Sacha’s<25: This study is geared to give elementary students a hands-on element while learning about the 12 Great Empires in the world from both the past and present.
Home in the Trenches Product Rating (out of 10 stars)
Is it worth our time? 8 stars
Did it help us learn? 7 stars
Is it worth the money? 8 stars
Is it useful to me? 8 stars
Practicality- 8 stars
Quality- 10 stars
Kid Rating- 9 stars
We were recently given the opportunity to review the new
Great Empires Activity Study from
Home School in the Woods. We were very excited to try this out. We have been covering the Eastern Hemisphere this year for History/Geography and a few of the great empires were from this area of the world. I thought this might be a great opportunity to revisit some of what we had learned this year and to add in some great hands on projects to our studies. I was not disappointed!
The Great Empires Activity Study covers 14 of the great empires in history.
Empires included are:
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
We chose to do the Chinese, Japanese, English and French Empires during our review period. Each empire study has 3 main sections. The first is a text portion. I would print out and read this (usually 2 pages) to the kids while they worked on coloring or cutting out part of a project that went with each empire. The second portion is the activity directions. This tells you how to put together any of the activities for each empire. The activities are varied so don’t worry about it becoming monotonous. The last portion includes all of the printable masters. These are beautifully illustrated which is to be expected from Home School in the Woods! Can I mention how much I love their timeline figures? We have been using them for many years now in our timelines…so much more interesting than just writing in names!
We were given the downloadable version to review. Downloading to my Mac was a piece of cake. I did find that it was a little bit more time consuming printing out the pages I needed for each empire. They were saved to my computer as individual PDF’s. So I had to click on each PDF to see what it was and decide how many copies I needed of each page. Sometimes I had 5 kids working on a specific page, other times it was just 3. Actvities varied from mapping projects, recipes, games and printable projects. We found it was great to put all of the activites into a binder for each child. I recently purchased a Pro-Click binding machine and we were easily able to punch holes into our pages and add to our binders easily.
While this product is recommended for elementary students I had my 6th and 7th graders enjoying it just as much as my Kindergardener and 3rd grader.
It is suggested that each empire study would take between 1-3 days to complete. I used this as a review of what we had covered this year. However, I think that you could really use this product as a more in-depth study of the different great empires. This product comes with a web link to additional online resources as well as a book list for each empire. A few of the books recommended were ones that we had already read this year in our studies. (And that we really enjoyed)
My kids thanked me each time we worked on this review! They really enjoyed the hands-on activities, which is something that we don’t normally have a lot of time for. We found it to be a perfect addition to our studies. I only wish I had known about it at the beginning of the school year. We would have been able to do each empire’s activities as we finished up studying them.
What I liked:
- I could pick and choose what activities we wanted to complete from each Empire we studied. There were plenty of different ones to do!
- Very flexible in how much time we spent …we could go in depth and spend hours in one sitting on it or just 20 minute sessions over multiple days.
- Love PDFs. Super great for my 5 kids…I could print out as many copies as I needed for my family. Also, when we spilt water on a page it was no big deal to print out another one.
- The graphics are gorgeous.
What I didn’t like:
- It was a little hard to sometimes figure out what pages I wanted to print from each section. I had to open them all up individually to see them. They were not organized completely by topic.
To sum it up: This was a great change of pace for my kids. They really enjoyed all of the hands on activities, which is something we don’t tend to spend much time doing. It was very easy to use and jump right in learning and completing the activities.
The important information:
Great Empires Activity Study
Order from: Home School in the Woods
Price: Download Version-$18.95, CD Version-$19.95
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