Institute for Excellence in Writing Resource Package Review

I had the privilege of trying the Institute for Excellence in Writing Resource Package: Timeline of Classics, Teaching with Games Set, and A Word Write Now for this review to use in conjunction with our own homeschool curriculum. This is a Schoolhouse Review Crew Review. All opinions expressed are my own or those of my family.

Institute for Excellence in Writing is a company that helps homeschooling parents and teachers to teach language arts, mainly: reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and communication through speaking and listening effectively. They have many products to help with this. I got to try out physical copies of the Resource Package: Timeline of Classics, Teaching with Games Set, and A Word Write Now for this review.

Timeline of Classics: Historical Context for the Good and Great Books is a chronological index of classic world literature that shows a extensive view of World History. This book by Gail Ledbetter is a sturdy spiral-bound paperback containing 192 pages. This teacher and student reference has many books, audio books, movies, etc. to choose from that correspond to a time period in chronological order. These (about 15-25 references) are listed on each page by description or time period, title, author, and ability level (Elementary, Middle, and High School). The timeline is divided into sections of world history: Ancients, The Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, & The Modern World.

Teaching with Games Set included: a book by Lori Verstegen that teaches you how to create games for learning in the classroom and a 2 DVD/1 CD set. The book is a sturdy spiral-bound paperback containing 118 pages. This teachers resource is broken up into five groups: "No-Prep" Games, Matching Card Games, Question Games, Math Facts Games, and "Make As You Teach" Games. The CD has 25 ready-to-play game templates to print out and make and the two DVD set is a workshop that teaches you how to implement those games and adapt them to any subject, any grade level, and almost any number of players. This is ideal for homeschool, team teaching groups, traditional classrooms, and Sunday schools.

• DVD Disc 1: 70 minutes long, "No-Prep" Games and Matching Card Games
• DVD Disc 2: 60 minutes long, Question Games, Math Facts Games, and "Make As You Teach" Games
• CD-ROM Disc 3: Teaching With Games PDF e-Book and Bonus Material from the book, Dress-Ups, Decorations, and Delightful Diversions to help teach stylistic techniques in writing

A Word Write Now: A Thematic Thesaurus for Stylized Writing is a book by Loranna Schwacofer that helps writers find and replace words that are overly used with ones that are better. The book is a sturdy spiral-bound paperback containing 112 pages. In it are lists of words for each character quality or behavior trait. The pages are broken down by parts of speech like: nouns, nouns characters, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, descriptive words. On the pages it also has a definition at the top for the main word, some thoughts about the main word, a place to write additional words, and at the bottom a final quote with the word in it. The book is organized into an Introduction, Overview, Simple Definitions of Parts of Speech and four more sections:

1. Section A: Character Traits (words like: Anger, Courage, Laziness, etc.)
2. Section B: Descriptive Words (words that describe: Appearance, Temperature, Shape, etc.)
3. Section C: Words for Movement and the Senses (words for: Feet, Seeing, Speaking, etc.)
4. Section D: Appendix (other helps)

How We Used This and Our Thoughts:

As a homeschooler I love resources that make my life easier. The Institute for Excellence in Writing Resource Package gives me so much information right at my fingertips without having to look things up and go on an extensive search. I love having these amazing resources for use with my homeschooling curriculum.

Timeline of Classics: Historical Context for the Good and Great Books is an excellent reference that we have been using in conjunction with our eclectic style of homeschooling. It is wonderful for classical style homeschooling and we love how easy it is to look up a time period that we are studying to find media to read, watch, or listen to that goes along with our studies. History is so much fun to learn about and this reference gives us more to study and learn without having to dig through whole libraries. It is very flexible as well, letting you pick and choose what you want to use from the lists.

Teaching with Games Set is a great resource that gives you templates for games and teaches you how to make them best structured for your use. My family loves games! I love games that teach the best. All the games within the pages of Teaching with Games are fun, but not only that, they teach the student and player skills like: retention of knowledge, critical thinking, etc.  I also love how easy it is to change the games to fit our specific needs and even get ideas and inspiration to make up our own games. The CD makes it so much easier to print everything all out because it is in PDF format and the DVDs are helpful to get even more insight on what to do and how to use these games. My girls recently learned about the three main different kinds of rock. So from this book we played Rock Lotto with our whole family. It was fun to help them get the types of rock cemented into their brains even more because of playing this game.

A Word Write Now is great to use to enhance ones writing skills. I use a Thesaurus all the time with my writing and A Word Write Now is a fun and different way to go about looking up synonyms, antonyms, etc. This reference, when used, makes a world of difference in improving the student's writing. We love how it is organized and have it sitting on our shelf in reach of everyone in our family to use.

BUY IT
Timeline of Classics is $29 for the spiral-bound book and the PDF is $19. Teaching with Games Set is $19 for just the spiral-bound book and $29 for just the CD/DVD Set. A Word Write Now is $35 for the spiral-bound book.

Follow Them on Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/excellenceinwriting
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/iewriting
Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/iewtv
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iew
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/iewtv
Blog: http://iew.com/help-support/blog
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Iewriting/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/iew/

Read other homeschool curriculum reviews for Institute for Excellence in Writing...