Bridgeway English {A review}

Bridgeway Academy is a fully accredited customizable home education resource.

About The Company:

Bridgeway Academy’s mission statement is:

We help kids succeed by tailoring learning to their strengths and needs, by offering dedicated support to their family, and by giving them the freedom to pursue their God-given gifts and abilities.

I love their mission statement.  They offer a plethora of resources and you can completely pick and choose what you would like based on your teaching style, your child’s learning style and what you want your child to learn.  As well as what they want to learn. 

About The Product:

From their website:

Starting with the basics of nouns and verbs and moving on to writing sentences, paragraphs, resumes and essays, this course is great for middle school students preparing for high school, for high school students who need to gain essential English skills, and for adults who hope to gain success in language and communication. This remedial English course does not teach literature. It is a skills development course designed for students who need help with grammar, with writing, with usage, and with skills required for the realities of life. Written in a step by step fashion with each new skill building on earlier skills, students gain confidence quickly and are able to experience success.

Bridgeway English is a resource for high school students needing a refresher course on grammar and/or writing.  7th to 12 grade students are considered the target audience for this program which is written to the student.  They complete it on their own with checkpoints along the way for the teacher to grade. 

This program is broken down into 2 workbooks.  Each book is divided into Paks. Each Pak is divided into lessons of several pages with all background material provided as needed.  Tests for the Paks are included at the end of each student book.  Each workbook is priced at $23.33.

 

The 1st book “Focus on Grammar” has 6 Paks and focuses on the following concepts:

• Subject and Predicate
• Four Type Sentences
• Sentence Fragments
• Run-on Sentences
• Compound Sentences
• Noun Functions
• Pronouns
• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases
• Conjunctions
• Interjections
• Grammar Review

 

The 2nd book “Focus on Writing” has Paks 7-12. This book focuses on the following concepts:

• Clauses
• Sentence Variety
• Subject/Verb Agreement
• Grammar and Mechanics
• Writing Skills
• Rules of Capitalization
• Rules of Punctuation
• Proofreading
• Editing
• Letter Writing
• Business Writing
• Study Skills
• Critical Thinking and Reasoning
• Fact versus Fiction

There is a single teacher guide that covers both of the books. It is priced at $23.33 also.  The teacher guide has a reduced actual page of every page in the student workbooks with the correct answers.  This makes for very easy correcting. 

The way these books are set up is that it is completely self taught. There is a quick lesson – along with a sense of humor – totally our style,

then some examples. Next come practice and putting what you just learned to work.

A day/week in our life:

I began by assigning one Pak per week.  Each Pak is upwards of 30-40 or so pages.  That ended up proving to be too much and it was more stress then it was worth.  I quickly realized that we had to give each Pak 2 weeks.  I realize that the grammar book is supposed to be used 1st and the writing one second.  We chose to use both together.  How we did that is I would have him do 1 Pak in the grammar book and then move to the writing book and do 1 Pak in there.  We just kept switching it up every 2 weeks.  The student is supposed to correct their own work.  There are some things the teacher needs to correct and those are noted in the teacher guide.  This made correcting very easy.  Him seeing the mistakes he made along with the correct answer, I think, really helping with his comprehension of the materials. 

Final Thought:

I know I have said this before, my son has always struggled with grammar.  He gets that from me.  As he gets older I struggle with the “am I teaching him enough” mentality.  I was so glad to receive these books.  He actually likes them.  I actually like them.  He actually does the work in them. He is getting “it” and retaining the information! YAY!   

To see what others think of this check out this post.

 

 

To see a wide variety of reviews check out

our crew blog.