Reading Study Guide
Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
Reading Study Guide
Homeschool Review
Progeny Press
Are you raising readers? We are in our house. I love to read and have imparted that love of reading to my children. But we must work harder at making sure we add in a bit more than just reading. A reading study guide helps ensure that children get the critical points from their reading. We love Progeny Press for this. They have SO many different guides for books from early readers through high school.
Recently we received two reading study guide downloads from Progeny Press. The two reading study guide downloads we got to study are The Last Battle Study Guide and The Fellowship of the Ring Study Guide. The Last Battle Study Guide is geared towards grades 5-8 so middle school while The Fellowship of the Ring Study Guide is geared towards high school or grades 9-12.
About the Guides
First off, we received the digital download of the study guides. But you can also purchase them as a physical copy or on a CD. You can use them again and again if you get the CD or download it. The physical copy is a once-and-done type product. I’m a physical lover. I want my children to have papers in their hands but for this product, it makes so much more sense for us to get the digital download or the CD so that we can print off as many copies as we need.
Progeny Press has been creating and selling reading study guide products for over 30 years now. They know what they’re doing! They have won lots of awards as well. Many homeschoolers use and love their products yearly. We have used several of their guides before and I’ll link those at the end of this post.
What’s in the Guide?
So what’s really in the guide?
In the download, you get the student portion and also an answer key. These can easily be kept separate so that your student does not have access to the answer key. Each has its own download link for the two guides we received. So you download them separately and they are separate files.
The guide will teach you about the author, vocab words, literary techniques, activities, writing assignments, moral lessons, and character values, plus so much more!
I love these guides. They provide so many questions that get you to think and mull over parts of the story that you might otherwise just read over and not really think on. And best of all, it’s written from a Christian worldview. This is important to us because I want my children to pull God and allegory out of their reading. We try to only read good and wholesome books that will teach a valuable lesson or point us closer to God.
How to Use
These guides are super easy to use. They’re pretty much open and go. I’ve found with my children I don’t have to be super involved but rather can just hand them the guide and set it up for them as to what they need to do each week.
The guides are set up with having you read a section, answer questions, and then repeat. That said, most of my children will read the whole book first and then re-read the sections for the questions. This is because they hate having to stop reading without knowing what is going to happen. This allows them to read the first time for the pleasure of the read and read the second time for knowledge and understanding.
When you get into the high school guides if you use four in one year that will count as one high school literature credit. This is something I’ve had to think about now that I have so many high schoolers! Each guide is geared to take 8-10 weeks for the middle school and high school ages. The younger ages won’t take as long.
Our Thoughts
We love Progeny Press! I can’t say this enough. We love reading and I love that Progeny Press offers such literature-rich, Christian reading study guide downloads. They seem to know my heart and always choose the books that we love or want to read.
The guides are easy to use.
I love that I simply sign into my account, hit the download button, open the file, and boom there it is. No chasing down links, no grabbing this here and that there, plus you can actually use the guide in adobe acrobat and type there if you want. We don’t. I think if each of my children had their own computer that might be a good idea, but since we share two computers for the entire family printing is my best option.
You do have to own or get the book to go with the guides. Easily the books can be gotten from a library. They’re all books that are easy to find and purchase or borrow.
My kids love to read.
I think we have only ever done one guide that we did not already own the book or had never read the book. And that book was The Long Way to A New Land. I was thrilled to review that guide(review linked below) and introduce my children to a new book. I knew that the book would be a good one because I knew that this company would not do a bad book.
There is something to be said for knowing you can trust a company and knowing that they consistently produce quality reading study guide downloads for your homeschool.
We are planning on using more of these wonderful reading study guide downloads this year. I don’t know about you but my kids say they can’t just read and study one book in a series. So my middle school kids are going to go through the entire Narnia series while my high school students are going to go through the whole Lord of the Rings study. It seems we’re off to enchanted lands all around!
Now to decide on what I want my elementary kids to read and study. Maybe some Little House for them. I don’t think they have read that series yet! It’s always fun to get to revisit books as each set of children age into them!
Here’s a fun tip for all.
Read the books out loud. All of the books. You see, we will have three books going at once in our homeschool. Three different books are being read by three sets of children.
We have found that all of my kids love being read to. Yes, even those high school kids love to hear books read aloud still.
So, I will read three different books out loud. For us this looks like me reading one while they eat breakfast, one while they eat lunch, and one while we eat supper or right after supper. I don’t eat at the same time a smy kids normally because I want a stress free eating time, so this fits perfectly for us.
Do you enjoy reading books out loud to your children?
Learn More
Ready to learn more about Progeny Press and all of their wonderful reading study guide downloads? Run over to the Main Blog Post on the Homeschool Review Blog and read all of the posts linked up. We got a choice of what books we wanted to study so you’ll have choices from the younger ages all the way through high school.
Progeny Press can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Here are some of our previous reviews for your viewing pleasure!
Little House in the Big Woods and The Courage of Sarah Noble
The Cricket in Times Square and Frankenstein
The Long Way to a New Land and Hound of the Baskervilles
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