Homeschooling Early Elementary? You Need To Check Out Starfall!

Let’s explore the Starfall Home Membership and see if this program is right for your early elementary students!

Where do you look online for fun, engaging, and interactive lessons for your early elementary students? Where can you find both math and reading along with plenty of extra activities as well?

If you said Starfall Education Foundation then you would be correct.

Starfall is a program my family was familiar with prior to this review. However, our review of the The Starfall Home Membership allowed us to explore some new features and utilize the program in new and unexpected ways.

And now, I am going to share that experience and help you decide if a Starfall home membership is right for your homeschool!

What Is The Starfall Education Foundation?

The Starfall Education Foundatation launched their website in 2002. At the time, it was a free websitesite designed with one thing in mind: to create an environment where children have fun learning to read.

Since then, it has become a fully developed program offering pre-k, kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade programs, with both paid and free options.

However, with The Starfall Home Membership, you can access all the site has to offer in terms of games, songs, math, language arts skills, and even create your own printables.

And in my opinion, it is well worth it to purchase the membership.

Reviewing The Starfall Home Membership

When the opportunity to review Starfall came up our home was excited!

While my second grader enjoys his current homeschool set up, he is currently offline. For him, this was a chance to use the computer for learning like his older siblings.

Plus, as he reminded me countless times after I told him we were reviewing it, he loved the program when we used it in both pre-k and kindergarten.

Getting Back Into Starfall

The first thing we did after logging into the site and setting up our account, was to download the app to his Kindle. This was one aspect we had never used before and he really wanted to as it would allow him to skirt the rule of “no electronics until school is done.”

I’m not sure what it is about using his own device that makes learning seem less like school. But I’m grateful.

In those moments when life is busy and I’m struggling to control the chaos that is a house with four kids, I could easily have him work on the Starfall Education App for a few moments while I tended to the four-year-old or worked on items with the older kids.

It’s like a homeschool life preserver.

Favorites From A Second Grader

Hands down, my son’s favorite section from Starfall is the Geometry & Measurement area. Here he could get lost in the treasure trove of activities working on skills such as puzzles, symmetry, and weight.

And for reasons that I do not understand, a dinosaur weighing in at 135 pounds is hilarious to a seven-year-old boy. He could spend a half-hour working on the weight game weighing dinosaurs, turtles, and kangaroos.

While the Short-Vowel Word Machine may have been a little too easy for him, he truly enjoyed making the words. I enjoyed the focus on phonics and the visual reminders that changing just one letter changes the whole word.

And since he is familiar with the silent ‘e’ he loved pointing out words that could be made by simply adding one. It gave us a great opportunity to talk about words, phonics, and both long and short vowels.

The fact is, most of Starfall focuses on reading whether you are playing a game, building a custom calendar, or working on math skills. Words on the screen are almost always read to the child (or there is the option to hear the words). This allows for both visual and auditory learning and helps them to build the memory of the word.

Starfall Is More Than Just Reading Though

While Starfall is known mostly for it’s reading and Language Arts, there is also a huge section of the program devoted to early-math skills.

And the second-grade math skills section was great!

Robot Place Value emphasizes place value and is great for teaching the skill and showing the value as you work through ones, tens, and hundreds. Shoot Hoops! allows you to practice place value skills and mental math.

However, the screen did use the word “and” when reading larger numbers. My son did not notice this, but I overheard the program when it read 110 or 410, the word “and” was used (“one hundred and ten” and “four hundred and ten”).

I know that this is a common error, a mistake that a lot of people make. But this can cause a lot of confusion when kids get into higher math levels and start learning about decimals.

(If you don’t remember, in math the word “and” signifies a decimal point. A fact I had just gone over with my second grader. Thankfully, he remembered that we don’t use “and” when talking about numbers over 100.)

And, to make sure you are ready for multiplication there are a couple of math games designed to get your child seeing number groups. If they are ready, you can even start on multiplication and division skills as well as fractions. While we did not use this section together, I did check it out for myself because it’s coming soon for him.

Getting Off The Computer

We all know that there is such thing as too much of a good thing. And that too much screen time is never a good idea for kids of any age regardless of activity. If your child has been on the website or app long enough and wants to keep going you can simply head on over to the parent-teacher center and print a wide variety of worksheets.

Available in both Language Arts skills or math skills, you can choose from either premade or custom sheets.

Language Arts sheets focus on proper letter formation, blending sounds, and sight words.

Math worksheets focus on counting, measuring, and operations.

You can also grab some of the other printable downloads like journals, puzzles, and books.

And of course, you can make your own sheets that line up with either the skills just practiced on Starfall or the ones you are working on outside of the program.

This is also part of what makes Starfall a complete resource for both math and Language Arts.

Parental Help and Guidance

Need support and direction with your early elementary student? Starfall offers teacher’s guides for both pre-k and kindergarten levels allowing you to be sure you are doing more than just playing on the computer. These guides help you to stay on task, focus on learning, and see how Starfall can be a complete math and language arts curriculum for these two grades.

How does Starfall make sure you are on task? Well, they align with state and national standards (also known as Common Core).

Even if you are not concerned with these standards, or prefer to allow your child to follow a more natural learning path, these guides can come in handy for those times when you worry your child may be behind.

And if you prefer to not follow Common Core, just ignore this section.

Seriously. Your early elementary child is naturally curious and they don’t worry about standards.

Personally, at this age, neither do I.

The Biggest Suprise of Our Starfall Home Membership Review

Really, this shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

One day, my second grader and I were working on Starfall. He was in the Puzzles section of Geometry & Measurement when my four-year-old started telling him where to put the shapes to build the cat he was working on.

We were both quite impressed.

And that led me to try out the site with her.

They do offer Pre-K items and curriculum for four-year-olds. So I figured, why not?

She loved it!

My son helped her sister and he loved being able to “teach” her how to use the site. The first thing we did was to create her “person”. And since she loves pink, her person is utilizing all the pink customizations we could make. (And no, my daughter does not have pink hair, nor does she wear glasses. She does, however, have a vivid imagination!)

From there, we all simply explored the site together.

I watched her pull the laptop onto her lap. She used her tiny hands to try and control the mouse.

Eager to mimic her older brother, she quickly got the hang of moving the cursor and making her selections.

For the next hour or so we simply listened to songs under the Nursery Rhymes Section, read countless stories in the Talking Library, and even ventured into the Short-Vowel Machine where we discussed the difference between a “hat” and a “cap”.

And now daily she asks if she can use Starfall because whether she is on the site or the app, working independently or with someone, she loves it!

She doesn’t think of the site as schoolwork or something she has to do, rather for her, it’s fun and engaging and interesting. It’s something she wants to do, and something I don’t mind her working on at all.

While her little self is having fun, she is also learning so much.

Starfall is A Great Program and A Great Value

While my son is on the older end of the site and his abilities are quickly outgrowing the program, The Starfall Home Membership is something we plan on hanging on to for a while as my daughter starts her education.

And at just $35/yr, our Starfall Home Membership is well worth the price.

And for me, this review was pretty neat.

I saw Starfall come full circle in our home.

A site that we used at the beginning of my son’s education, one that he is outgrowing, he is using a new way as he shows his sister how to begin her Starfall journey.

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***This post has been updated from its original version published February 2018.