Schoolhouse Review Crew: Dayspring Chrstian Academy

Dayspring Christian Academy is a Christian School located in Pennsylvania that uses " The Principle Approach."  From the website "What makes Dayspring Christian Academy so different from other Christian schools?Its distinctive mission! Dayspring employs the Principle Approach America's historic, classical Christian method of education to prepare young people to be servants, scholars, and statesmen in our constitutional federal republic. This requires developing a biblical worldview as well as excellence in character, skills, and talents. The Principle Approach is very intentional in its purpose equipping young men and women to help restore America to her gospel purpose, thereby helping to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission."  You can read more about the Principle Approach here.  In addition to being a physical school that you can attend, they also offer online live and self paced courses.  Over the last several weeks we have had an opportunity to use and review one of their self paced courses, The Pilgrim Story.

 The Pilgrim Story is a self paced course for children in grades 3-6.  The course teaches children the true providential history of the Pilgrims from original sources.  Throughout the course students are taught the importance of Christian character, Christian liberty, self governance, hard work, and perseverance.  The course includes activities such as crafts, application, live action, map making, and more to involve the child in the learning process.  Learning how to keep and use a notebook is a large component of the course and each lesson contains lesson, vocabulary sheets, and other downloadables for the student notebook.  Each lesson takes from 30-45 minutes with enrichment activities adding extra time.  There are a total of 17 lessons in 5 units with lesson review and unit tests at the end of each unit.  After completing all 5 units students go to a virtual field study in Plymouth, MA.   Lessons include:

Unit 1
King Henry
Geneva Bible
Life in Scrooby
Liberty of Conscience
Unit 2
Leaving England
The Second Escape Attempt
Leiden
Preparing to Go
Unit 3
Leaving Leiden
Conditions on the Mayflower
Building Christian Character
Unit 4
The Mayflower Compact
Exploration
The First Winter
Unit 5
Spring, 1621
The Wampanoag People
The Rest of the Story

Access to the course begins 48 hours after purchase.  You will have access to the course for 6 months from the date of registration.  The cost of The Pilgrim Story course is $99.00.  You can order by clicking here.

My son Nicholas (10) has been working through the lessons in The Pilgrim Story.  He has been completing 2 lessons a week and it takes him about 45 minutes to complete each lesson.  Nicholas likes to be independent, and this course is right up his alley.  He can log in, download the necessary paperwork, play the lessons, and complete the work entirely on his own.  Each lesson gives specific instructions on what the student needs to do.  The course is set up as a series of slides so all the student needs to do after listening to the first slide is to click on the next button.  The directions for the inter active features are very easy to follow and the answers to the notebook questions are made very clear.  The lessons are taught from a providential view of history and teaches students important character traits using the Pilgrims as examples of these traits.  I love that there are comprehension questions and review built in to every lesson.  Unit tests at the end of each unit assures the student's mastery of the material as parents can view the test scores.  Students can choose to take an essay test or a multiple choice test.  My son will choose multiple choice every time.  I love that the course makes the student take responsibility for their own education.

We did have a few issues downloading the notebook sheets and running the program when we were using Internet Explorer and Firefox as our web browser.  When we switched to Google Chrome everything worked just fine.

To see what other crew mates had to say click here.

Disclaimer:  I received a complimentary 6 month subscription to The Pilgrim Story for the purpose of writing a fair and honest review.  I received no other compensation.