Oh, how I love the memories we’ve created together when we’ve embarked on learning adventures as a family! These little snippets have been some of the most rewarding experiences during our elementary school years. Because we’ve often lacked the time to pursue time-intensive projects during our normal school routine, we’ve used the time off from our homeschool tutorial (like Fall Break) and set aside a day to “Hone in on History” or “Search Out Science.” During our normal routine, we haven’t stuck to a hard-and-fast schedule for these projects – we just used them to add something special to each week at a pace that was comfortable and doable for us. And so… without further ado, we flash back to one of our favorite history studies from our oldest son’s elementary years…
The Renaissance and Reformation Project Passport History Study
The Renaissance and Reformation Project Passport by Homeschool in the Woods includes a Project CD containing 25 “stops” on the road through the Renaissance and Reformation. A history reading and travel itinerary is provided for each “stop” of the journey.
The travel itinerary provides the detailed instructions for projects that are to be completed, which include…
a time-period-specific timeline with lovely images and short descriptions of persons/events [this was the inspiration for our accordion timeline notebook],
illustrated directions and masters for over 50 projects and activities, such as papercrafts, cooking ideas, art projects, and other crafts,
writing prompts via “The Renaissance Reporter” newspaper,
and fictional postcards from various people from history.
Download the free “Science, Math,and Astronomy During the Renaissance” PDF sample (shown in the above photos) and mp3 by clicking on the Sample tab of this Homeschool in the Woods webpage.
How we’re using this study
There’s so much crammed into this project pack that we decided to work on a large bulk of the activities during fall break. This week, we constructed the Shakespeare Globe Theatre.
Surprisingly, Stephen enjoyed using the Hamlet puppet to perform Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. I couldn’t believe he chose to perform this over “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because he has asked that we no longer read tragedies. He has decided that he does not like the tragedy in tragedies. He wants everything to be happy and prefers to laugh. (For those wondering, we are reading Tina Packer’s Tales from Shakespeare.) Levi also did a performance, but he used a strange combination of puppets like Puck and Juliet in his play, and they ended up talking about something like monster trucks.
Also during our fall break, we completed all the scrapbook and lapbook pages…
Even Levi helped with the coloring of the projects. (He hasn’t mastered cutting with his left hand, but he’s figured out how to color!)
Now that we’ve finished that, we plan to return to where we were in the history readings and audios, and we’ll work through those for the rest of the semester and look back through our activity and lapbook pages as we come to them. (We usually have a history focus one day per week where we do some extra history reading and activities.) Many “stops” include a map activity, and there is a “Mercenary Madness” review game at the close of the study to review all vocabulary, people, and events introduced. So… in the end, we will have:
- reviewed our history memory work (multiple tie-ins for Cycle 2 history – and to timeline)
- mapped out the history of the Renaissance and Reformation (historical map studies)
- learned the vocabulary of this time period
- studied Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Luther, and many, many others
- connected the various events and peoples of the Renaissance and Reformation using a timeline
- written about the events during the Renaissance and Reformation in “The Renaissance Reporter”
- (hopefully created some projects that we can give away as Christmas presents??)
- made memories together and created a great keepsake
We still have plenty of projects to complete, and we don’t plan to do all of them (Just because it’s available doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it!)! But one great thing about this particular project pack is that it contains so much art instruction! By the time we finish, we’ll have studied multiple artists and replicated their work using various mediums while learning some art and drawing techniques.
The bottom line:
We totally and absolutely adore this study! We are learning so much from it!
Any drawbacks?
This study does not come in a pre-printed format, so printing takes some upfront time. The detailed instructions take you through how to print everything – on white or colored card stock or white or colored paper. One day my hope is that HSITW will provide an option for pre-printed packets because the convenience would be well-worth the additional cost for those who would like to just open-and-go.
Our family enjoys lapbooking and papercrafts. Those who are not at all familiar with lapbooking may find the paper projects difficult to complete. (Again, there are step-by-step instructions with illustrations that guide you through how to complete each activity.)
If you’re not sure if you or your children would enjoy something like this, visit Homeschool in the Woods to see photos of all the projects and to download samples of Timeline Figures, Time Travelers, and Project Passport and Olde World Style Maps. Try some of the projects and Newspaper News articles! I highly recommend trying out the Copernicus vs Ptolemaic Revolution activity in the free sample to see if this is a method of learning that’s a good fit for your family!
If you’re studying the Middle Ages, be sure to check out the Middle Ages Project Passport as well! To read our review of The Middle Ages Project Passport Study, click here.
Suggested grade level is 3-8, (although our younger children have enjoyed these projects, too!), and approximate time to complete this study is 8-12 weeks, although you can extend it across the rest of this school year or condense it by dropping some of the activities. Visit Homeschool in the Woods to see all the other great products they have available!
Let me take a moment to emphasize here (for the classical educators) that we don’t set out to dig deep into each piece of memory work. We simply choose a few topics we want to study more in-depth, even if our memory work moves on to other topics. A couple of years ago, we decided to study the Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression and World War II. Having selected these two studies, we didn’t go into all the details of communism, or the civil rights movement, or the astronauts walking on the moon, even though our memory work included it. We had not the time, energy or will to pursue every topic. But digging deeper into WWII resulted in our oldest son actually retaining (long term) so much more about WWII – battles, weaponry, support efforts on the homefront, Operation-Fill-in-the-Blank, and on and on (way beyond what I can remember). In many ways, these studies connect our upper-grammar child to the dialectic stage of understanding in a realm he is already very dialectic about; he’s a natural history buff and thrives with these studies, without me doing anything (except printing the materials)! To see our past Homeschool in the Woods studies in action, click here.
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