Essential Skills Advantage Review

Essential Skills Advantage provides another option for Online Education with their Complete Home Learning Suite.

What is Essential Skills Advantage?

ESA is an online resource, developed by experienced teachers, writers, and developers. Their goal is to provide an online program that allows kids to work independently, reduce distractions, increase motivation, reinforce understanding, and improve performance. There are many online activities that include audio, visual, and tactile learning to reinforce skills in reading, spelling, language & grammar, math, science, and geography.



Both of my kids have been trying out the Complete Home Learning Suite, which is a one-year subscription service that includes all the games in all disciplines. It is self-paced and the kids get immediate response back from the activities online. They could choose from a variety of activities including:

• Reading – K-6: Phonics and reading comprehension. 
• Spelling – Grades 1-6: Fun with Spelling and Spelling Stumpers. 
• Language & Grammar – Grades 3-6: Writing fundamentals, vocabulary, grammar and creative writing. 
• Math – Grades K-6: Complete math, operations, and concepts. 
• Science – Grades K-3: Earth & space, physical and life sciences. 
• Geography – Grades 3-5: Map & globe skills, World, American & Canadian geography.

Your launch page is the classroom page.  On that page you can easily log into each child's classes or you can check out their progress and marks in the activities. This gives you an idea of what the kids are learning and retaining.

From the classroom page you can log in to the children's accounts with one click. It then goes to the kid's page and they can choose the subject they want to study. The subject is then broken down into units.  My son immediately went to science and then into space science.  He is very much into space science, so this unit was a review for him and it was very easy for him to do. Some of the other

My daughter also went into science but decided to do the unit on life science and specifically animals. Because she is in kindergarten, the information was basic, but she did have fun with it.

I also had my kids try out some of the other subjects. Kaelyn worked on basic math and reading while I had Sebastian work on grammar and geography.  They enjoyed being able to do it independently and choosing what they wanted to do. If they got an answer wrong, they were given a chance to fix it before automatically marking it wrong, which helped my perfectionist son who only wanted to see 100% on the mark at the end of each activity.

What we liked:

• The activities were varied: matching, ordering, listening, typing, etc.
• The kids could work at their own pace. When they had enough, even if it was in the middle of a unit, they could just turn it off and start it up another day.
• I noticed it is filling in a few holes that my daughter has right now. There is such a large collection of subjects and units, that she could be busy for a VERY long time and learn a ton.
• It is independent and I AM NOT NEEDED!  I could have them both on computers for 20 minutes while I grabbed a cup of coffee or took a shower and the kids were still engaged and learning things.
• It is very easy for everyone involved. There is no prep for anyone and the kids enjoyed "computer time" as a fun activity.

What we didn't like:

• My son thought it was too easy. He is advanced and he is picky. Even though he thought it was easy, there were benefits to the subjects he was doing because it reinforced what we have been doing together.

Pricing:

Per month for one student $7.99; Extra students 99 cents per month.
6-month subscription for one student $39.99; Extra students 99 cents each per month.
Year subscription for one student $69.99; Extra students 99 cents each per month.