Farm Fresh Adventures: Time Travelers U.S. History Studies: A Unit Study of the Industrial Revolution thru the Great Depression {Product Review}

Home School in the Woods: Time Travelers US History Review

I'm always on the lookout for things that make history come alive. One of the ways to do this is to incorporate unit studies into the subject and one of the top makers of history unit studies is Home School in the Woods. Their Time Travelers U.S. History Studies include many in-depth explorations of key moments and people in US History not usually expanded on in other history courses. For the last several weeks, we have been reviewing the Time Travelers U.S. History Studies: The Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression and today I'm going to share our thoughts on this material.

About Home School in the Woods

Home School in The Woods is a multi-award winning company that is dedicated to providing materials to make history come ALIVE in your classroom! Steering clear of the typical history textbook, Home School in The Woods chooses to help your child make living and real connections with the men, women, places, and events they experience through their history experience, with hands-on materials. One of the ways they do this is through their Time
Travelers U.S. History Studies units. Following the concept of notebooking blended with lapbooking, these hands-on studies bring history to life for your 3rd-8th grader.

There are seven eras included in the Time Travelers U.S. History Studies:
New World Explorers
Colonial Life
The American Revolution
The Early 19th Century
The Civil War
The Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression
World War II

Each of these contains 25 lessons, enough lessons for 5-10 weeks depending on your speed of use. Put together they work as a complete course covering a wide range of events and people from America's history.

Because of our current interests and our 2019-2020 history curriculum topics, we chose to review The Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression unit from this collection.

The Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression unit consists of 25 lessons covering the period directly after the Civil War (the 1860s) and through the Great Depression (1939) 70 years later. Through this study, students explore key events and people, as well as disasters from this era which shaped modern American history. Some of the events studied include the transcontinental railroad, "Seward's Folly" with the purchase of Alaska and the gold rush that followed, the wars with the Native Americans in the Wild West, the Gilded Age of opulence, the Progressive Era of industry explosion, American involvement in World War I, the Roaring Twenties of great change, and the Great Depression which rocked America to its core. A full scope and sequence (click the scope and sequence tab on the product page) is available for each of the units for planning purposes.

This product is a digital download which is compatible with Mac and PC. It comes as a zip file and contains everything (All Text, Masters, Directions, Photos, and Resource Lists Provided [Supplies Not Included]) you need to learn how to use the program and to get started.

Sample of the 12 lap book projects

This program is a mix of lapbooking and notebooking styles and includes activities like:
Creative Writing, Factfile Cards, Penmanship Pages, Depression Era Recipes (you can read about why adding recipes to history studies is encouraged by Home School in the Woods in a recent blog post), File Folder Games, Notebook Timeline, Experiments, authentic crafts like Paper Tole, a Penny Rug, A Yo-Yo Quilt, and WW1 Silk Postcards. There are also larger three-dimensional projects like making a suspension bridge, a Wright Brothers "Flyer," and more. There are 12 Lap Book projects included as well as notebooking activities. There is even a final "Depression-Era Dinner" to bring the unit to a close!

Our Thoughts on the Product

The first and most important thing someone should know right away about this program is that it is very labor-intensive. This is not an open-and-go program. There is a LOT of prep. This cannot be done without access to a computer and printer. The prep could be done all at once which will require HOURS at one sitting of printing and prepping, or you could do my method which is to print one lesson worth of projects at a time. The materials for the projects aren’t simply opening it up and printing it like usual, instead, you will need to be fairly close to your printer so you can make things print both sides, change paper types, etc. Additionally, you will be doing a LOT of cutting of the printed pages.

I have reviewed products from this company before, thus I was prepared for this. I printed out the project pages which details types of paper for the printing each lesson’s projects as well as other materials. From this, I could load up my printer tray with the appropriate tray before working through printing the materials. Once printed, I would cut some of the more complicated projects out in advance to save time—otherwise, I would simply paperclip them together and put in my master folder.

I printed the lesson project pages and stored them in a 3ring folder for quick reference.

