Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
For the past month, Silas and Titus have been using literature study guides from Progeny Press. We've used several of their literature guides in the past and have always been very pleased with them! For the purpose of this review, we received these E-Guides: The Last Battle Study Guide by C. S. Lewis and Farmer Boy Study Guide by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
WHAT IS AN E-GUIDE?
Progeny Press's E-Guides are Interactive Study Guides that open in Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can either print off the study guides (which is what we do) or your child can type their answers directly into the program. All of their literature guides for 4th grade through 12th grade are now available as an Interactive Study Guide. You can also purchase the Progeny Press literature study guides as a physical, paper book or on a CD. The guides are reproducible and can be used with multiple children over and over again.
HOW THE LITERATURE GUIDES WORK:
The literature study guides are very user-friendly! Each guide takes around 8-12 weeks to complete (less time for the younger grades). Progeny Press recommends reading the book before completing the literature guide, but you can also just read the chapters each section covers before working on that section in the guide.
The guides are broken down into sections based on several chapters. There are vocabulary exercises, character analysis, reading comprehension questions, writing exercises, and dig deeper questions. The "dig deeper" questions are usually based on scripture and really make your child think deeper!
Each section also contains extra project and activity ideas, like arts and crafts, cooking, research, discussion, and games to play. These are optional, and I usually had my boys pick one of the suggestions to complete for each section.
The literature guides a synopsis, author information, pre-reading activities, and final projects and activities. They are full of great ideas and information!
HOW WE USED THIS:
The first thing I did was buy The Last Battle. Progeny Press also offers many of the books for sale on their website! We already owned Farmer Boy, so I just pulled it from the bookshelf. Next I printed off both of the guides in their entirety. The Last Battle Study Guide was 67 pages, and Farmer Boy Study Guide was 57 pages. The pages are all black and white, no color, so it's very print-friendly. I three-hole-punched the pages for each guide and placed them in a three-prong folder for each boy.
Farmer Boy Study Guide is written for grades 4-6, and Titus is entering the 5th grade this year. I knew this book would be a challenge for him to read on his own because he struggles with long chapter books. Titus and I are reading Farmer Boy aloud together, alternating pages. This makes it much easier for him, and he's remembering so much from the book! We read the chapters for each section (usually around four chapters) in a week and then we take a week to work through the questions and activities.
We usually completed a page a day in this guide, working together. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well Titus answered the reading comprehension questions! He would read the question aloud, and then I had him give me his answer. We worked together to shorten the answer as he wrote it in his guide. Not all children in this age range will need this much hand-holding, but some will.
For the first section, he chose to do a really neat activity! In the book, Almanzo was eating popcorn, apples, and milk as a nighttime snack. The book mentions that if you get a cup full to the brim with milk and a cup full to the brim with popped popcorn, you can put each piece of popcorn in the cup of milk and the milk will not overflow. This activity was the first suggestion, and Titus quickly decided we had to try it! He was surprised to see that it actually worked. We put every piece of popcorn into the cup of milk and it never overflowed. We talked about why he thought this worked.
The Last Battle Study Guide is written for grades 5-8, and Silas is entering 7th grade this year. This book is in the Chronicles of Narnia series, and he is really enjoying it! He reads the chapters for each section on his own and completes the corresponding pages. Each section is pretty long, and he works about a page or a page and a half a day. When he reads the questions to me and answers them, I can tell he really does understand what's going on in the story. The questions are really thoughtful and make him think about the "whys" and "hows" of the book.
He almost always chooses to draw when it's one of the suggested optional activities! He loves to draw. Drawing also makes him visualize the characters and scenes more.
WHAT DID WE THINK?
I knew we would love these literature study guides from Progeny Press, and we do! We are going to continue with these guides until we finish them, and then move on to the other guides I've already purchased for them to use this year! We have reviewed these guides in the past:
There are so many things I appreciate about the literature study guides from Progeny Press - the book choices are excellent, the questions are well-written, and the activities are relevant to the book. You can take as little or as much time as you'd like to work through the guides. I plan to have my boys complete two more of these guides this year for a total of three guides. To see what other Crew members thought about Progeny Press literature study guides, click the banner below!
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