Science can be a difficult subject for homeschoolers. In our house, we love to do kitchen science experiments and other hands-on things like that, but I felt like my kids weren’t getting a strong foundation in the vocabulary and technical workings of science. As a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, Visual Learning Systems gave my boys and I an opportunity to review their online programs: Digital Science Online: Elementary Edition (Grades K-5) and Digital Science Online: Secondary Edition (Grades 6-12). Because they are in grades 2 and 4, we focused on the Elementary Edition for the time we’ve used it.

Digital Science Online is a subscription based service intended to supplement your child’s science learning. The site offers videos on a large variety of science topics. Like, really large. Within the Elementary Edition, it is broken down between Primary (grades K-2) and Elementary (3-5). Primary offers videos on the subjects of physical, earth, life, and health sciences. Within each of these subjects there are about twenty videos, ranging from topics like the seasons, fossils, and the water cycle. Each of these videos is about ten minutes long and give an overview of the topic with narration.

Elementary offers the same subjects as Primary, with the exception of health, but the topics within the subjects get a little more advanced and the videos slightly longer. Topics like electrical circuits, chemical reactions, and the building blocks of matter can all be found under the subject of physical science. For this age group, the videos are about fifteen minutes long.

Middle and high school are grouped together and are offered in the Secondary Edition. Subjects included in the Secondary Edition include physical, earth, life, integrated, health, and biology. The number of videos in each subject varies, but many still have about twenty. For the Secondary Edition, the videos are about twenty minutes and deal with much more complex topics like atoms, Newton’s law, and the periodic table.

In addition to these videos, the site also offers images, animations, and a teachers guide. In the teachers guide you can find things like discussion questions, activity ideas, and worksheets. Some of the worksheets are your typical “fill in the blank” kind of things, while others might include word searches, crosswords, or matching.

Because I have one child in second and the other in fourth, we were sort of in between the “primary” and “elementary” levels. After poking around and watching a few videos in each level, we decided to focus on Elementary (grades 3-5). Because we don’t have a principal science curriculum (it’s one of the areas we’ve been unschooling this year), I didn’t have a specific subject I wanted them to focus on. This site is created to be a supplement to your current learning, so it breaks things down into various categories but does not give you an order in which you have to use it. And since I didn’t have an order either, I allowed the boys to choose whatever struck their fancy. Together they agreed on Life Science.

We added Digital Science Online to our list of “school to get done every day.” Both boys use a computer math program, so it usually ends up going right in between the two. You can use your iPad or other internet capable device, but for us it’s been easier to just do it at the computer. The boys sit together and one will choose what topic within Life Science they want to watch today. At the end of the video, there are about five review questions from the video. The boys talk about it and figure out the answers together. When they’re done, we sit together and discuss what the video was about. I love to use the supplied Video Review sheet in the Teacher’s Guide as a discussion starter.

My initial thinking with this program was that it would be a good way to familiarize the kids with the technical terms and vocabulary that they might not get from our experiments at home. And it does do a great job with that. The videos make learning more fun for them than just sitting and reading a chapter out of a textbook. But Digital Science Online offers so much more! I have been really impressed with the activities supplied within the teacher’s guide. Not only are there worksheets to reiterate the vocabulary they learn, but many topics also offer fun activities like games, scavenger hunts, or experiments. We have gotten so much more from this site than I originally anticipated, and we are loving all of it. The boys are learning so much about plants and animals, and they really enjoy their video time. I am happy because I feel like they’re getting a good science foundation with minimal effort on my part (OK, that might sound bad, but when you’re entirely responsible for your children’s education, you take help when you can get it). If you’re in the market for a supplement to your current science program, I highly recommend giving this one a try.