Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.
We're at it again with Home School in the Woods! If you're a new homeschooler this year, you must check out their offerings - so far we've tried two of their products that have aligned with our history studies, and both were so incredibly thorough they could stand on their own as a complete history curriculum! We prefer these as a supplement, since we already have all our books picked out for the year. This time we tried one in their Time Travelers U.S. History Studies series, and we chose Time Travelers: Colonial Life. They also have studies available from New World Explorers through World War II, so there's sure to be something for everyone.
I love that Home School in the Woods has these studies available with special licenses for Teacher and School use, so if you're planning on using this with a co-op, you just pay a little extra for multiple families to have access through your co-op! These would work beautifully in a co-op setting as well, particularly with all the included projects. If you're looking for a unit that's not linked to one particular history stream, you might be interested in their U.S. Elections Lap-Pak.
Since we're in summer mode right now, our schooling has definitely fallen more under the "unschooling" umbrella, but I've been checking out lots of library books related to what we'll be studying for history this year, which for all the kids will be Early American History. It'll be a while before we get into colonial life, but I knew that especially my girls would enjoy whatever projects they could get their hands on in this Home School in the Woods study. We looked through the different chapters and printed a whole lot of interesting activities and filled up a binder with everything we'd like to do. Then it became somewhat of an independent study opportunity, with them picking and choosing projects and telling me what kinds of things they learned.
The three big girls (7, 7, and 9) all decided they were very interested in how people dressed during colonial times, so I printed different activity pages with outfits for a Colonial Girl and a Colonial Woman (none of them were interested in the boy or the man!).
We read about how different fabrics were made (mostly review, although learning more about flax & linen was somewhat new information for us), and we used the examples of dye to help choose colors for the colonial outfits everybody colored. Technically these were supposed to be printed on transparencies, but since we don't have access to anything that can print on transparencies or actual transparency material, we decided to treat these somewhat like paper dolls instead.
We also tried out the very first activity, which involved matching artifacts with clues from a pretend archeological dig. This was more popular with our 11-year-old, for sure.
When I saw the Apple Head Doll, I knew my 9-year-old daughter would love to try to make her own. She was noncommittal at first, so I printed the instructions and set them aside... Lo and behold, a couple hours later she retrieved the instructions and got to work! It took a couple days, but she used her art supplies and her crafty skills and made her own little head for an Apple Head Doll. Now she's begging me to find books at the library that will teach her how to make a proper body! She's disappointed that the head looks "creepy," but if you look up pictures of these dolls, I'm pretty sure they all look creepy... What do you think? Creepy? Normal? Or do you choose not to say?
Through the end of August, use the code TOSGameNight at checkout to get a free copy of the Greek Life! File Folder Game. No purchase necessary.
Read more Homeschool Review Crew reviews here!