The materials are easy to find on the zip file that you are sent. Once saving and extracting the files, simply open the file and click “start”. This allows you to work through the program lesson by lesson without getting overwhelmed. Everything is clearly labeled, and if you print off the project pages after printing the lesson itself, you can quickly work through the printing aspects of the material.
I found that saving the EXTRA large zip file on my flash drive was the best bet for me.

If you want to print everything off all at once, you could print off all your project pages first, then click the pdf option on the menu and go straight to your printing material. Then just load up your printer paper with what you need and work your way through it.

the PDF file has every printed item together

I encourage new users of HSITW to read all the extra information about how to use the product and the notes about the storing and creating of the unit study. This particular unit study is a bit more advanced in its material so it was perfect for us since we aren’t new to the program or material. We started by reading the lesson material—either independently or as a group. Next, I picked 2-3 activities from each lesson to do. Some of the lessons contained some much more time-consuming activities, so we always allowed 2-3 days for each lesson’s work. Once the reading was done, I had the boys do the copywork assignments. Both boys asked for blank lines after they tried the pre-written cursive versions. After this, we did one more project for the day. Usually something not as intensive in putting it together.

My preference for printing. Work through one set of lessons at a time.

Every lesson begins with the reading portion. This is found by clicking the link for "text pages". It has all your actual lesson readings. I let my sons read it on their own.

Tracing the cursive quote for the lessons.
Later he preferred to just write it out on his own on the blank pages included

The next day, we reviewed the lesson topics and then worked on 1-2 additional lesson projects. I do not think it is wise to try to do the entire lesson and ALL the projects in one sitting. If so, you are looking at more than an hour of work. Two hours in some cases. Ideally, I would only attempt to do 2-3 lessons a week during a regular school year because of the sheer amount of material to be covered. Because there are 25 lessons included, this means that it could easily be done in 8-12 weeks, which is close to the 5-10 week guideline. We are in our summer schedule, so we stuck to just one lesson per week.

Time Travelers additionally has a timeline which can be completed as the lesson goes along. It is designed to fit inside the master binder. The timeline covers the 70 years of these lessons and has small images to add as you go--the images to add are noted in each lesson.

The projects cover a wide range of topics and ideas—from simply making little books to writing “newspaper” articles to flipbooks, to creating “games”, to making an airplane, to trying recipes, and more!

Here are a few of the many activities that we covered as we worked through the lessons we did…

Learning about Tycoons and Robber Barons

putting together the Transcontinental Railroad booklet

Recording our information from the Indian Wars

Cutting the pieces for the Wright Flyer then using the project directions to put it together

Success!

One of the highlights was the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge!

Instructions for construction clearly laid out in the project pages

I am going to be saving the rest of our work to be done when we pick back up history this year in our new school year. I think some of the projects will be super fun and a great way to help remember the lessons we have done.

The only way I can do this product is to pick and choose what lessons we want to do. I would be overwhelmed trying to do them all--and honestly, the program does NOT encourage someone to do them all. I also do NOT do a lesson a day. Our history time isn’t set up that way. We would never complete an entire unit in the 5 weeks. Honestly, to give it a good go, you need to work on the 25 lessons over 8-12 weeks to do the readings, as well as at least 2-3 projects for each lesson. My boys enjoy learning about the information and they appreciated that this unit had more actual projects, not just lapbooking items.

HSITW allows for a lot of rabbit trails and exploration into deeper topics. It can be used as a core, or as a supplement. The material is spot on and in-depth and excellent. The biggest challenge is simply that it is so intensive in preparing the material.

We've reviewed Home School in the Woods before with four other products--here are the links if you want to get an idea of other things that can be done--ALSO check out the lapbooks that we made.

Make-A-State Activity Pak

Old Testament Activity Pak

US Elections Lap-Pak

Project Passport World History: Ancient Egypt

Want to Know More?

For the last several weeks, we have been reviewing the Time Travelers U.S. History Studies: The Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression from Home School in the Woods. You have seen how we used it and our thoughts on it. I encourage you to visit other reviewers to see even more of the great material that Home School in the Woods offers!