Focus On Elizabeth Prentiss

Homeschool Review Crew

Reading is a huge part of our homeschool.  Not only just reading, but reading good and wholesome books that are going to draw us closer to God.  I subscribe to the “twaddle” rules from Charlotte Mason for our household.  With that in mind, it should not surprise you that we love the Trail Blazers series from Christian Focus Publications.  Recently we received a new title, Elizabeth Prentiss, RTM 8-9; RM 9-14, that we couldn’t wait to review.

Elizabeth Prentiss, More Love is the newest title to our growing library.  Written by Claire Williams who is a mother of four young boys with an Oxford theology degree.  She’s also working on her masters at the time of this writing.  The series is Trail Blazers which has lots of lovely titles for you to peruse and purchase.  Publishing is done through Christian Focus Publications.  

About the Book

The RTM above stands for “read to me” while the RM is “read myself”.  So for this book, it is recommended that you read it to your 8-9-year-olds but allow your 9-14-year-olds to read it for themselves.  Obviously, this can be changed up as needed for your own family and readers ability.  

Trail Blazers has over 50 different titles of biographies for your tween to teens to read.  We own several of them and enjoy them.  What makes them unique from most other biographies is the Thinking Further Topics and Timeline.  These require the reader to actually engage and use what they have learned which then helps them to remember that information.  

The first 121 pages of the book are the biography of Elizabeth Prentiss.  Next, come twelve pages of thinking further reading and challenges.  For each chapter of earlier reading in the biography, there is a thinking further in the back.  Finally, there are two pages of her timeline followed by some other titles in the series to look at.

How We Use

I like to use this series as a read aloud.  My older kids who read will grab the book and read it on their own as well but I really like having these for family reading and discussion.

What we do with it as a read-aloud is read a chapter per day.  I read the chapter to my children and then flip to the thinking further section. In the thinking further section, I will read the short about section and then start asking the challenge questions.  The challenge questions help relate to the information that has been learned to the lives of those reading. 

For instance, it might talk about someone behaving well or behaving badly and have them name a time that they behaved each way.  Or it might ask them how they think they might have reacted to a situation.  I can say that most of my children would not react well to being shut up in a room because they were quarantined!  They’d get bored fast and then start complaining.  It’s a good lesson!

I can remember the first time I read Stepping Heavenward.  It is an amazing book that I am planning on sharing with my older daughters this year.  Learning about the author was fun for me and I love that my children love this type of book.  Learning should be fun and something that kids want to do. My kids want to learn through reading books and I am going to make sure I have a large collection of good books for them including this one. 

Some final thoughts. 

I could see this being a great book to build a study around.  Choose a few of her books to read.  Find some other resources on her.  Memorize her hymns.  Learn to play those hymns.  Take a trip into history and learn about what was happening during her lifetime through the major events. 

Making biographies into unit studies is a fun thing for me.  I make it fun for my kids by not assigning things but rather grabbing all these book resources that they can simply pick up and read.  We then can have fun discussions on what they’re learning through what they’re reading.  It doesn’t have to be anything big or require a large expensive curriculum. 

Have fun reading! 

Learn More

You can learn more about Christian Focus Publications and the four items that were offered to Crew members to review by reading all of the reviews which are linked up on the Main Blog Post over on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.  They can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.  Other titles up for review this time are Big Bible Science, God is Better than Princesses, and God is Better than Trucks.  The last two titles are for younger readers to be read to while the first title is best for older elementary.