— The Titus 2 Homemaker

Super Star Speech (review)

July 26, 2011 By Rachel

Book Title: Super Star Speech

Price: $18.95-22.95 print (depends on binding style), or less for ebook edition

Published by: Super Star Speech.

We have noticed some issues with Sophia’s speech. A bit of a lisp sometimes, or substitutions of sounds. Mostly, she just mumbles. Honestly, I think she just picked up some bad habits from talking around a pacifier so often for so long; I didn’t really think she had any inherent speech impediment. But she still needs to speak more clearly for others to be able to understand her consistently! And I don’t want to frustrate her by just making her stop and repeat herself to practice something the right way. I wondered about some sort of games or something to make practicing less boring.

Then this review opportunity came along. I assume that Super Star Speech must be fairly new, because I’d never heard of it before. It’s a speech therapy manual designed to equip parents to do speech therapy at home with their own children. (Perfect for homeschoolers!) The primary manual is what I tested, ‘though there are additional manuals available for the sounds R and L; S, Z, and Sh; or Ch, J, and Th, so you can address those more in-depth.

In the original Super Star Speech book, there are some essential, foundational tools to equip you to do speech therapy for children. The most significant (at least for me) is the evaluation. An entire section contains materials to test your child’s speech. There is a series of images which the child is to name, so you can determine (without prompting him for the sound) whether he is able to pronounce each sound properly at the beginning, in the middle, and/or at the end of a word. Unfortunately, my daughter had difficulty identifying many of the images so I had to prompt her, anyway. The test still confirmed my suspicions – she can pronounce nearly all, if not all, of the phonograms; she just sometimes doesn’t. The evaluation materials are followed up by a chart in which to record the results. This process will tell you if your child is behind schedule on any of the sounds. (Sophia is definitely up to age level, at least. Even though she struggles with a sound or two, they’re apparently not sounds that should necessarily be mastered by her age. This is helpful for reassuring Daddy and Grandma! )

Suggestions are made for setting up a therapy plan. Then the instructions are provided. There are instructions offered for teaching each set of sounds. Lists of practice words are provided, as well. This is, of course, the primary substance of the text, but it doesn’t require much explanation – it just teaches you how to teach the sounds!

Finally, there is a section of games to make speech drills less drill-like. For our situation, this is what I expect to use the most.

If your child has some speech issues, this is a cost-effective way to address them. (It isn’t designed for severe impediments to speech, such as cleft palate or hearing impairment, but for basic speech delays.) If someone else is concerned about your child’s speech and you think it’s on-course, it can also be an affordable way to confirm that a child is progressing normally!

Consider visiting Super Star Speech on Facebook (while you’re there, “like” me, too!), and use the coupon code “mamabuzz” to receive a 20% discount on purchases from www.superstarspeech.com.

This is a MamaBuzz Media review. The product was provided by Super Star Speech for this review. All opinions expressed in this post are purely my own.

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Filed Under: Book Reviews - Homeschool Tagged With: home speech therapy manual, speech therapy at home, speech therapy for children, teaching R sound, teaching S sound

Balance Benders (review)

June 21, 2010 By Rachel

by The Critical Thinking Co.
$9.99/level

I have known of the The Critical Thinking Co. for a long time, but I was previously only familiar with their logic/critical thinking materials. I had no idea they had subject-specific books! My daughter loves puzzles, so, when offered, I jumped at the chance to review one of the Balance Benders books.

As it turns out, these are really a great tool. Ariel is seven, and just finishing up second grade, so we are using the Beginning level. But get this – these are algebraic concepts she’s learning. By making the problems visual and removing the numbers, algebra is automatically made far less overwhelming and much more concrete. It looks like puzzles, and Ariel has a blast with them. Meanwhile, she’s learning things like the commutative property and transitive property of equality.

Each page is topped with an image that is the “assumption.” A balance scale holds a shape or series of shapes on each side, and the scale is either balanced or unbalanced. (The early ones start out with balanced scales.) This offers a visual of whether the figure(s) on the left is/are equal to, greater than, or less than the figure(s) on the right. The remainder of the page is a list of statements, which also make use of the figures shown at the top. The student has to figure out which of the statements are correct. The puzzles, which get steadily more difficult as you draw nearer to the end of the book, are reproducible for your household’s use. Answers are found at the end of the book, complete with explanations and references to the applicable properties (which are all described on a couple of pages at the back of the book).

To give you an example, the first page of the Beginning book is topped with a balanced scale. One side holds a black square; the other holds a white circle. The instruction to the student is to “circle the three answers that will always be true.” The options are things like white circle equals black square; two white circles equal three black squares; one black square and one white circle equal two white circles. (These are all displayed as images on the page.)

Working through these with Ariel is making algebra seem much less intimidating to me! She doesn’t know she’s doing algebra; she just knows the puzzles are fun. But I’m realizing that these concepts really are simple when they aren’t complicated by numbers and “x =.”

I would definitely recommend these books.

If you’re interested in The Critical Thinking Co., they have a couple of other things going on right now. There is a Critical Thinking Moments Video Contest and a Critical Thinking Heroes Award Program. They also have a new printables widget, that will allow you to embed free printables on your blog, website, or Facebook page. For more information, click the links.

