Ocean Adventures from Scholastic

A while ago (probably over a year ago now), Scholastic was offering a deal of buying a lot of their downloads for a $1 each.  (I think it was like "Buy 10, Pay $10" or something like that; like I said, it's been a long time since I actually purchased this.)   I knew my son would like the one on oceans, so I downloaded it along with a whole bunch more of the lessons.  I put them in a large 3-ring binder and placed them on our homeschooling shelves for later use.  Well, "later" finally arrived :)  My son was asking to do something with whales since our family vacation this year is a trip to Maine to go whale watching.   Somewhere in the back of my head I remembered that I had this printed ocean themed unit waiting.  So I pulled out the unit and really looked at it for the first time.  

Here are some things I quickly learned about the unit and things that I would have done different. 
1.  I would have read the entire thing before printing the entire thing.  The unit is geared for classroom use.  So it has lots of directions and activities that are simply not applicable to a homeschooling one child environment.
2.  I would have read the directions and realized that I needed multiple copies of some pages.  Oops!  Some of the games and coloring were hard to do because I only had the original copy.
3.  Do NOT print this double sided!  As you can see in the picture above, there are some cutting and crafts involved in the unit.   I did not realize this.  So every time we had to cut out a page we were cutting through another activity on the opposite side.  So I just would ask my son which activity he wanted to do and we simply did not do the other activity.

All-in-all, my son liked doing the unit.  For me, it was an "eh, not my thing".  I am not really a worksheet kind of person.  My son though liked the cutting, coloring, and glueing of the activities.  I felt that the unit was definitely weak on content.  This was definitely something to do as a homeschooling-lite activity.   I am sure we will continue to do the Scholastic downloads as my son wants to do them.  I am also pretty sure that I won't be buying any more of them, even for the $1.