YWAM Publishing: Laura Ingalls Wilder



Our family was first introduced to YWAM Publishing a few years back as recommended read alouds and during that time quickly fell in love. This year we chose to kick off a year with YWAM Publishing: Laura Ingalls Wilder, and so glad we did!YWAM Publishing: Laura Ingalls Wilder

As They Grow Up was sent a product to help facilitate this review. All opinions are our own.

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YWAM Publishing: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Our introduction to YWAM included only the Christian Heroes, which we immensely enjoyed. Fast forward two years and that’s when we first checked out the Heroes of History series by reading Davy Crockett. Paring that book alongside the Digital Study unit was simply amazing!  That’s why this year when YWAM Publishing offered us several choices from their Heroes of History series of books we couldn’t resist.  

Heroes of History

Heroes of History by YWAM Publishing is such a unique biography series. This is a series that brings history to life with amazing true stories of truly fascinating men and woman that have changed the course of history. The stories are told in a way that you’ll find it hard to put them down.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Did you know that Laura Ingalls Wilder never dreamed of being a writer. She was a teacher, farmers wife, and a storyteller. She lived in one of the most exciting times in America and thanks to her putting pen to paper, generations have been able to relive her experiences through her writings.

The digital unit study is laid out in a way that it’s easy to adjust to your students learning style. You can choose activities based on what works best for your student.

Digital Unit Study

While the book is amazing as a stand-alone, I would highly recommend adding the digital unity study.  It really adds to the reading experience and allows the children (and teacher/parent) to take a closer look at that particular time.

Key Quotes

In this section, you’ll find eight quotes that you use alongside or as part of the unit study. You can choose to let your student memorize all or one of the quotes, use them to spark a conversation or even let them pick a favorite, make it into a plaque and display it during the unit study. We chose to randomly select a quote and talk more about it as we went through our unit study. This was one of my personal favorites:

“It is never too late to be what we might have been.” —George Eliot

Display Corner

This part of the unit study was the most popular in our house.  In this section, it suggests displaying a variety of different items that are talked about throughout the Laura Ingalls Wilder book.  A few suggestions were:

• Displaying books frontier life, covered wagons, etc.
• Large map of Midwestern states where Laura live
• Flags of the states in which Laura lived
• iron skillet, butter churn,etc.
• and so much more!

You’ll find tons of suggestions in this sections, and it really helps the kids to better understand how life was in those days.

Chapter Questions:

In this section, you’ll find a total of six questions related to each chapter.  Vocabulary question, a factual question, two questions to help gauge the level of your student’s comprehension as well as two open-ended questions.  As mentioned, you can easily customize this unit study based on your child’s age or learning style.  The first two questions are for younger students, while the last ones are more difficult.  With that being said, you can choose to have your student answer only a few of the questions, or all the questions.

Student Exploration:

This section was one of our favorite sections in this unit study.  It offers a variety of activities that cover a broad range of learning styles.   You’ll find essay questions, creative writing, hands-on projects, and audio/visual projects.  Having a reluctant writer, I appreciate the hands-on projects recreating recipes and even the audio/visual section. 

Community Links:

In this section, it encourages you to go out and find resources in your community that goes along with your current unit study.  Even though we live in a small town, we were able to find several resources to go along with this study, which seemed to get the boys even more interested in this time period.

Social Studies:

This section is divided into six categories: places, journeys, terms/vocabulary, geographical characteristics, timeline, and conceptual questions. This section was fantastic at giving them more knowledge about the time and places.

Related Themes To Explore:

This section gives you different ideas/suggestions on other related themes to help extend the learning.

Culminating Events:

This section is all about closing the unit study and gives fun ideas on how to go about it.

Overall thoughts

Over the past few months, I started introducing Laura Ingalls Wilder to my boys.  Over this time, I’ve enjoyed rereading all her wonderful stories to my boys and even watching the television series on DVD with them.  When we were given the option to pick a Heroes of History, my ten-year-old immediately picked Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Reading about her life on the frontier and the struggles that they went through.  We have thoroughly enjoyed reading and incorporating the unit study into our schedule. We opted to read a chapter a day and then answer the questions that go along with it. At the end of the week, we would do an activity or field trip that would go along with our unit study.

 

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