Review: Essential Skills Advantage

Essential Skills Advantage offered us the opportunity to review their Complete Home Learning Suite, so Sweetheart and I jumped in.  We were given a year’s subscription that gave us access to a WIDE variety of topics and subjects.

ESA offers a supplemental curriculum that is used in more than 20,000 schools.   It is geared for ages K – 6th grade and has over 14,000 lessons!   Their program would keep the kids occupied for a while!    They offer the following programs:

Math – Levels K-6
Language and Grammar – Levels K-6
Reading – Levels K-6
Science – Levels K-3
Geography – Levels 4-6

We focused on the Reading with my kindergartener because that’s where she most needed some supplementation.      Logging into the programs is easy, and she can easily find the material to work on.   She did have trouble switching subjects by herself, but that’ll be improved once she can read. 🙂  In the Kindergarten Reading level, there was a lot to do to keep her busy.    In the reading readiness section, she could choose between picture vocabulary, visual skills, auditory skills, and basic concepts.   The Sight Words section had Word Lists 1-5 and Colors, Numbers, and More.  The third section was filled with stories.

Sweetheart really enjoyed the Reading section of this program.   The program doesn’t lead you through a specific track of exercises, so the kids can jump around and try different things.  She really enjoyed the Word List section (hooray for learning sight words!) and I would have to pull her off the computer.   (That’s an improvement from another reading program we’re using, where I have to make her do it. sigh.)

I really appreciated that she didn’t have to be able to read to do the first parts of the reading program.  (You’d be surprised, I’ve run into others for Kindergarten that she couldn’t do yet because the words were just printed on the screen instead of spoken.)

The story time section is still too advanced for her, but we’ll get there.  That was a bit of a disappointment because who doesn’t love stories?   I wish they had started with stories with simpler words.

I’m planning to continue to use this as a supplement for Sweetheart over the summer, to give her some variety, reward her with media time, and continue to practice her reading skills.  We’ll also play around with the Math and Science sections.  The science portion seems rather basic but it’ll be good review and fun for her to play with.   The Math will both be review and some introduction to new material perhaps – it covers the basics as well as addition, subtraction, money, and calculator basics.  We’ll ease her into that portion!

A yearly subscription to the Complete Home Learning Suite is $69.99, and they have monthly and 6-monthly subs. Also, subscription prices are available for more than one child.

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Blog: http://buyesa.com/blog/