I have never been accused of our homeschooling being very structured.  We don’t have daily schedules that we strictly follow each day.  We basically school eclectically where we pick and choose what products that we use for the various subjects and we follow a loose plan for our week.  So when I had the opportunity to review Bright Ideas Press‘s Illuminations, I thought, “Well, why not give it a try.”

For those of you who are not familiar with Illuminations, it is a practical plan for homeschooling your children.  You are provided with the framework for your weekly schedules and are given the flexibility to change the schedule to incorporate which ever products you plan on using for each of the subject areas. Of course you can also choose to use the schedule as is. Illuminations is either a downloaded e-product or it comes on a CD-ROM so that you can print off things only as you need them. Here is a direct quote about the Year 1 Illuminations (for grades 3-8) that I received to review.

We provide the framework and daily lesson plans as well as fabulous literature study guides, vocabulary and spelling, tons of useful graphic organizers, and rubrics for grading.

You provide the literature books and other curriculum as you desire and we give you daily lesson plans in our unique, tweak-able weekly grid system that correlate most lessons to The Mystery of History.

Finally, schooling doesn’t get much more pre-planned and easier-to-use than this while still allowing YOU to choose what to use and what not to use. Simplify and Illuminate your homeschooling today!”

With Illuminations you have an entire plan for your homeschooling and you have the flexibility to use as much or as little of the schedule and plans available from them.

We selected to use The Mystery of History Volume 1, the literature and the study guides and we tweaked the schedule to include the materials we were already using for our other subjects. I admit, for our family, at first it took a little bit of time to adjust to trying to keep to some semblance of a schedule. However I found it easy to adjust to Illuminations and much better than trying to put together some type of schedule or plan each week on my own. So I believe that whatever homeschool methods you use that Illuminations is do-able with various homeschool philosophies. I have to admit it was nice being able to use a preplanned schedule and merely tweak it a bit then print it out for the week. I have to mention up front that Illuminations is not an all inclusive curriculum that you purchase so you do need to buy or borrow some of the materials that you plan on using with it. Illuminations does include materials such as literature study guides among other items. Our spelling and vocabulary was covered using the spelling section included with Illuminations as well as the literature guides.

The literature study guides guides are a nice addition to the literature reading since they contain materials that help your child to study in more detail what they are reading. For example, the study guide we used was for the book, The Golden Goblet. The study guide begins by providing a section that lists preparation for the study as well as a list of supplies needed, an introduction to the story including a cast of characters and other information that will be helpful as you read and study the book, and a reading schedule. Each day is then broken down for you with various activities for that day of reading. Some of these are a list of vocabulary to define, geography to explore which may involve looking up areas on a map, discussion questions, after reading suggestions as well as activities to do. Each comes with suggestions for younger and older children doing the same study. Again, it must be noted that Illuminations clearly makes it easy to do as little or as much that you feel your child needs. This is especially important because there are so many items just within the study guides that you could be stressed out if you tried to complete everything that is given or suggested.

Overall I enjoyed what we have completed with Illuminations so far. Most of the materials can be easily found either for purchase or to borrow.

You can visit the Bright Ideas Press website’s product page for the 3rd through 8th grade Illumination year 1 to view what is covered in this level as well as explore the other levels offered through their website.

The Illuminations, Year 1, 3–8th grade (Download) I reviewed can be purchased from the Bright Ideas Press website here for $165. There are also other pricing options which can be also viewed from the product page.

You can also check out what my fellow Crew members had to say about this product as well as others from Bright Ideas Press here on our TOS Crew blog.

Note: I received this product for free as a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew in order to provide an honest review for my readers.

Filed under: Home, TOS Crew by Barbara
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