Dollar Homeschool – TOS review

One of my families favorite shows is Little House on the Prairie.  We love when they are in school, all ages together, learning from their McGuffey Readers and writing on their slates.   If only school was still that way.  Well, Dollar Homeschool has made it possible for you to teach with the same materials that schools in the late 1800’s used.   I received electronic versions of  the Complete Eclectic Education Series from Dollar Homeschool as part of the TOS crew.   The Eclectic Education Series (EES) is a set of textbooks which from roughly 1865 to 1915 WAS education in the United States, almost exclusively. They were the standard textbooks in many states and were chosen independently by over 10,000 school boards as their standard textbooks. 

The main parts of EES is the McGuffey Readers and Ray’s arithmetic.   Along with these, there are also science, history and grammar curriculums.    This complete curriculum can be purchased on CD for only $159 and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.   What you will get is digital copies of all of the textbooks and teachers manuals.  The teacher’s manuals are very important in helping you to know how to teach with this long forgotten style of learning.   This is a very reasonable price for all that you get.  Most of the titles included are available online for free but having them all in one place with easy to use tabs for reference is well worth the price.  Another cost that you have to factor in is printing the pages and binding them if you would like that as well.   It is nice that you only have to print off what you need.

For this review, we used the McGuffey’s readers for both of my children.  This picture shows the 1879 version which was the original.  They both enjoyed the stories and poems that we read together.   It was nice to know that we were reading wholesome stories that teach values.  Some of the pictures were blurry but other than that we didn’t have any problems with the curriculum.   A few of the crew members stated that some of readers were marked up but we didn’t personally experience this.   You do need to know that all of these are copies of old textbooks so you will need to keep that in mind when viewing them. 

I liked the fact that most of the books are set up to initially be done orally.  This is great for the mom of a boy who hates to write.  I feel my children learn better when they are doing things orally.  They tend to remember it better this way. 

If you would like to see a list of the entire curriculum you can look at it here.   As I said before, this is a great price for a complete K-12 curriculum for your family if you are willing to print out all of the pages.     They also offer the titles individually if you do not need all of the titles but you will save money by purchasing the entire set.

I would recommend this for someone wanting to return to the one room schoolhouse type of learning.   It is a lot of stuff for your money.   It would also be great for a large family because of the ability to use it with all age groups. 

You can purchase this by visiting the website at www.DollarHomeschool.com.  If you have questions you can reach the company by e-mail at dollar_homeschool@yahoo.com. 

** Please note that I received EES from Dollar Homeschool at no charge in exchange for my honest opinion in this review.   No other compensation was provided.