Review: Essential Skills Advantage

We were given a years’ access for both of our boys to the educational and colourful Complete Home Learning Suite from Essential Skills Advantage. ESA is a great supplement, online subscription program consisting of over 14,000 lessons that help enhance your child’s learning. This self-paced program has been carefully designed by teams of educators and is used in over 20,000 schools in North America.

In the Complete Home Learning Suite, you will have access to five subjects plus a ‘Marks’ area:

Reading – Curriculum for grades K-6
Language and Grammar – Curriculum for grades K-6
Math – Curriculum for grades K-6
Science – Curriculum for grades K-3
Geography- Curriculum for grades 4-6
Marks, Report Cards and Certificates

You can read about the curriculum here and when you click on a white link, you will be transferred to a page that contains loads more information about each concept your child will be learning.

This program offer a great ‘Marks’ area where parents are able to view the student progress and print out report cards and certificates for the units that have been completed. You are also able to see how much time your child has spent completing each topic and when they last accessed it.

How did we go?

After logging in, you choose the correct student, the subject, their grade level and finally you select a program you wish for them to work on. As each boy has their own laptop, I was able to log in each one on their own laptop and they were able to complete their work at the same time. If we were out and about, the boys took turns on the iPad.

As B is in grade 4, he concentrated on the correct curriculum for his grade except for science. In science he completed grade 3 more as a review of the information he has already learnt. As for R, he is in grade 6, so he concentrated on the curriculum for all the subjects in his grade except for science.

Our boys were easily able to navigate the site for themselves and found the short, interactive lessons fun. These lessons were able to keep their attention, while making them think.

R concentrated on grammar, as you can see in the picture below, as he is struggling a bit with it in his PACE’s. He found the activities really helped him and enjoyed reviewing and practicing his grammar skills.

B on the other hand is more into science at the moment and loved completing the science part of this curriculum. Life science was his favourite, learning about habitats, adaptions and the food chain.

Even though the boys had the subjects that loved, we also used lots of the other curriculum available too.

Overall, we really loved using this self-paced, online curriculum. The variety of topics is fantastic and we found it worked well with our current curriculum. Being able to use this program on our iPad, meant that we were able to keep up with our work while out and about.

Essential Skills Advantage has been a great supplement curriculum for us and our boys are looking forward to continuing with throughout the rest of the year.

Pricing is always very reasonable, making it very affordable for homeschooling families.