Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
I have been intrigued by the study guides from Progeny Press ever since I first heard of them, before I had children. A couple of years ago, we had our first chance to use one, for review, and enjoyed it. When I was offered another study guide recently, I knew it was something we wanted to do. I chose the Wagon Wheels Study Guide. Wagon Wheels is an easy reader we have had on the shelf for years and a wonderful story.
Little Miss is the only child I have who was in the correct age range (grades 1-3) for this study, so she was the one who got to go through it. The guide is sent as a fillable PDF, so it can be completed entirely digitally, but I chose to print it. For our family, something on paper is much easier to use than something on the computer, in general. I do appreciate having the PDF, as I can use it again when Miss Joy is old enough.
Before we started reading the book, we read a page of background information and talked about some of the issues that affected the family in the story. We also looked up maps to find where they came from and where they lived.
There are four chapters in Wagon Wheels, and after a few pages of studying some of the more uncommon words found in the book, the child is directed to read the first two chapters, answer questions about them, and then read the last two chapters and answer questions about them. Instead of doing it just like that, I chose to have Little Miss read one chapter a day. After reading the chapter, we answered the questions that went along with it, and studied the words that were from that chapter. The book is just enough more difficult than most she’s reading right now, and the chapters are long enough, that it worked best to spread out the reading over four days.
After the questions about the chapters (which included studying a few passages from the Bible and discussing how they related to the book), there is a page about Fact or Opinion, and Little Miss had to identify which one each of 15 statements was. She had fun with that! Next, she had to go through the book and find compound words, writing them down on a page. After that, she got to draw pictures to illustrate several compound words. The last activity in the book is a crossword puzzle, which she was quite excited about.
After all the activities about the story, there are hands-on projects and research projects suggested to extend the learning. At the very end of the book is a list of other books by the author of Wagon Wheels, and other books that have similar topics.
We really enjoyed this study. Little Miss enjoys reading, and she enjoyed thinking about the book. I believe I’ll be looking into doing more literature studies with her in the future; this seems to be something that will work well for her. Be sure to click the image below to read reviews of other Progeny Press study guides!
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