Eastern Hemisphere Explorer

by Shelley L on 2011-09-17
Although this attempt at getting our kids to research on their own may not always end up with their finding all the answers, I have found it to be quite beneficial. It has added to our understanding of the geography, customs and key players in the Eastern Hemisphere. The "Choose Your Adventure" Activities are great! My kids have had a blast with each one they have chosen. Give it a try...your kids may not find every nugget of information themselves, but they will get a taste of the culture.

by Rachel O on 2011-03-19
I agree with the other reviewers. We have been so frustrated with not being able to find the answers! I end up having to go to the Internet myself for the answers, screening the web page and then letting my son look at it to find the answers himself. This has caused so many disruptions in my day and I hate telling my son to just skip it! We have enjoyed Core 5 so much this year with the exception of EHE. I think this facts need to be learned and the research is important, but this is not the best program for that. I am struggling about what to do next year for my daughter who will be in core 5.

by David E on 2011-03-19
Wow! This has been very difficult to follow. We live in Asia and were very excited about doing a unit on Asia but the Explorer has taken a lot of time and effort (more than necessary). Indeed the World Book Encyclopedia is great but the questions in this Explorer are hard to find in the Encyclopedia. There aren't enough instructions and its hard to find the answers in the WB Encyclopedia.

by MARY S on 2010-09-27
Avoid this product and find something else all together. There is nothing to give a clear idea of what to search for an it just makes everyone want to give up. I find it hard to believe that with the amount of money that we paid for this Sonlight couldn't do a better job. Everything is out of order and some of the words result in NO search results.

by RUTH H on 2009-08-03
I too have been very frustrated by trying to have my kids look up information that simply isn't there. What is the point of trying to teach them to do research when it's too frustrating? I was hoping this would be something they could learn to do on their own, but it just won't be because it's too difficult for beginning researchers to deal with questions that have no answer.

by TONYA L on 2009-04-03
We used about 1/2 of the Explorer. I really like that it made my kids research to find answers. We would read together and then my older student would work on the pages on her own while my younger student would do his pages with my help. I would like to see more time spent on the Middle East, so we slowed down and spent more time there but we didn't want as much on China so we skipped some of those sheets and assignments.

by JENNIFER P on 2008-05-22
We are using the version available for the 07/08 school year and have been fairly happy with it. Why only "fairly" you ask? Because some of the questions don't match up with the same day's reading assignment. Several times we have spent twenty minutes looking for an answer and finally given up, only to find it the next day with a different reading assignment. The new 08/09 'revised' edition may have fixed this problem. Also, I don't like all the questions that are thrown in that have no answer in the reading assignment at all. We try to do pretty much all of the assignments in the guide and do not have enough hours in the day to have to try and find more resources with the correct answers. This typically means that we wind up skipping those, which I hate. I hate flipping through their notebooks and seeing those empty, half-done pages. Very irritating for someone who likes to have "all the boxes checked in."