Review: Progeny Press Study Guide

Princess P loves all things Little House on the Prairie, so when Progeny Press offered their Little House in the Big Woods Study Guide  for us to review, I jumped on it. It's recommended for grades 3-5 and she is just finishing up 3rd grade so it was a perfect match.  

The study guide is a 56 page ebook that was easy to download as a pdf. It also came with an answer key if you needed it. I was reading the book with her so didn't need to use it but it would be great for if your kiddo is doing the study guide on a book you haven't read. The downloadable study guide is $16.99. It is an "interactive" guide so when you download it using Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0+, you can fill in the blanks ON the form and not have to print it out. That's so cool for those with expensive printers. Ours prints dirt cheap so I printed the whole thing out and put it in a folder for P to use. Included in the guide are a synopsis of the story, about the author info, then some activities to do before you start and then the activities about the book. There are vocabulary questions, comprehension questions, and questions to make you "dig deeper" into the material. There are also projects and activities for the chapters. Some that require more materials and time than others. The guide takes two chapters at a time and does all of these activities. Each one has some Bible verses to look up to bring the lessons back to God, which is pretty awesome. One of the verses was Eph. 6:1-3, which we had just memorized Eph 6 in CC so it was cool to see it come up again so soon.     To use the study guide, you need to have the book, Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (obviously). You also need to have a dictionary/thesaurus, pencil, and a Bible. They suggest that you read the entire book in the first week, then begin the study guide. Princess P isn't a very fast reader and hates to be rushed so we checked out the audio book from the library and listened to that through in the first week. Then we started reading a chapter at at time and working on the study guide as we went. We own the book (two copies actually) so weren't in a hurry to get it returned and could take our time reading through it.
We broke it up and did a section each day...like, one day we did the vocab and looking up the words in the dictionary (which was a great thing since we rarely do that anymore. I made her use the actual dictionary instead of an online one - mean momma!). Another day we did the comprehension question or the digging deeper questions. And another day we did one of the activities listed. Each chapter had 4 projects or activities - some taking longer than others. For example, one choice was learning to square dance. We didn't have time or resource to do that just yet, but could look it up on youtube and at least see what it is. One was to track temps for a week to see if it was cool enough to keep the pork Pa had killed frozen...but it is 90* here so we picked another that week -  making butter. The kids always love doing this!
I liked the variety in the activities and thoughtful questions. I like that it kept us moving forward and made the book more meaningful. We are now planning a trip to Laura's home in KS with some friends and can't wait!    This downloadable book sells for $16.99 and you can view a sample of it by clicking here. I'm sure you could find enough info online to piece together a curriculum around these books, but time is money and I'm always happy to pay if it is a quality product and saves me hours of time, and this does just that! I also appreciate that they are from a Christian perspective.
Progeny Press has numerous study guides to choose from varying from early elementary to upper elementary levels. Check out the reviews from the other Crew Mates who used different ones.  

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