High School Books to Study
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.
High School Books to Study
Homeschool Review Crew
Progeny Press
Little Women and Animal Farm
Do you have children in high school? Wonder what you should be focusing on for reading and literature? In our home, we like to use real books to help teach. I’m a huge fan of books and reading and knew that I wanted my son and daughter to read and study good literature. On my list of high school books to study were Little Women and Animal Farm. So imagine my surprise when they were two of the offerings from Progeny Press for the Homeschool Review Crew to review. Of course, we requested them!
We did receive them both. The official titles and links for the two book studies are Little Women Study Guide and Animal Farm Study Guide. You will see on their website that they are both intended for high school and grades 9-12 for Animal Farm and 8-12 for Little Women. With the Progeny Press study guides, I do tend to agree with their assessments on what grades the book studies are for. You can fix them to work for younger or older students but they really are pretty spot on.
About the Study Guides
Progeny Press produces multiple interactive downloadable e-study guides. We have reviewed from them in the past so they may be familiar to you. The company is owned by Michael and Rachel Gilleland. The many books they have created study guides for are classics and modern novels but all are written from a Christian perspective which we here in our home appreciate.
While we have always received the downloadable study guide you can also purchase them on a CD or as a printed workbook. With the downloads, you have the flexibility to work on them on the computer through the edit function or print them off and use them that way.
All of their guides are created with the intent to help your child ask questions and learn to dig into the books and find the hidden. It’s almost like a treasure hunt as they learn to read and decipher with a critical eye.
Our Thoughts on The Study Guides
The two study guides we received are two of the books on my list of high school books to study for my high school children. I currently have two though I guess that’s not quite true as I’ve added another as of the first of this month. But for this review, I’ve had two children using the study guides.
Animal Farm seemed like a good fit for my 13-year-old son. He’s a bit of an animal sometimes. But really I felt like it would be the book that he would enjoy most so it’s the one I started him off with while my 15-year-old daughter was working through Little Women. She, of course, had already read Little Women but this was a good chance to reread the book and do so with a critical eye.
With these study guides, the student reads the entire book during the first week. Then they go back through and study sections of the book with their assignments catching things they might have missed during their quick read. Something I like to do when we are working a study guide from Progeny Press is read the book out loud to the whole family during one of our read-aloud slotted times. This helps them not only see the book but hear the book as well. That’s why we are currently reading aloud two books.
It is my firm opinion that no matter what age level books are meant for they can be enjoyed as read-aloud books by a vast array of ages. For our family that means that all of my children are listening to these books. Now, if the book is scary or contains content not appropriate for little ears we might skip some sections. But I have always felt it a good idea to expose children to good literature from birth. And it makes life easier in my large family household to just include everyone.
Animal Farm
Animal Farm has been noted as one of the 100 best novels by Time Magazine and I have to agree it’s a good one. While studying this book your child works to learn about allegory and Stalinist Russia. It’s a marvellous book and now with our current world situation is a great time to study it.
The 93-page study guide is intense and yet not. It pulls you in and challenges you to seek deeper and understand more than just the surface. To me, it’s a great novel about humans in the form of animals which we kind of all can relate to as we know people who we often think of as being animals. I was pleased to see how my children would react to the book and its message.
My son is enjoying the book. He had questions for me the first week when he read the whole book but I put off quite a few of them because I knew we were going to cover them and I really wanted him to do the thinking on his own.
We started slow. The first week he read about the author(which is part of the guide), the synopsis of the book(also in the study guide) and then he went into the background of the book. These are all sections in the study guide but they don’t take long to do and work well in one week. The last portion of the study guide in this week is the pre-reading activities. Short and simple.
He also read the book this week. This really isn’t a long book but it does have a lot of information I think. I knew that he would read quickly as he does read through books fast but I also knew that the study guide would slow him down so that he would get more out of the book then.
Then the next week we started in on the actual study guide where you actually focus on certain chapters. For this book, those chapter sections are broken down to take 7 weeks. We are currently on week five of our study guide.
Little Women
My daughter is 15 and has already read the Little Women book. Really she’s read all of the series for this book too but I wanted her to take a deeper look within the novel. I’ve found that most children will read a book for pleasure but skip over a lot of the meanings.
I have to admit I even learned a bit about one of my favorite novels through this study guide. Did you know it was originally published in two volumes titles Little Women and Good Wives in the UK? I didn’t. Don’t worry though they combined it into just Little Women and that’s what this study guide studies.
The Little Women guide was written by Carol Clark.
Because this moves a bit faster for my daughter and the fact that she had read it multiple times before she actually is almost done with it so I’m going to have her do more of the additional activities that are optional.
Partially this is also because she’s older and needs to brush up on her essay writing skills as well but also because I want them to finish the same week so that they can start the second books the same week. I really appreciate that they have a separate section of optional projects and essays for if you want to dig deeper or work longer on a book.
Extras on How We Use
For our reviews, we print off the study guides so that it’s easier to use them. It’s easier for us because we don’t have a computer for each child and they all need to use the two we do have to work on their math so that doesn’t leave a lot of time for other uses.
There are also separate downloads for the answer keys for both of the study guides we received. I print those off too and keep them in one binder for me.
When I print I print the whole study guide at once so that we have it all ready and I can put little tabs on the pages with what to do which day or week. For my older kids I normally tab them out by week and they can do it all on Monday or all on Friday or however, they want as long as it is done before I need to grade it.
The study guides are reproducible so you can print off as many copies as you need for further students as well. Each of my two that are doing guides now will switch and do the other guide once they are done. The guides are designed to take 8-10 weeks each.
Learn More About Progeny Press
You can learn more about Progeny Press and the different study guides that they offer by visiting their website. To view more reviews about the two study guides we reviewed as well as three other study guides please visit the main blog post on the Homeschool Review Crew blog which will have all of the reviews linked up.
The other three study guides that were offered for review are A New Coat for Anna Study Guide, In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson Study Guide, and My Side of the Mountain Study Guide.
Progeny Press can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Other reviews or Progeny Press that we have done and you can read are:
The Long Way to a New Land and Hound of the Baskervilles
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