Review ~ Home School In The Woods: Great Empires Activity Study
We love the history unit studies from Homeschool in the Woods! They are so much fun to put together and teach multiple ages at the same time.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
We've taken a break this past month from our normal history studies to use the Great Empires Activity Study from Home School in the Woods.
I've been looking at a number of their packages to use in our next school year, so I was so happy to have the opportunity to review this unit study.
Home School in the Woods is a family run business by homeschool mother Amy Pak. I love products that are developed by other homeschool families since they have a true insight into what our days are like!
The Great Empires Activity Study is available in both CD and download format, we received the download version. It's suggested for elementary school-aged children. This unit covers the following 14 empires.
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece
Ancient Rome
Ancient China
Arab-Muslim Empire
Mongolian Empire
Viking Empire
Spanish Empire
French Empire
English Empire
German Empire
Japanese Empire
Russian Empire
The United States of America
Each empire unit contains a few pages of text with key information about its formation and activity. Also provided are games, maps, projects, links, and recipes for each area of study.
Each unit can be covered in about a week’s time, or if you use all the book and link suggestions you can stretch each empire into a month of study.
Homeschool History Unit Study
I had originally planned to move through this quickly as we had in past years studied some of the early empires already. My children, on the other hand, had a different idea!
They just love the early history time periods and we have spent the past month learning about Ancient Egypt.
The download version launches with an HTML page in your browser. This page acts as a home page and lets you easily move through the resources for each unit. I loved how this was set up!
I printed off the reading text, maps, activities, and timeline. We started off our study by reading the 2-page information guide on Ancient Egypt.
This is the only part of the unit study that I wasn't overly fond of. The text is written in a very textbook-like format.
My younger children were not interested in it at all, as it was too "dry" for their liking. My older children understood it, but trying to keep them paying attention was hard.
I would have preferred the text to be written in a narrative style. I would read each section and then ask the children to narrate back to me.
Next, we worked on the mapping pages. I have to say I love the maps in this unit! They are pretty and the detail is great.
I'm also glad that they include a teacher's copy with the correct areas filled out. It is not always easy to find a map of Ancient Egypt, that has everything labeled.
Hands-On Ancient History Unit Study
Other activities included in the Egypt unit was making a cartouche. We did the paper version first using their worksheet and each child wrote their name in hieroglyphs. Later we worked on the more messy clay version.
Two recipes were included Egyptian Fig Cookies and Lemon & Garlic Potato Salad. The kids picked the fig cookies, no surprise there!
There is also a great list of additional reading books suggested for each unit. Unfortunately, our library didn't have most of them, and it takes them forever to order books in. So I substituted where I could, and tried to wait for the others.
Luckily I already have many Egyptian books in our personal library.
This unit also includes a collection of websites, and we loved these! For Egypt, links included how to make your own Senet game, a virtual tour of Egypt, websites on the pyramids, Egyptian life, art, and many interesting people from Egypt's history.
Some of these include Narmer, Ramses II, and Tutankhamun.
We have really enjoyed using this program, the only thing that I wasn't overly fond of was the format the text was written in. This is because our family prefers a living book/narrative style.
I loved how the interactive program was laid out. It makes it very easy to find the pages you're looking for. I don't have to dig through many PDFs to find the right pages.
The overview sheets for each empire although not in the style we prefer are still very well done. The information included in them is excellent. For the remaining units, I will simply break the readings up into smaller amounts.
The additional reading suggestions are great and books are suitable for different ages. This is another way you could use the program with younger or older students.
The next unit we do, I don't expect to use the overview sheets with my younger children. Instead, we'll jump right into the literature suggestions.
I loved the webpage links that were included. It takes a lot of time to search the internet looking for child-friendly websites for each topic. I loved having them already organized.
The maps are wonderful! They are large and easy to read. I like the shading as it makes the maps look nicer the most we have used.
We loved the simple timelines that are included. Instead of being a timeline covering every person and event in a time period, they covered the start of each empire. These timelines are perfect for younger children or for your first timeline.
Our family is going to continue using this program but in a slightly different way. I'm going to use the earlier empire units as a review of what we have studied in the past.
Then as we come to a new time period of history I will use this unit study as an introduction to that, then move into our normal narrative style of history.
