Did you see my post about our new schoolroom? Later this year we are going to take off in our caravan and explore Australia. All of us. For more than a year. We’re packing up our house (we rent), putting all our belongings in storage and…going.
Heaps to come on that. Before that we are going overseas for a month. A month! So what does that mean for the rest of our school year? It means we’re not going to get everything done. No way. Won’t happen. We’ve got to pack up this place, do our overseas trip, come back and adjust to life in a caravan. That’s a good chunk of the school year gone. I had a good look at the calendar recently and realised there is no way we were going to finish Story of the World this year. We were using Volume 2, the Middle Ages. But we’d barely made a dent. At first I thought we’d just keep going, maybe speed it up, see how far we got. Then I remembered… I have Project Passport: The Middle Ages! I bought it originally thinking I’d do it along with Story of the World. You know, a fun supplement. Right. (Why was I thinking we could do two history programs??)
Project Passport: The Middle Ages from Home School in the Woods is an 8-12 week journey through the Middle Ages aimed at grades 3-8. We’re doing it a little faster. More like six weeks. We’re rushing a bit in order to get through it before we leave. So we aren’t getting to everything, but doing most of it. (I purchased the CD version as pictured above, but it’s also available as a download.) Below is my Guide Book, a.k.a. Teacher’s Manual.
Only one of my kiddos is in the suggested age range of grades 3-8. The text is definitely aimed at these older ages. While we are reading I stop and explain things to help the younger ones get what we’re talking about. I’m betting we’ll do this study again when my youngers are…er, older. There’s a travel itinerary that gives all the instructions for each stop (lesson). It’s a list of what timeline figures you’ll need, newspaper articles to write, lapbook pieces to complete, etc. I printed all of these and placed the text for each stop behind them. These could be viewed on a tablet or computer, I decided it would be easier to have it in a binder. I use a post-it tab at the top of the page to mark which stop we are on.
I love that this is all laid out for me. All I had to do was print (and print, and print…). The only thing I’ve added was to make myself a list of topics from each stop so that I could add books to use for supplemental reading. Story of the World is chronological while Project Passport is more topical. You could easily extend it by spending more time on each stop, fleshing out the topics a bit more with more books or projects. The only thing I really feel is missing is mapwork, there’s not much in this program so far.
I’m a bit sad about leaving behind Story of the World for now. But we have it on audio, so we can listen to it later while we are on our journey around Australia. About that printing…It’s a lot of printing. Especially for three kids! I already had regular printer paper, coloured paper, white cardstock, and coloured cardstock. You need all of those. It’s a lot of switching paper out in the printer if you are doing all your printing at once. I’ve organised mine into pockets that fit in the back of my binder. There’s too much paper to fit it all in the binder at the beginning, so I just switch them out as needed.
When we started this I printed out just what we needed for the first couple of days. After I had a feel for it I printed a few stops a night until I had the whole thing done. Just a warning…there is a lot of colouring, and cutting, and lapbooking, and notebooking type projects in this program. If your kids don’t like those activities, this program may not work for your family! I’ll be posting more on this in the weeks to come.
Note: I was not given this product in exchange for review. Just really enjoying it!
Leave a Reply