Homeschool help

I think you guys know that I homeschool Haden but if you didn’t, you do now. And I’m helping Khristiaan prepare to take his GED. They both started having trouble in school when I was going through chemo and while I left them in for the rest of that year I decided to keep them home the next year.

Sometimes I find it hard at the ages they are to find materials or to help them out. So I was looking for something that would help me explain Math. I was in Math League in High School, but let’s face it, that’s been a few years ago.

In my search I found Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008 and since the price was right (about $38) I decided to give it a go. We had a little problem with the download, I think Haden let his laptop shut down prematurely and I was frantic for a bit trying to figure out what to do. After I got over chewing his butt (nah, mom’s never do that) I discovered that my receipt provided me with a download link. I was able to get it up and working with that.

It is so much more than I hoped for! Like I said, my main reason for wanting it was for math so that’s the area I looked at first. It has an awesome calculator in it! You know how much just the Trig/Calculus calculators can be. If he really gets stuck on a problem he can plug it in there and it not only gives him the answer but shows him the solution. But I really like how it explains the concepts, so when he gets stuck and my brain has cobwebs I think we can find a good explanation.

I peeked at looking up something like “platypus” and found it gave tons of information. Encyclopedic and photos. But then I wondered, what if he doesn’t know how to spell the word, maybe he types “platipus” and I found that it gave him alternate words, in this case, “platypus”. I, of course, had to check out the photo search so I typed in “woodpecker”. Wow, I got a lot of hits for that word. Did you know there is a Woodpecker Finch? I didn’t, but it looks cute, I may have to find me one. :)

And because I’m curious, I checked out the foreign language area too. Hubby speaks Spanish and is learning French. I found that you can type in the word you want to know like “coffee” and it told me that in Spanish it would be “un café” (literally a cup of coffee). There’s also an area of tutorials. I bet Dennis wishes I had this for his Valentine’s card but I’ll explain that tomorrow.  :)

There’s a lot more in there that I think I would actually use but if you’re curious you can go look at their website, you can see a screenshot of that calculator there too. I did notice that it gave some tools for writing a novel, I feel a new assignment coming on. Don’t tell hubby that there’s tips on improving my writing or he might insist I stop ending sentences with prepositions.

Hey, maybe if I poke around in it enough it will tell me how to lose these extra pounds without diet and exercise. You can bet I’ll be looking into that. 

No, Kiwi, you cannot come out and play!

tags: homeschool  microsoft student  educational