As I’m sure I have shared before, we’re “mostly unschoolers.” What this means, to me, is that I pretty much let the kids decide what they are learning and how they are learning it, based on their interests. They spend a lot of time reading what they want and playing. That’s the “unschooler” part, the “mostly” part comes in when I get too paranoid that they’re going to miss something that will affect their learning in years to come. Now, we could sit here and debate all day on whether that’s necessary or not, but the fact remains that that is my paranoia and we work with that. For this reason, we devote a small portion of our day to “grade level” pursuits. This involves things like math, vocabulary, and now, writing.

In the past we have worked on handwriting practice and some journaling, but we had not tried paragraph or essay writing until offered the opportunity to review Here to Help Learning. Here to Help Learning is an online subscription site that, through video and printables, teaches essay and paragraph writing. For our review, the boys (ages eight and ten) and I chose to begin with paragraph writing. Lessons are broken into three “flights,” each being a year of instruction. Each flight offers thirty two lessons. The lessons are expected to be completed one per week. Your child works through the lesson in two days: one day watching the video lesson and the second completing the writing assignment. Each day takes about forty five minutes to complete. Because neither of my children have done formal writing lessons before, I started them both together on Flight 1. I think it is more expected that the student will be closer to Little Man’s age (eight, around second grade) than Big Boy’s (ten, around fifth grade), but I did not feel that the video or lesson was in any way condescending or too easy for my older child. Both children thought the videos were silly, but that kept them entertained and kept their attention.

The video lessons are entertaining. The teacher, a homeschool mom like us, is willing to put herself in silly costumes and situations in order to make learning more fun. Some scenes are only her, explaining a concept, others are her teaching a group of children. This is cool because our kids work while the kids on the screen work. The lessons tell you when to pause so the kids at home can finish a short assignment, then restart to make sure the students are on the right track. Videos are streamed through the website, so can be watched from any device you can access the site on. We used the Chrome browser on my MacBook for our lessons.

I’d like to note here that, though there is a video teacher walking your students through everything, you as their teacher still need to be involved. This is not one of those products where you can just leave the kids to watch the videos and complete the assignments, you still have to be active during the process in order for them to get the full experience. There is a whole Teacher’s Guide that comes with the program that walks you through everything step-by-step. Now, they do make it easy for us. The Teacher’s Guide is wonderful and offers a lot of help, and the video lessons and worksheets do a lot of the work, you just need to supervise and be willing to step in when needed. I thought I’d be able to turn on the video then go do the dishes, but I ended up always staying with them and watching the video as well, so I could make sure to understand what they were doing and help with the assignments.

Other than the internet connection and site subscription, you will need a binder for each child, a set off dividers, and the ability to download and print off the workbook from the website. The teacher’s guide and the first video your students watch give you specific instructions for how to set up the binder. It was really easy and came out very organized and easy to use. The binder is referred to throughout the lessons, so it’s important not to skip this step.
The boys loved the organization of this program and they found the lessons easy to understand and use. At first they rolled their eyes at the video, because, like I said, the instructor is rather silly. But as we continued, I realized that they were learning a lot more and paying a lot more attention than they have to more boring video instructors. Overall they’ve enjoyed the process and have grown as writers. I’m looking forward to finishing paragraph writing and their learning to write at least one essay by the time it’s all said and done.