Mar
Here to Help Learning Review
Hailey has always loved writing. She is very creative and does a wonderful job at writing. Teaching writing seems like such a huge task and I really want to make sure I do a good job of helping Hailey to become an excellent writer. But, I want to make sure I keep writing fun since she loves it so much. I have been really struggling to find a writing curriculum that we both enjoy. We were recently given the chance to check out Here to Help Learning, a writing curriculum that I had never seen before, and I was thrilled to be able to check it out. We could pick which level we wanted (more on the different levels below) and I decided to try Flight 1 Essay Writing for Hailey.
Here to Help Learning is a writing program developed by Mrs. Mora, a homeschool mom of over 20 years. She created this program to help parents and co-op teachers to be able to make teaching writing fun. The lessons are based on the theme of going on a flight. There are 2 different levels of Here to Help Learning and within those 2 levels are 3 different flights you can take. The first level is geared for children in 1st-3rd grade and it teaches paragraph writing. Within the paragraph writing level you are able to pick from the 3 different flights. Each flight has 32 lessons to cover one year of writing curriculum. The flights do not have to be done in a certain order, but rather can be done based on the interest of the topics in the flight.
Click on the picture above to enlarge and you can see the different topics you can pick from in each paragraph writing flight.
The next level covers essay writing and geared for 4th-6th grade. There are three different flights in the essay writing, each one has 32 lessons to cover a year of curriculum. Once again they can be done in any order. Flight 3 will be working towards writing and publishing a 6 chapter book, so you might want to save that one for last- but you certainly don’t have to.
Click on the picture above to enlarge and you can see the different topics you can pick from in each essay writing flight.
Once you have decided which flight to do you can start the lessons. The lessons are done online with Mrs. Mora as your teacher. You will spend 2 days each week completing the lesson. The first day you do the lesson which has 5 parts in it, and includes:
- Pre-Flight Checklist- this is where Mrs. Mora is dressed as a flight attendant and helps you make sure you are ready for your flight.
- Flight Check-In- in this section you will check in work from the previous class, get new worksheets for that day’s lesson, and review the purpose of writing verse.
- Take Off- this is where the writing warm up takes place as well as going over the work that was done during the previous class.
- Full Throttle- this is the main part of the lesson where the Mrs. Mora guides the students through the part of the writing process covered that day.
- Flying Solo- the last part where the students are given an assignment to work on.
The second day in the week that you use Here to Help Learning is the day the students actually work on the flying solo assignment.
How did we use Here to Help Learning?
I decided to use Flight 1 of the Essay writing with Hailey (age 9, fourth grade).
Hailey’s favorite part of each lesson is the writing warm-up. Hunter (4 years old) and Harper (18 months old) both love to watch the lessons too. Mrs. Mora is very entertaining and really does making writing fun. Hunter and Harper always come running to watch when they hear us start a lesson. They were all working on their writing warm up in this picture.
When Hailey realized we would only be using Here to Help Learning 2 times each week she begged to do it every day. She always asks me, “Are we doing the fun writing today?”
Here Hailey is reading what she wrote on her webbing outline.
Mrs. Mora gave several great suggestions for creating a good environment to write in. So, Hailey got everything all set up and got to work on her first rough draft.
Hailey working on her first rough draft.
Hailey read her first rough draft to us.
After we went over her second rough draft together, Hailey wrote her final copy.
Then Hailey made a presentation folder for her essay.
I can not say enough good things about Here to Help Learning. I absolutely love it! Mrs. Mora really does make teaching writing and learning how to write fun! Not only is it fun, but the lessons are excellent. Hailey learned so much from just one flight. I am planning to continue using Flight 1 Essay Writing this year and then finishing it up next year before we move on to Flight 2 Essay Writing. I can definitely see us sticking with Here to Help Learning for our writing curriculum. I highly recommend this curriculum!!
Hailey’s review- “I loved it! The videos are so much fun. I give it 5 out of 5 stars.”
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