Essential Skills Advantage, a review

Review: Essential Skills Advantage, Complete Home Learning Suite

5/31/2016

It has been our delight to again review for Essential Skills Advantage. We have had the pleasure of reviewing The Complete Home Learning Suite is an online program designed for students in Grades K-6 to focus on reading, spelling, language arts, geography and science.

My son and I have reviewed Essential Skills Advantage (ESA) before, and always find it a useful program for doing some learning and testing of subjects we often don't really concern ourselves about.

Imagine my delight when I learned that ESA now has geography classes as well AND they have a whole section on Canada!!! My son was much intrigued and spent his entire time with the complete home learning suite in this area.

So just what is Essential Skills Advantage (ESA)?

ESA is a supplementary program for grades K-6 with over 14,000 lessons. It is an online learning opportunity that reinforces skills taught, and helps student discover skills they have yet to possess. In other words.. it's asks questions LOTS of questions, and through those questions children learn what they do and do not know. It's not a bad system, I like it as points out areas that may need more attention paid to them, or in the case of my lad... helps him learn some pivotal facts about Canada. Facts that until now have seemed unimportant to learn.

Science is K-3, Geography grades 4-6, Reading, Language/Grammar and Math are for grades K-6. I have to admit, that my son chose what he wanted to do with this program. He was very focused on "MOM! They have information on Canada!!!" And what does a homeschool parent do when their child is excited about something? They let them run with it. :)

Under Canadian Geography you will find these categories
1. Provinces and Territories
2. Provincial and Territorial Capitals
3. Other Major Cities
4. Bodies of Water
5. Physical Regions
6. Biomes
7. Time Zones
8. Natural Landmarks
9. Human Landmarks

If you want to know what the unit is about, you can press on unit description.

The units move forward as you complete each lesson. I find that you can't really move forward well unless you have answered the question correctly. Two different noises indicate whether you are correct or not. All you need to do is answer the question, and the next in the series will pop up if you are correct. If you answer incorrectly you get one more chance to get it correct and then it moves on to the next question. I appreciate this aspect as it means your student need to think before they blithely check an answer.

My son always liked seeing this screen. It would mean the end of the unit he was currently studying... what student doesn't like to see the end to learning and questions eh? :) He was occasionally disappointed if he got a poorer grade, but I was surprised! Not doing well on one segment proven to be an incentive to do better next time. See? Check out the great improvement!

So.. what do we think of ESA?

Well, I love how easy it is to use.
Login and student identification are easy to manage,
My son could run it without help.
If you need to use a pen/paper it will tell you.
It advances on it own.
One section naturally leads to the next.

What Does my Son think?
"I like that I am learning more about Canada mom".
"It's easy to do and it makes me learn things if I want to do well on it."
"I still don't remember how to spell some of the names though..."

As you know, I have reviewed this program through the TOS crew board, others have also reviewed it, and if you click the image below you can read what others have to say.