Pirates or Privateers: You Decide A Once-a-week Micro Study from Homeschool Legacy {Curriculum Review}

One of the aspects of homeschooling I enjoy the most, is being able to do a unit study. Unit studies work well for us, because they allow me to teach both boys at once, incorporate multiple subjects into one lesson, and allow for a variety of activities to be done. A company well known for their best selling unit studies, is Homeschool Legacy. Over the past couple weeks, we have been reviewing their Once-A-Week Micro Study Pirates or Privateers: You Decide.

About Homeschool Legacy

Homeschool Legacy is devoted to providing high quality unit studies to the homeschool family. With unit studies covering a plethora of subjects from holiday traditions, to colonial cooking, to historical events, and more—there is a unit study topic for just about everything. They also offer shorter unit studies like their once a week unit studies, lasting just 4 weeks, instead of their 6-8 week studies.

Our review crew was allowed to choose from the following list of unit studies to use in our classroom:
Once-a-Week Unit Study:
*Christmas Comes to America 

Once-a-Week Micro-Studies:
*Pirates or Privateers: You Decide 
*Cooking up History with the Founding Presidents
*Victoria and Her World
*Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims   
*Many Nations

These unit studies incorporate language arts, history, geography, civics, life skills, and more!

We chose to do the Once-a-Week Micro-Study Pirates or Privateers: You Decide over the last couple weeks.

My Thoughts:

The #1 appeal of this unit study, is its length. A once a week (30 minutes) session is a great mini-unit length for us to work in. I can see that it would be a great way for someone to explore how the Homeschool Legacy unit studies work. Having experienced Homeschool Legacy before, I knew that the shorter length of the unit study, was in no way going to decrease the meatiness of what the study covered.

I was happy to see that I was right. Every week’s lesson gave in depth history on the subject, as well as a rich vocabulary relating to the topic. There were links for us to do maps and other activities—like labeling the Spanish Main or reading about and labeling the parts of a Spanish Galleon.

After learning about Sir Francis Drake, Little Britches was to write some facts about him—so I used the links and printed off a short biography. I had him record the information on some notebooking pages I had which were even themed Sir Francis Drake. My youngest drew the sailing route that Drake took, on a blank world map I found—great geography practice. We also had fun remembering the audiodrama Under Drake’s Flag which we reviewed last year, because it mentioned several of the same things we talked about in the unit study portion about Sir Frances Drake.

We are reading the suggested book Treasure Island, which we hadn’t ever read before. The boys were very eager to read it, because it has primarily male characters and is about pirates! We read it daily, even when the unit study is a once a week lesson.

An added bonus for our unit study, we went to a pirate themed mini-golf course on our recent trip to Panama City Beach, FL! Throughout the course—at every hole plus along the path, there was the tale of Blackbeard! It gave factual information about him as a man and pirate, and threw in extra bits of information relating to pirates and privateers. Talk about perfect timing!

one of the silly ditty gravestones

Daddy in stocks

Some suspicious characters apprehended!

The final aspect of our study is to dress like a pirate and watch one or two of the suggested old swashbuckling adventures. I appreciated that the unit study links them up to YouTube recordings—perfect since we have YouTube on our TV!

The boys have enjoyed learning about pirates and we had some great discussions about how a piece of paper granting you permission to rob others, doesn’t make it right in the sight of God. They now don’t think that being a pirate is something to want to be in a costume, because of what they really represent. This is something that I appreciated them learning all on their own—thanks to this unit study.

Would I Recommend This Product?

I definitely recommend Homeschool Legacy for anyone desiring to do focused studies on particular aspects of history—the units provide you all the information you need for the basic instruction and give you plenty of supplemental information to take it further. Their digital pdf’s are linked up to websites with activities, maps, movies, sound bites, and other very useful information, so you don’t have to find it yourself.

All in all, I think I actually prefer these mini-units of once a week studies, to the longer units, because I can easily fit them into what our schedule already contains. I will be checking out others in their mini-unit collection for sure after using this one.

Want To Know More About Homeschool Legacy?

Over the last couple weeks, we have been working on the Once-a-Week Micro Study Pirates or Privateers: You Decide from Homeschool Legacy. We've shared about our study, but make sure you check out the other studies the rest of the crew members picked!