Renaissance Study

Homeschool Review Crew

We love history and so we jumped at the chance to review History Through The Ages Project Passport World History Study Renaissance and Reformation through Home School in the Woods.  We’ve loved all the studies we’ve used from Home School in the Woods and were eager to start a new one!

As a member of the Homeschool Review Crew we were given a choice of several different history times to review.  While Ancient Egypt was appealing, I really wanted to do more with the Renaissance period so we chose Renaissance and Reformation.  It’s a great period of history that requires a lot of studying before you can fully grasp it all.  Other time periods that we’d love to explore at another time are Middle Ages and Ancient Greece.

This series of History studies is growing!  They just released Ancient Greece and are working on releasing Ancient Rome in 2018.  I love ancient history so much and can’t wait to be able to delve into these titles.  But first, the Renaissance study we have!

One of the reasons that we love the project passport series is that it makes history come alive!  It’s like you’re actually taking a vacation through time and across continents.  We go to several different places.  With this history study we have 25 stops that we make.  This means we get 25 different experiences from this time period in history that we can visit and learn from.  

Our Experience

Some of the study is up to you of course.  It isn’t going to come alive for your children if you don’t put some effort into making sure you are following the instructions to make it fun.  This is another part I love.  It’s all set up.  I don’t have to do all the leg work to figure out how to make this fun and what stops to make or what we should do at each stop.  

These studies are meant to last 8-12 weeks.  Because we love history so I often add other books to our repertoire and make our study last longer.  So for us, I’d say it does normally take the 12 weeks to finish it.  With that in mind we can do about four studies a year since we homeschool year round.  I really want to add some others in this year!  We’re loving Renaissance and Reformation.  Next I think we’ll swing into the Middle Ages.  After that Ancient Greece then Ancient Egypt and hopefully Ancient Rome will be available when we’re ready for it!  I’ve got it all planned out!

Because this is a well thought out and planned history curriculum you can easily use this for your main history.  If you like to flesh it out a bit with extra reading it can be your reading as well.  Add in a few science experiments or some study on science of the time period(especially during this study!!) and you’ve got another subject covered.  I love to get the most subjects from our studies.  This is an easy one to add to and make it cover more than just history. Plus, it’s one the kids love to do!

My kids have loved using this Renaissance Study and are eager to get to it first thing.  They’ve always loved history but actually “going” back in time and making it like we’re visiting so many fun places has really helped to make it come alive.  I only wish we were closer to some historical type villages from this time period.  That would be amazing!

About the Curriculum

A little about the curriculum.  I’ve already mentioned it’s an 8-12 week course.  You can purchase it as a CD or as a download.  We received the download to work with for this review.  Personally, I am more of a physical girl and print mine out.  I print the whole thing out once and then only print off the pages we need as we need them for the students.  Having it all in a 3 ring binder so I can read ahead and see what we’re going to need makes using this unit study easier for me.  Reading on a computer just isn’t as much fun for me.  Paper has a special place in my heart and I love flipping pages!  Just a little quirk of mine.

This study is geared for grades 3-8.  So, with that age limit in mind, we used this with all of my children that are in school.  I have a girl who is 6 who is doing K/1 this year plus two boys in 2nd this year and I wanted to include them in this.  Modifications are super easy to make so that you can adjust this to different grade levels as needed.  My two preschool girls sat in and listened as well but most of the activities they did not do.  They loved the art related items though.

There is so much extra with this curriculum.  You’ve got audio adventures to listen to, which are great by the way.  They’re not dull or boring and hold kids attention well.  A fun newspaper is also available to help you brush up on your “current events”, fun writing projects of your own, and so so much more.  We love that the audios are set up in a fun way.  Basically you’ve got a tour guide giving you a personal guided tour of all the famous sights and things going on in the time period.  Definitely worth it for this curriculum if you’re looking for something to engage your kids and help them learn.  You might even learn a thing or two too!

Learn More

If you’d like to learn more about this particular passport study or some of the others that were offered for review to members of the Homeschool Review Crew please pop over to the main Blog Page and check out all the reviews linked up.  We’ve reviewed different ones and you’ll see those in the link titles.  You can also find Home School in the Woods on facebook, twitter, pinterest, and google +.