If you are unfamiliar with Home School in the Woods, they produce beautifully drawn project based history studies appropriate for a wide range of ages. Although the U.S. Elections unit is rated for grades 3-8, it could easily be adapted for younger siblings and used as a supplement for high school students. For the purpose of this review, we received the download version of History Through the Ages Hands-on History Lap-Pak: U.S. Elections. However, there is also a CD version available for those of you who don't have instant gratification issues.
The U.S. Elections Lap-Pak provides a wide array of learning opportunities through various learning methods. All of the lesson information is available in a text file that can be made into a booklet or printed as full pages. This same text is also provided as audio files so your student can listen and read along, if that is their preference. Of course, there are also 21 election based projects that can be made into a lapbook or kept as individual projects.
All of the projects come with complete instructions and the master project pages. Rarely is anything other than paper, glue or tape, paper fasteners, and colored pencils needed to complete the projects. Full color images of completed samples are available for each project. I must admit to occasionally being a little confused by the instructions and using the pictures as my guide for a project or two.
Our Experience:
You may or may not know this, but we are rather happy previous customers of Home School in the Woods. My daughter, Amber, was chomping at the bit to start the election projects and had made me promise to purchase the U.S. Elections Lap-Pak as part of her American Government credit if we were not selected for this review. It took great restraint on her part to wait for our downloaded product, but once we had it in hand she was off and running.
Our choice was to use the U.S. Elections Lap-Pak as an introduction to the American election process prior to starting Amber's formal American Government book work. I printed off all of the projects on a wide selection of colored paper and cardstock, knowing full well Amber would chose to skip a few of the projects. I then loaded the MP3 audio files and the text file with the lesson information on Amber's iPad. After a brief introduction and a few project instructions, she was ready to work at her leisure.
Since we now utilize a block style of schooling, American Government is not a daily subject for us. Instead, Amber chose to work on her Elections projects over a couple of blocks per week. Each lesson period Amber set up her iPad and speaker to listen to the information while either following in the text or working on the projects. Some of the information was not new to Amber, thankfully, although a good portion was either unknown or a clarification of how she understood the election process to work.
Over the course of the review period Amber completed almost all of the projects and all of the reading /listening in the U.S. Elections Lap-Pak from Home School in the Woods. For us, this was the perfect introduction to a high school level American Government class. However, for younger students it will make a full and engaging election study.
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See how other members of the Review Crew used this versatile elections study!
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