Review: Essential Skills Advantage

8/26/2014

You know, I am SO blessed doing reviews for the Homeschool Crew? We just finished our subscription to one reading program and we were offered a different reading program called Essential Skills Advantage. Just when my son was looking for a change, we got right what we needed. Isn't it great how God works it all out? We have thoroughly enjoyed our review period withEssential Skills Advantage and plan to keep using this reading program for children. :)

Let me walk you through Essential Skills Advantage so you know what to expect. :)

First you have the login screen. There are two screens, the parental login and then a student login. The computer saves the parental one, but doesn't the student one. It would be helpful if they did, but I suppose if you have more than one child using it, you'd want the security of knowing they are doing ONLY their work and not anyone else's. :)

This brings you to another screen that looks like this. This is where the different categories are laid out. Changing categories is such as easy thing to do. We mostly used grade three, but we jumped around a bit using some grade two, some grade four. So easy to work with. We plan to use more areas as we continue throughout the year.
As you can see it offers the following

Complete Reading (offered for grades K-3)
Fun with spelling (1-3)
Vocabulary Builder (4-6)
Spell Master (grades 4-6)
Grammar (grades 3-5)
Spelling Stumpers (two levels offered)

Let's say you've chosen to work with grade three. This is the next screen you will see. As you can see we are half way through vocabulary builder. My son does three sections every day. Some take more time, some take less. It gives him a definitive number to focus on though.

Each section opens into another grouping. When you complete an area it lights up with stars. Those stars show how well you did. My son's goal is to get three stars under each category. The program works with the children giving them a warning blip if they choose the wrong answer, and often gives them a second try.

I chose one category and deliberately did a few things wrong to show you a feature my boy has really picked up on. Do you see the bar at the bottom? it has different colours: green, orange and blue? The blue shows the question left to be answered. The green is correct, the orange is incorrect.

When your child is done an area, they get a screen that shows their overall result.

If you want to see how you are doing in the overall area, you can click on the yellow star and it will bring you to a page like this. The stars show the score they go, they can see how far through the program they are with a numeric value and a bar graph.

I like that this online learning program has a variety of methods to teach the children.   You get yes/no questions, write in the answer, drag correct answer, click on the write answer etc.    In fact they have over 20,000 activities to keep children engaged and interested. Starting from kindergarten all the way up to grade six.

Our opinions:
I like the program. The variety of activities keeps in engaging for my son.   The instructions are clear.    I like that if he doesn't understand what is being asked he can click on the "?" mark in order to hear the instructions again. I like that he doesn't complain (unless he's doing reading comprehension) about doing ESA. He likes it and does well at it and it is good at helping him choose the correct answer. I like that he is learning to read even better.      I also like that it challenges him a bit. He likes to do things verbally and this program forces him to read out his answers, and then look for the answer if he doesn't know it (particularly in the reading comprehension area).

I did struggle with the "forced" to get 100% in order to advance that some of the activities have. There are pros and cons to this approach particularly if the default is the only other answer. Then it becomes a bit of a guessing game for the child, and are they really learning?   But on the flip side, for the child who is really focused on getting it right the first time, it gives them a boost to look a bit harder at the question being asked.   it worked both ways for my boy depending on the activity involved.

For at one of the activities I heard frustration from my lad. "MOM!   Why don't they put them farther apart?"    And when I checked I did notice it was true... some of the spacing is a little tight if you aren't steady with your clicking.   And when you KNOW what you meant to click on and you missed one boy child gets a bit frustrated and will wail "Mom, I know the answer, but the computer says I'm wrong!!!!". :)   So he's learning to exercise a bit more control.

My son's thoughts: "It's a good program, it's fairly easy, and there's really nothing I don't like about it. Sometimes it's a bit annoying, when it gives you really hard questions."

Product Details:

Vendor: Essential Skills Advantage.
Product: Their complete on-line program. Premium package.
Price: 14 day free trial, $9.99/month. if you sign up before October 1st, they will give you a 50% off discount of your monthly fee with the code TOS50.
If you would like to work with a sponsored version of the program (so has ads and missing some features) you can go to ESA Learning for a free version.
Age Range:This is idea for K-6 or for remedial work for older students.

A clarification from John from ESA.
"I did want to clarify that the content of the free program is the same as the premium program. The difference relates to the parent portal. No ads are displayed to the children. Ads are displayed on the sponsors landing page and in our weekly newsletter. Here’s an example of our landing page www.LearnWithESA.com/JohnLennie. Here’s an example of our newsletter http://bit.ly/1pcFs0b."

To read what other crew members thought, click on the link below or HERE.