Review: 180 days of…

So I was searching for home school resources online, as I do, and I came across some packets that schools were sending out for virtual learning from home.

Quite a few of these packets for K5-3rd graders had pages from the “180 days of” series. So I decided to check it out.

I purchased a digital copy of the 180 Days of Social Studies: Grade 1 workbook because Social Studies was one of the areas I was having trouble covering with E.V.

The Setup:

The 180 days of… workbooks are split up by subject and grade. So you can customize!

Each of these workbooks has one worksheet per day. Most of them are further broken up into weeks. It works out to one worksheet a day, five days a week.

For those that are broken up into weeks, each week has an overarching concept that the child works on. Each day builds on the others. The final day brings everything together.

So for the writing workbook, on the first day, you might draw a picture of your favorite teacher and write a sentence about them. The second day you write three reasons that teacher is your favorite. The third day works on revision to make sure sentences are grammatically correct. Day four focuses on punctuation. On Friday the student uses what they worked on the first four days to write an opinion piece.

What I don’t like:

E.V. is five, turning six soon. I have her working in the 1st grade books and they are still quite easy for her. It takes 1-5 minutes (depending on content) to finish a worksheet.

Also, they are purely practice, they don’t actually teach the concepts. E.V. has had a pretty eclectic education so far and picks things up pretty rapidly, but sometimes she has no idea where to even start on a worksheet.

I know they are workbooks, not curriculums, but it would be nice if the worksheet would at least give a brief overview when introducing a new concept. The problem is that they don’t go with a specific curriculum so you have to cobble things together to follow the workbook if the student isn’t familiar with the material.

What I like:

They are comprehensive. As far as I can tell, if E.V. works through all these books and understands the concepts, then she will have most, if not all, the knowledge a first grader is ‘supposed to’ have.

I put ‘supposed to’ in quotes because what a first grader should know is very different depending on who you are talking to or what state or country you are in.

It helps fill holes in our home schooling. One of my fears is that I will miss something when I am home schooling EV. With these books, if we come across a page she has no idea how to do then I have found a hole to fill.

The fact that they are so easy means we don’t waste a lot of time on concepts she already knows. If she gets a question wrong though, we know that she needs more coverage in that area.

How I use it:

After a couple weeks using the 180 Days of Social Studies: Grade 1 book I ended up getting digital copies of all but one of the first grade workbooks. I use them as a safety net.

She spends about half an hour total each day doing worksheets from nine different workbooks. E.V. calls them her ‘warm-up sheets’ and a lot of the time has them done before I wake up. She gets to watch TV during breakfast if she has an agreed-upon amount of worksheets done, so she almost always does them early.

We then move on to the rest of our day which I adjust depending on how she did on the worksheets.

Are they worth it?

If you worry about holes in your child’s education, and don’t mind teaching concepts piecemeal, then absolutely the 180 days of… series is worth it.

If you or your child doesn’t like worksheets or you want an all in one solution, then these workbooks are probably not for you.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Lawrence

The Home Poppy

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