you can speed things up or jump ahead.

We received Month 1 of the Transportation Theme, which is a month-long packet of curriculum for preschoolers. With this packet, there are activities with math concepts, reading concepts, art projects, and even science and history topics.  Your child will listen to music, as well as do plenty of hands-on projects.  The following are the skills taught with this packet:

• Letters and Sounds -Letter Names
• Phonological Awareness -Listening Skills
• Concepts About Print -Print is all Around
• Sight Words -Name Recognition
• Math -Rote Counting

I’ll be honest here and say that I wasn’t able to download this packet and actually use it, so I’m by no means an expert on Ideal Curriculum.  However, you can purchase this downloadable packet for $30 or the already printed packet for $55.  From May  1st – May 31st, you can use this 10% discount code: welovekids on your first order of any of their products.  To me, the price seems a little steep, as you are supposed to keep purchasing the packets, in order, up through 9 months…..so this would add up quickly.  For my preschooler, I tend to lean towards finding free, printable, educational activities online, plus finding bargains at yard sales, such as manipulatives, wooden puzzles, etc.  If you want an easier path, though, with everything laid out for you already, this might be the way to go.  It would definitely jumpstart your preschooler’s education, in my opinion. You can sign up for the Ideal Curriculum Newsletter to stay aware of all they are doing.

To read more reviews, check out the TOS Homeschool Crew blog.

(Disclosure: I received a downloadable version of this packet, free of charge, from Ideal Curriculum….but wasn’t able to download it.  It was for the purposes of this review.)

Lesson Planet is truly an awesome resource, in my opinion.  They are an online database of approximately 150,000 lesson plans for teachers to use for any subject, at any time.  For me it was way easier to use Lesson Planet’s searchable database than to sift through hundreds of results on a regular search engine….mainly because everything is categorized and simplified within Lesson Planet.  They offer a Homeschooling Web Guide for Teachers, as well as a Lesson Plan Curriculum Calendar, in which you can find ideas by the date.  In fact, there are several different ways that you can search, to help you cut down on the number of results that you have to sift through.  Here’s a short video to show you what I mean:

Lesson Planet doesn’t just have lesson plans, though; they also have printable worksheets.  I actually sifted through multiplication worksheets, since that’s something we’re really working on right now.  They have a variety of different types, including Problem Solving, Word Problem, Coloring, Drawing, Word Scramble, Printing Practice, Word Puzzle, Graphic Organizer, Essay, etc.  If your child needs specific help with a certain subject, it’s easy to find something to fit his needs.  Not only that, but you can look up the standards for each state on Lesson Planet.  These standards tell you what your child should be able to do within each age group.

Since I sometimes have a hard time finding art projects for us to do, I decided to look up lesson plans for arts and crafts.  I was able to narrow it down to Preschool arts and crafts.  I came up with 796 results, which I could further break down by rating or topic (main type of craft).  There were some very cool crafts within the database.

As a member of Lesson Planet, you can also share/create your own lesson plans.  You can actually try Lesson Planet free for 10 days.  After that it is $39.95 per year.  You can become a fan of Lesson Planet on Facebook.

For more reviews, you can check out the TOS Homeschool Crew blog.

(Disclosure: I received a free trial from Lesson Planet, in association with the TOS Homeschool Crew.)

When Jacob was about 2-3 years old, he suffered from constant ear infections.  We always knew that if he had a fever, it was coming.  As a consequence, he ended up having a slight hearing loss due to the infections and having to have tubes put in, as well as speech therapy for a while.  Now with Jaden, we’ve dealt with the same issue, only he is borderline on his hearing, and his ear infections seem to be slowly growing less and less.  I still am concerned about his speech, though, and I’m really grateful to have a resource that I can use with him, as he gets a little older.  It’s called Super Star Speech and is written by Deborah Lott, a speech-language-pathologist.

Super Star Speech was developed to help parents provide their children with forms of simple speech therapy at home….they have one focus. The focus of these books is the correction of articulation (speech sound) errors.  I’m going to be honest and state that I haven’t used this with Jaden yet, but I plan to start using it with him this fall.  Although the books are designed for ages 3 and up, he is only 2….I feel, as his mama, that he just needs a bit more time to learn certain words.  He’s really starting to grasp how to say certain things, and I want to give him time to develop his speech a bit more; that way, I can hone in on the areas where he might need a little bit of help.

