Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

Play-Based Learning

Homeschool Review Crew

Figures in Motion

Learning is so important.  History is a huge part of our homeschool and my kids love learning about history.  Part of the reason I think this is is that we do play-based learning for history.  For the Civil War and WWII, we do reenactments.  What’s better to help you learn than to reenact it?!  

Recently we added a new level of play-based learning to our homeschool by using Figures in Motion.  We received their Famous Figures of Ancient Times book to use in our homeschool.  Now you may be thinking book.  Really a book?  Books aren’t play!  Some people even say books are boring. 

But Figures in Motion is not some boring book.  It incorporates learning and doing together and lets your child have fun.  This is because if you look further past the book part you’ll see Figures.  I wonder why the title would have figures in it?  What figures are we talking about?

I’m glad you asked!

About Figures in Motion

Figures in Motion takes history and makes it more appealing to children of all ages by incorporating jointed paper dolls into the mix.  Within their books you find history come alive through play-based learning as they make the dolls and then use them to act out history. 

They offer a variety of time periods in history from ancient times to the Civil War with fun things in between like the Renaissance and Medieval.  What fun to act out a joust with the characters!

Now you might be wondering how paper dolls can joust.  These paper dolls are connected with brads so they have moveable joints.  They’re almost more a puppet than a doll so you get extended play with them and also you can actually move them!

Each book comes with lots of recommendations for reading to go along with what it tells you about the characters.  These fun figures would work well to complement just about any history curriculum you happen to be using.  I can see us using and reusing them many times as we study different periods of history.

What we Received

We received the Figures in Motion set for Ancient Times.  We received a few things that you normally don’t when you purchase because they wanted us to be able to hit the ground running!  Because of this we got the hole punch and brads with our book where you normally have to provide your own.

Our book came in the mail. It’s a soft cover and the pages that you make the paper dolls or puppets from is perforated so you can easily remove them.  Because I know that my children are hard on things I brought out the laminator!

Laminating your figures will help them stay together longer.  I recommend cutting out the pieces, then laminating them, and then assembling them. The paper you are laminating is cardstock but if you have children like mine laminating will help!

Assembly is through using a paper punch and brad system to keep them together but allow movement.  

Copying of the line art pages is permissible for one family use only.  I thought this was good to know. 

Each character that you get to put together is introduced first.  They get a black and white page and a color page of perforated figures.  If your child wishes to color the figure they can use the color page as a guide and color the black and white figure. 

I being the book-loving mama I love that they give good book recommendations to help you further study the characters that you are working with.   In the beginning information section they have a paragraph or two about each character and what makes them remarkable. 

Here is the content list for reference.  I was pleasantly surprised with some of the figures included!  I was also flabbergasted by some because I’d never even heard of them!  What a great way to learn alongside my children.  Those are ones we will be studying more indepth I do believe. 

Our Thoughts

I was a little skeptical about these guys at first.  My kids are the best at destroying things.  I think they could tear apart a house with no tools.  So I was nervous about how long the figures would last in our house.  I was pleasantly surprised with how well they held together with play.  Now I will say even with lamination toddlers can still destroy things.  They’re just that good!

I loved learning about new people of history with my children.  There were some of the characters within our ancient figures that I personally had never heard of let alone taught to my children.  I also enjoyed that Bible characters were included as part of history and not just in Bible courses. 

My older boys loved the fighting figures and did enjoy making their figures fight each other.  I think that’s pretty standard for their age.

Over all we were greatly pleased with these figures and really are enjoying using this as a loose curriculum.  We are between actual history curriculums so we are grabbing all the books on each figure and spending roughly a week learning about each and what part of history they played.  Older children have more to tell than youngers of course but everyone is learning which is the goal. 

Learn More about Figures in Motion

You can learn more about Figures in Motion and the books they had available for reviewers by reading all of the reviews that are linked up on the Main Blog Post on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.  Reviewers were given a choice of five books plus a printable online version for international reviewers.  What book each review is based on can be found in the title of the link.  For instance, ours will say Ancient.

Figures in Motion can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.