Time Travelers U.S. History Studies: Colonial Life ~~ A New TOS Review!

Sometimes we need to mix things up a bit and hands on history from Home School in the Woods has products like Colonial Life from their Time Travelers U.S. History Studies makes it easy for you to just that! They have many in this series including The American Revolution, WWII, and The Civil War, and I know we will be adding some more of these to our history over the next several years as we delve into American History. This series is intended for grades 3rd through 8th, but are easily adjusted to fit younger and older students. That's exactly what we did since my reviewer is my eldest (15yo). She chose Time Travelers U.S. History Studies: Colonial Life because it is one of her favorite time periods.

This review was a little different because almost the entire time period of our review she was in South Carolina doing 'summer school' of sorts with her grandmother (she took a Nutrition class as a dual enrollment and also finished her Geometry and began Algebra II) so I told her she'd have to be sure to keep up with this review ... and she did, wonderfully, even with the OVERLOAD of reading for her nutrition class.

So first, before I get into how Arianna used the study, let me tell you a little bit about how they are set up and such. All of the Time Travelers series have 25 assignments or lessons. Inlcuded in the unit is the text reading for each lesson (about 2-3 pages in length), project pages, masters (for the projects), and a helpful lesson plan so you can see at a glance each of the lessons and what's included in each one. These are all PDF files that you download and then can print however you'd like (one at a time, all at once, several for the week ahead, etc.) 5 of the lessons on the lesson plan are set aside to finish projects at the end of the week if they hadn't been completed.

As you go through each of these hands on history projects your student will have handwriting practice, create recipes from the era, dress up as if you were living in that time period as well as play common games for children, timeline, maps, and much, much more. For the activities and projects most of the supplies are things you probably have around the house like scissors, glue, colored pencils, tape, but there are other thins you might need, but as long as you are looking ahead you can gather them quite easily.  I have no idea if any of these were  'hard to get' for my mother-in-law, but she did not mention that they were. We tend to have a lot of artsy supplies in our house and I think most homeschooling families have more than the 'average' person as well.

There are a variety of activities for each and every lesson AND if this wasn't being done over the summer I'd have done it with ALL of my kiddos OR have my eldest do ALL of them. But since it's summer (and she was taking that dual enroll college class) I told her to pick at least 1 activity per lesson and to shoot for getting at least halfway through the lessons.  I'm so proud of all her hard work this past month including typing up her 'review' since we haven't been in the same house the entire time! Originally she wanted to do EVERY single activity and project, so she intends to finish working on it throughout the fall to complete the whole unit.

That is one of the great things of both the Project Passport World History Studies as well as the Time Travelers U.S. History Studies -- they are so flexible! And can definitely be used by one child or all of your children together.

Here is what my daughter says about this product:

Colonial Life is a collection of lessons about life back in the colonial times.  In every lesson you get to learn some things about what colonials did. Included you are given some cool facts about stuff that they did and or used. Each day there was a 1 to 3 page lesson on a certain topic that I had to read. These topics included such things as colonial cloths, types of houses, food, farming, schools, types of religions, famous people, etc. Each lesson came with several possible activities. I read the lesson then chose an activity that interested me. I really wanted to do them all, but I didn't have time currently. I do plan on finishing ALL of the activites this year.  Here is the list of activites that I did complete -- a Town Crier newspaper, 

Working on the Town Crier newespaper

figured out the age of broken tree branches, 

lesson 2

 made a log cabin pop up card, 

sewed a tick (a miniature version of their mattress), 

dressed up in a colonial dress, 

practiced penmanship by writing the rules of civility, 

lesson 5

made an apple head doll (my brother liked this activity as well - he even ate the extra pieces from his whittling), 

I thought this one looked the best!

completed a rebus puzzle (one of my favorite activities), 

played colonial hopscotch with my brother after he drew the states - which is hard to see in this picture because the only chalk we had at my grandmothers was pink and light orange, 

played artisan charades, 

pretending to be the bard

picking a card out

the cards

cooked Indian pudding, 

and lastly made silhouette art. 

There were lots of other crafts like making rock candy, lots and lots of other recipes which I look forward to making, making a lapbook, stained glass, and pomander, but I did not have time to do them all. 

My favorite part was learning all about colonial life. My favorite activity was the rebus puzzles. Something now that I learned was that they would make a doughnut shaped pillow and put it around babies as they learned to walk to keep them from hurting themselves when they fell. I think this unit study would be good as a stand alone curriculum. Even though it wasn't designed for high schoolers I think there is plenty of 'meat' in the program, but we'd have to add a little more to the research of all the different parts. I really enjoyed it and my brother loved to join in as well. I like these types of programs because it's easy to have the whole family in on the journey.

 I think she summed her study up perfectly, don't you?? I also wanted to let you know there is a photo gallery which you can see what the completed projects should end up looking like. I did not pass that information on to my daughter, but I don't think that hindered her. I also didn't realize until this review that Home School in the Woods also has a BLOG! I loved the one on adding living books to your homeschool as well as how to teach American History with the Time Travelers series. You can also find Home School in the Woods on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

I hope that you don't just take my daughter's word for it, but you can check out the myriad of other reviews by the Crew. They not only reviewed other in the Time Travelers U.S. History Studies, but they also reviewed their Project Passport World History Studies (Ancient Rome is their newest edition) and Timeline Collection: A Collection of Historical Timeline Figures so be SURE to click the link below to read those reviews as well. I also have reviewed their Project Passport a few years ago on the Middle Ages. Have you used any of their products? If so, I'd love to chat and "meet" you ... leave me some comment love!