Let me tell you a little bit about the book, though.  I received the Super Star Speech: Speech Therapy Made Simple book.  Consisting of 74 pages, it starts with an articulation test for you to do with your child in the very beginning.  This is an assessment tool for you, as the parent, to see where your child is at.  There are charts for you to mark down certain errors/responses you get from your child.  From there, you can formulate a plan of action with your child’s speech therapy.  You can even create lesson plans, although lesson plans aren’t written in stone in the book because of the different starting points for each child.  The book contains clear-cut directions, simple activities, and things you can do with your child to help him learn to articulate his sounds more clearly.  Here are the specific sounds it focuses on:

• P and B
• T and D
• N
• K and G
• NG
• F and V
• L
• SH
• CH and J
• TH
• S and Z
• R

There are wordlists and activities for each new sound.  With most of the sounds, you are showing your child how to articulate that particular sound with the use of a mirror.  There are extra games and activities included towards the back of the ebook, as well as worksheets and picture word cards.  The picture word cards are black and white, but a fun activity could be to have your children help you color the pictures and cut them out….I will probably laminate them, as well, to keep them in good condition for multiple uses.  You can purchase this book, already printed and spiral bound for $18.95 or ring bound for $22.95.  If you’d rather just download as an ebook and print out what you need, saving both resources and money, you can purchase it from CurrClick for $12.95.  It’s a wonderful resource for any homeschooling family.  It would also make an excellent supplement to any Pre-K, kindergarten phonics curriculum, in my opinion.

We also had the opportunity to review 3 of the Super Star Games: Silly Snail Parts of Speech Game, Planets, Moon and Stars! Quiz Game, and Covering the Continents.

Jacob and I actually play the Silly Snail Parts of Speech Game as a supplement to his language book now.  It is a lot of fun for both of us and gives us a welcome break.  He’s been gradually learning the different parts of speech this year, and this game just reinforces what he’s learning.  We cut out the different sentence cards, and placed them upside down by the game board.  The game board is just a big snail with a start to finish with the names of different parts of speech in the boxes.  The player picks up the card and has to guess which part of speech the bolded word in that sentence is.  If he gets it right, he gets to move his token (we use one of our flat colored counters for math) along the game path, stopping at the correct part of speech.  Whoever gets to the Finish first, wins.  It covers common nouns, proper nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.  If we ever make it all the way through the game cards, it’d even be easy to make up our own as extras.  This game can easily be stored in a folder for everyday use.  You can purchase this game for an awesome price of $3.50 from CurrClick.

The Planets, Moon, and Stars! Quiz Game is meant for 3rd grade and up; at first, I thought this would be great for Jacob, as we’re studying astronomy right now, but we need to cover a bit more material, and we’ll be able to play it for sure.  A lot of the questions are basic questions, though, so give or take a couple more weeks, and we’ll be supplementing this with our science curriculum.  With colorful game cards and multiple choice type questions, it’s an excellent learning activity that gets away from the textbook/workbook for a while.  He will love this game, as he has to answer as many questions as he can correctly, thereby collecting all of the planets that he can to add to his stash.  The player who eventually collects all of the planets wins the game.  You can also purchase this game for $3.50 from CurrClick.

The last game we reviewed was Covering the Continents.  This is a great geography supplement that will add a lot of fun to our homeschooling day.  Players have to try to answer as many questions correctly as they can; if they answer 3 questions correctly about a certain continent before the other players, they have “settled” that continent.  By the end of the game, the player who has “settled” the most continents wins the game.  The great thing about these games (all 3 of them), is that you don’t need anything else to play the games; everything is included, minus game tokens in the first game.  You just print, cut, and play.  Covering the Continents can also be purchased for $3.50 from CurrClick.

I would definitely recommend these resources, not only because they are affordable, but because they are wonderful resources to have on your shelf for your children to use and learn from over and over again; they are great for reinforcement.  Learning can be fun!  To read more reviews, you can check out the TOS Crew Homeschool blog.

(Disclosure: I was provided these products, free of charge, by Super Star Speech and Super Star Games, in association with the TOS Homeschool Crew.)