Mood:  bright

Recently, The Old Schoolhouse started a new line of products, Wee-books, that I was really excited to try out. What are Wee-books? The TOS website describes them perfectly:

Packaging concise nuggets of wisdom from your favorite homeschool authors, covering a variety of topics of interest to homeschoolers, these bite-sized E-books are designed with today’s busy, homeschool mom in mind. WeE-book™ offer quick, affordable content that educates, inspires and encourages. WeE-book™ may be small in name, size, and price, but they are big in value.

When I first read that description, I thought "Aha...Joshua". Bite-sized nuggets of information are exactly what our asperger's child needs. I immediately found two Wee-books that I thought would be excellent fits for him. We are constantly looking for small, science unit studies for him, so I picked out "The Real Hummers" about Hummingbirds. He also is always needing help with math so I thought "Building Strong Arithmetic Thinking" would help. Then, "Writing Essays" caught my eye for John Allen, our 12 year old sixth grader. So, I ordered all three.

After first looking them over, I had mixed emotions. I was extremely pleased with one, satisfied with another, and a little dissapointed with the third. I quickly realized, though, that my mixed emotions were partly my fault. I was looking for mini-unit studies that I could take out and immediately go to work with my child. However, that's not what the description says. It says that they are "concise nuggets of wisdom from your favorite homeschool authors, covering a variety of topics of interest to homeschoolers". After rethinking, I concluded that all three Wee-books delivered exactly what they promised.

I was really encouraged with "Building Strong Arithmetic Thinking". It really gave me a new perspective on how to teach Joshua. It was written by Dr. Ruth Beechick and the more I read from her the more impressed I am. For arithmetic, she puts more emphasis on everyday activities than traditional math curriculum. One statement that I found very liberating was "...get rid of any textbooks or workbooks you have for kindergarten and first grade. And second grade, too, if you’re brave." Her approach was like a breath of fresh air. 

 "Writing Essays" was also written by Dr. Ruth (dare I call her that?). It, again, gave many good thoughts on how to teach not only essay writing, but all types of writing. I did find that it was geared for a little more advanced student than John Allen, but I am looking forward to using it with him in the near future.

The one Wee-book that I misjudged was "The Real Hummers" by Jeannie Fulbright. Jeannie is the author of Apologia's great elementary science series. Although it was not the ready to use mini-unit study that I was hoping, it was very informative and offered some great ideas for attracting hummingbirds. It's "further resources" section also led to notebooking and lapbooking ebooks that could be further used to study these smallest of birds.

All in all, I am very excited about these small (around 20 pgs each) ebooks. The topics are wide ranging and, along with the titles mentioned above, include, not only educational topics, but general homeschool topics as well. I'm looking forward to trying "Homeschooling the Rebel" and "I was Raised by Wolves" in the near future. Wee-books are also one of those items that are perfect for parents or grandparents that want to supplement their student's public/private school education.

With any product you have to read the description carefully before you buy. With larger ebooks, even if it's not entirely what you were looking for, there is bound to be something included in the ebook that you can use. The information in Wee-books is so concise that there is not much room for error. However, even if the Wee-book is not at all what you expected, the $1.95 price tag can make the mistake much easier to swallow, and you may be able to use it in the future. Have fun looking through the 41 titles, and happy homeschooling!

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