It’s so nice to know there are companies out there that give time and attention to kids that need that bit of extra encouragement. Bonnie Terry Learning is one of these much needed businesses.
Bonnie Terry Learning is a company started by Bonnie Burke Terry, a Board Certified Educational Therapist. She was asked repeatedly for materials to help students learn with her methods so she finally began to produce them herself.
Kids learn so much better when they and their teacher are relaxed and having fun while learning. What better way to incorporate those two important ingredients than creating a game? The Sentence Zone Game is a tool that is meant to break up the monotony of typical classroom English studies. It’s really a very simple set-up. You just pull words and punctuation cards from the piles lined up along the parts-of-speech strip in the middle to form your sentence. Each part of speech has its own point value. Once you’re done building your sentence, you add up your points and it’s the next person’s turn. At the end of the game, the person with the most points wins.
I recall being a kid in school and hating the idea of diagramming a sentence. I dreaded watching my teacher as he inscribed a long sentence on to the blackboard only to add those strange little branch-like lines indicating which part of speech each word belonged to. I don’t think I ever truly understood it and I have a confession to make: I could generally fake my way through an English test, but to this day, I still am not sure which words belong to what part of speech.Maybe The Sentence Zone game can help both my children and me.
Now, I have to say the game is a bit pricey, but if your child is struggling in this area, it would be much cheaper than hiring a tutor to coach them.
The Writer’s Easy Reference Guide is a great resource that can be used for multiple ages. It’s a 12 page fold out reference that you can pop into a binder to have available as a handy reminder when composing just about any writing assignment. It’s lay out is very well executed. Everything is visually appealing and arranged in a very accessible way. The Guide covers paragraph, essay and sentence writing tips, steps in the writing process, words to make writing more interesting, common prefixes, suffixes and root words, capitalization and punctuation rules, vocabulary and parts of speech terms and definitions, letter formats and other writing tips. I’m looking at this guide sitting right in front of me and I still don’t understand how she fit all that stuff in such a thin guide. Lol!
These two products would probably have been last on my list to purchase from BTL, but they are still so useful. They will absolutely not go to waste here at our house. Other things I would have liked from BTL- b&d reversal poster and/or b&d reversal stickers, and the BT Easy Math Reference Guide…Hmm, maybe we could use just about everything BTL has to offer. lol! I could see myself using these materials not only for Tink but for Ninja as well and probably even the Dude and baby Princess when they are old enough to require formal schooling.
Once again, because of the privilege of being a TOS Crew Member, I got to catch a glimpse of another great company created to help struggling learners move ahead in their schooling and for that, I am most grateful.
This is my family's journey through homeschooling, using My Father's World curriculum. We spent the majority of last school year reviewing curriculum for TOS Homeschool Crew so that's why many of my blog entries are product reviews. We're now back on track and diving into MFW once again.
My children are
Ninja- 15: teenage black belt extrordinaire. Using MFW's Ancient History and LIterature;
Tink- 11: sweet girl schooling with ADHD symptoms and dysgraphia (?). Using MFW's Exploring Countries and Cultures;
The Dude-5: handsome little man with language delays/probably on the autism spectrum. He's no longer in preschool for speech therapy and special ed. Now using MFW K; and
Baby Princess- 18 months: beautiful busy baby girl, possibly on the autism spectrum as well. Tagging along with The Dude and whatever else I think might interest her.
