Maybe it’s just me, but science always seems to be the hardest subject for me to plan and teach. It’s not just the hands-on, “it’s hard to do experiments when you’re not in a classroom” kind of stuff, I just have a hard time with all of it: finding a good program, explaining scientific terms, coming up with activities to make science learning fun… Because of this, I was really excited for the opportunity to review Rainforest Journey, a digital learning program for elementary students by EdTechLens. For this review, we received two one-year subscriptions: one for third grade for Little Man, and one for fifth grade for Big Boy.
The student learning part of the website is basically an interactive textbook. Students can read the passages themselves or have passages read to them. Amazing, real life photos illustrate the reading, and extras like videos and additional facts can be accessed throughout. Vocabulary terms that your student may be unfamiliar with can be hovered over and the definition will pop up.
Lessons only take about fifteen to twenty minutes to complete, so it was easy for us to add this into our daily school rotation. The lessons do still require teacher interaction. This is another one where you can’t just sit your child in front of the computer and expect it to do all the work for you. You are expected to interact and fill out the lessons, but the website offers the lesson plans and even the script necessary for you to easily do this with little planning on your part. Each unit comes with hands-on activity ideas in the Teacher Resources section. This is a great way to reiterate the learning your child has done in that unit. Little Man had a lot of fun learning about temperature while figuring out where the “Mystery Vacation” was going to take place.
The different grade levels still teach the same units. So Big Boy was learning the same thing at the same time as Little Man, but the higher grade is a big more strenuous. I really liked this because we could still talk about the rainforest all together. We were all still on the same page, but the actual lessons were tailored to their specific levels, which keeps the older one from getting bored or the younger one from getting overwhelmed by difficult material. While this unit’s hands-on learning focused on temperature and graphing for third grade, the fifth grader was learning about how and why we have different seasons and how those season vary between where we live and the rainforest.
The entire Teacher Resource section is awesome. It gives you all the printouts you will need, as well as the lesson plans for each lesson. This would also be a great program to use in a classroom setting. The site offers so many great resources for teachers to keep track of their students’ progress, plan lessons, and extend learning beyond the website.
The kids love learning on the computer, so this has been a good addition to our school day. It gives us science learning without much extra work on my part, which I like. The beautiful photos really add a lot to the lesson and help us get excited about learning about the rainforest. The only complaint my kids have is that they wish it incorporated more videos. But as a digital textbook, I really feel like it is serving its purpose and offering us an enjoyable way to learn science.