This is a Mama Buzz review. The book for this review was provided by The Critical Thinking Co.

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Filed Under: Book Reviews - Homeschool Tagged With: algebra, book reviews, critical thinking press, curriculum, elementary mathematics, Homeschooling, logic, mama buzz

Rosetta Stone update

March 26, 2010 By Rachel

I think I first learned of Rosetta Stone at our state homeschool convention a number of years ago. I’m not sure if they had a booth at that point or just a flyer in the promotional bags, or what, but I remember being intrigued by the first description I read of the program. The idea of learning a language by immersion really appealed to me because it made sense. That’s how we naturally learn languages.

So far it seems to be working well for Ariel. We’re very inconsistent about using it, but she’s still learning. And she’s developing a greater interest in it, as well. She frequently works the bits of Spanish that she has learned into our everyday conversation, or eagerly shares it with her daddy. She doesn’t always get it quite right, but she’s getting better. Her familiarity is definitely growing. And her pronunciation is getting much better!

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Filed Under: Book Reviews - Homeschool Tagged With: foreign language, Homeschooling, rosetta stone, spanish

Rosetta Stone – still plugging away

January 30, 2010 By Rachel

I feel bad; I am supposed to have been writing about our experience and progress with Rosetta Stone and I haven’t said a word about it in ages. That’s because we’d been having technical difficulties. (Not RS’s fault – our “school” computer was having issues.) They seem to be resolved now, at least enough for the computer to function, and Ariel’s been pretty consistently using the software for a couple of weeks now. (I haven’t found a time I can consistently use it, yet. I’m lucky if I can squeeze in thirty minutes uninterrupted for quiet time before my children wake up, regardless of how late or early I get up. They have radar or something.)

I’m not usually in there with Ariel when she does it, and the software uses headphones, so I don’t hear it much, either, but I am sensing progress. Her pronunciation is greatly improving, for one thing! At first, she wanted to “read” the words off of the screen – with typical American pronunciation – instead of listening as the words were pronounced, so her own pronunciation was awful. But now I’m hearing the difference, even in words that aren’t part of the software. The other day she was playing Wii, and she was “speed slicing” against a computer character, “Pablo.” She recognized how his name should have been pronounced. Before Rosetta Stone, she would not have pronounced this properly.

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Filed Under: Book Reviews - Homeschool Tagged With: foreign language, Homeschooling, Reviews, rosetta stone, spanish

Puzzleball Globe (review)

November 25, 2009 By Rachel

96-Piece Children’s Globe
For children in the early grades, consider the 96-piece Puzzleball Globe. Large pieces and child-friendly graphics make this a perfect puzzle for a six-year old.

Bright, colorful, and adorned with animals, your young students will get a kick out of assembling and reassembling this puzzle.

Why Give Your Child A Puzzle To Teach Geography?
Puzzles can be educational in so many ways because they stretch your child’s brain and improve the way his mind solves problems. While he’s solving a puzzle, he’s really teaching his brain to work in new ways. As your child solves a geography puzzle he is mentally drilling himself with physical facts, such as what country goes next to the one he has just completed. Unconsciously he is making a number of associations as he searches for the next piece.

More Realistic Than A Flat Puzzle
Flat puzzles of spherical items are easier to assemble, but what if you could hone your geographical skills on something more appropriate, more true to life? Now you can with Puzzleball Globes. These sturdy plastic 3-D puzzles come in different levels suitable to be used with beginners or for a refresher for both your pre-teens and older children.

No Glue Required!
Each Puzzleball Globe comes with beautiful, vibrantly-colored, and perfectly-crafted curved puzzle pieces that allow for an exact fit and are easily assembled with no glue required!! A stand is included to display your work of art, but you will have so much fun putting it together that you shouldn’t be surprised if the stand gets little use!

Price: $12.75

Put out by: Timberdoodle (Publisher: Ravensburger)

For about the last week, my husband and I have been battling what appears to be the lovely H1N1 flu. So the timing was great for this puzzle to arrive in the mail from Timberdoodle to help keep Ariel occupied – at least in theory. The puzzleball globe has plastic pieces that go together to form an actual sphere. This is great for geography, as it’s more accurate than flat maps! The plastic pieces are very sturdy, and much easier to attach to each other than cardboard pieces typically are. The two-year-old hasn’t knocked the puzzle apart yet. (And if you know her track record, you know that’s saying a lot!)

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this puzzle. It’s such an unusual concept that I couldn’t really imagine the implementation. When the box arrived, I was relieved to see that the starting piece is packaged separately so you can find it, and you know where to begin. There are guide pieces provided in the box so you know what the finished puzzle should look like, and the pieces are all numbered on the back for self-correction. Even after all that, though, Ariel really struggled with this puzzle. With her daddy’s help, she did ultimately get it together, but she required a good deal of assistance. (Part of that, I think, is just her laziness about having to work at figuring it out. She wanted to just know where the pieces go instead of having to work through it which, of course, is part of putting a puzzle together.)

We have no complaints about this puzzle. It’s a great concept, it’s very well-made, and, by using the provided stand, we can even keep it together if we choose to and use it for our geography studies. Assuming we can manage to avoid losing any pieces, I expect this to last for Sophia and perhaps even future children.

The product for this review was provided by Timberdoodle and MamaBzz.