When History Comes Alive
When History Comes Alive
Home School in the Woods
Homeschool Review Crew
We love history in our house! It’s pretty much our favorite subject. We read books on history, we reenact history, it’s just a history fest around here! So I was, of course, excited to get the chance to review a new product from Home School in the Woods. They have some amazing history studies! When History Comes Alive you know that you’re learning! We chose to study WWII through The Time Travelers U.S. History Studies. These studies are roughly grades 3-8 though I personally have used and do use them with a wider variety of ages. I’ll talk more about that below.
We received the study as a download. It’s a zip file so you do have to extract it. That took some getting used to for me. We got a family license so you can print as much as you need for your family. The study can also be bought as a teacher or school download or even as a CD. I think I might like the CD more, but I’ve honestly never used the CD version.
One of the other items available for review was the timeline figures. I’m beginning to think we should get those! I mean I would love to have the entire timeline all worked out. It could go with all the different history curriculums out there!
Tips
Have some things on hand to use with these materials. You’re going to want cardstock, binders, file folders, hole punch, glue, scissors, pencil sharpener, colored pencils, and lots of printer ink! We haven’t gotten our supplies for the school year yet so I’m struggling here! Definitely put card stock back on my list so that we can reprint out some things like the games and the timeline.
Some other fun things to have on hand are a laminator or pouches to protect sheets that you expect to reuse. Those could be the reading pages or game boards, etc.
A fun tip is to find some recipes to make that correspond to the topic of your studies. So ration recipes would be great for this one. You can find a lot of depression-era or war recipes online. This Blog Post tells about why and how this helps with learning the subject content.
About The Curriculum
When History Comes Alive is such a fun time! Definitely worth all the extra cutting and pasting. I’m not an artsy-craftsy mom. In fact, I avoid it if I can. But my kids love it!
This curriculum has a lot of hands-on projects and tons of cutting and pasting. You’re going to go through the glue so stock up.
Have you used a lapbook before? This curriculum can be used like a lapbook or a binder book if you will. Your child will keep a binder with their things in it. They’re going to do lots of fun things! Plus it’s going to teach them so much!
As I mentioned before, this curriculum is geared towards grades third through eighth but I have successfully used it with preK all the way up to my oldest who is 14 and doing 9th grade this year.
It’s fairly easy to up the level or lower the level when you’re already using it.
I like to print off some coloring pages for the younger ones. They listen in and learn that way and have fun doing the games with their siblings. My toddler loves all things war so some coloring pages of tanks and war vehicles had him happy as a clam for most of this.
There are 25 days of assignments. Really though you’re doing a four day week with the fifth day of just extra time to complete projects and dig deeper. Yes, day five is scheduled as an extra workday, not a day off.
So this is supposed to take you five weeks to complete roughly. I would say if you wanted to use this for more of an actual history credit for a semester that you should get two of the different time period studies and make sure to add a lot of extra reading into them.
Our only thought on this is that it is definitely light on the reading. There are only one or two pages of reading for each day so that’s not a lot. As I’ve mentioned before we’re big on reading so I want to make sure to have lots of extra reading materials available.
How We Use
We love using this! Okay so how do we use the Time Travelers studies?
First I go through and print out the reading and lesson projects pages for the first week. I also will print off all the activity pages and extras that we need for the week. This tends to be quite a bit of printing.
I only print off one of the reading things. If you have a way to read this on your phone or tablet or something I’m sure that would save you some paper but we haven’t figured that out yet. So far I can access it on one computer which is not in our main school area and is actually my husbands work computer too so we’re not going to let the kids read off of it.
Next, I gather any books we have on the subject matter. If I don’t have a lot I’ll request some from the library so that we have some free reading stuff available for the kids. There is also an additional resources page that you can grab things off of to add to the learning as well. We are very literature heavy in our school so I want to make sure we have a lot of living books to read. If you’re like us and love living books for your school you might like this blog post over on the Home School in the Woods site.
And then we have fun! We read the days reading aloud as a family. This makes sure the ones who struggle with reading are learning too and it helps the non readers to be in on the fun. Plus it keeps the fast readers from getting too bored at this point.
After the reading comes the fun making. We work on our timeline and the projects of the day. So fun things like making and playing language bingo, learning about dictators, making a care package to send to our soldier, etc. I think a neat thing to do that week would be to actually find a soldier that you can send a for real care package to.
I think my favorite part of each day is copy work. It’s available as print or cursive and you can print off pages to write on with dotted lines or regular lines. The copywork are quotes from famous people of the time period. Some are amazing and inspirational and some made you shudder a bit, but all get you learning.
Our Thoughts
Let’s start with our negatives. This is more labor-intensive than I’d like because you have to go hunting for what you need to print. Everything you need for the day or the week is not just right there in one folder. I’d love to see you have a folder to open for week 1 and then a sub-post in it that is day one, day two, etc. That would be so much easier! It takes me a bit to hunt and print what we’re going to need for the day or week.
My only other negative is that we can’t get some of the pages to print properly and that is very frustrating. We get extra lines on some pages and then we couldn’t get one of the dog tag pages to print at all so we ended up making our own bingo calling cards. It’s not a huge deal but is definitely frustrating when you waste the time to find it and then can’t print it.
This above is the page that wouldn’t print. It’s an easy fix for us to just handwrite them, but definitely not as neat and cute as gluing them onto the other sides of dog tags to have those cute cards available. My fix is that we put those above cards into text and printed them. Then my kids wrote the dog tag words on the back of the Language Bingo dog tags. Two of my older boys took on the job of cutting out all the pieces for the bingo game and that made me happy that I didn’t have to do it!
It probably would have been less messy if I’d done it myself as they decided to do it over my bed. . . .
But that being said, there are so many positives that we’re going to keep using this curriculum. We love it. It’s engaging and gives lots of hands-on activities for the kids to do while teaching them a lot about history. When history comes alive in your child’s eyes you’re going to overlook the few negatives that we’ve found.
A fun part of the curriculum is working on writing skills through journalism or writing within the newspaper. It’s really fun and makes writing less a chore. It also helps to give you a when history comes alive moment because your child is learning and putting themselves back in time! You can read more about how fun it is and why it’s included HERE on the Home School in the Woods blog.
I have to say we absolutely love these studies. It gives my kids that creative hands-on aspect that I’m horrible at doing for them. I’m not the arts and crafts mom. This is just not who I am and I’ve come to terms with it. But I also know my kids love the arts and crafts and this is so good for them! If you want to learn history while having fun definitely consider getting a Time Traveler study.
The map studies are a lot of fun. I highly recommend taking longer on the maps and boundaries than they suggest. We’ve been working on them for a whole week now. My boys are enthralled with war and this is so much fun for them. In essence, we got stuck there with them. Well, we actually did the assignment when it was supposed to be done. But we’ve come back to it. Boys love war and they want to mark out where all the battles were, and then they wanted to read more about those battles and how they impacted the war. So I’m just letting them take their time. We’re not on a deadline here.
Learn More
You can learn more about When History Comes Alive and all the wonderful products that Home School in the Woods offers by going to the Main Blog Post on the Homeschool Review Crew Blog and checking out all the reviews. Reviewers got to choose between Project Passports, Time Travelers, and the timeline collection so there are plenty of different time periods or locations to see and read about.
Home School in the Woods can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. We love when history comes alive and can’t wait to finish up this lovely program so we can choose another one to start!
Another fun way to learn more about when history comes alive and Home School in the Woods is to check out all of my past reviews.
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