I had heard so many wonderful things about the Home School in the Woods products but we had not tried any of her games. When I was offered the chance to review one of her Á La Carte products, the Get Your Kicks on Route 66 file folder game, which covered the Industrial Revolution, World War I, and the Great Depression I was very excited. If you are following along on our Journey Through History you know those are the topics we covered in February and March.
The game is a printable PDF that is very easy to assemble. One of the things that impressed me as I was looking over the PDF was that she had the pages set up so that the ones that needed to be front and back could easily be printed that way in a printer that does double sided pages. This meant I only had to load my cardstock and press print, instead of making sure everything was lined up and printing one side and then putting the paper back in to print the other side. All in all, I had the game printed, colored, and set up in only about 15 minutes.
The first time we played the game we used it during our evening family time. My children absolutely loved it and my history buff husband enjoyed it as well. It was neat to see what they remembered from what we had already covered and get a chance to talk about a few things that we had not already covered as the questions came up. Even the three year old enjoyed helping them move their markers across the board. I felt that the questions were interesting and appropriate. The children have played multiple times since that first night, including with their grandmother when she came to visit. We also used the question cards one night without the board, just as a trivia game. Our entire family really enjoyed this game and I am hoping to purchase some of her similar games for other time periods to incorporate into our history lessons.
In addition to the history board game, my daughter had the chance to try her hand at quilling. Quilling is a colonial paper craft and our family loves to help out a local colonial era historic site. She may be able to use this new skill and show others about this craft as she volunteers as a historic interpreter. It seems like a great way to engage children in history. My daughter really enjoyed this project, The Art of Quilling, and I love that using those instructions she can repeat the project using other colors to make more flowers and projects. Hers did not turn out quite as uniform as the sample but it was adorable and I thought a great job for the first try. One trick that she found very helpful was to use the paper cutter she has for scrapbooking to cut the paper strips. This helped her keep them even.
There were so many great Á La Carte options that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just the two that we reviewed. We are looking at possibly purchasing a few more to tie into our US History studies this year. The WWII: Military Weaponry Notebook Project looks like it would be a huge hit with my son. If you have a child that loves to write or you want to incorporate writing into your history program there are lots of great newspaper projects, like this American Beginnings Newspaper Collection.
I truly can not say enough good things about these projects. They were inexpensive, easy to use, educational, and lots of fun for the whole family. We enjoy making ‘school’ and learning a family experience and so these were a perfect fit for us. There are many more reviews of other Home School in the Woods Á La Carte options so make sure to click on the link below and check out all of the crew reviews!
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