Earthy Mama: Hewitt Homeschooling Review

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Hewitt Homeschooling Review

Vendor: Hewitt Homeschooling
Product: Chronicles of . . . A State History Notebook
Price: $19.95
Age: Grades 3rd-6th

The Chronicles of . . . A State History Notebook comes in a nice 3 ring binder with all the pages you need. The notebook helps your child with reports, drawings, pictures, and information pertaining to the state they have picked. There are five main sections of this notebook:

Facts, Symbols, Emblems (e.g., state flower, tree, flag)
Geography, Population
Industries, Jobs
History, Government
Miscellaneous, Field Trips, Photographs

Each page prompts what needs to be researched and gives the space to put your findings in. There is also suggested activities at the first of the book that you could do to add to the research, depending on how in depth you wanted to go with this. Some of those suggestions are things like interviewing people or making maps.

How we used it: We picked Georgia to go over since we have spent a couple small spells living there. There is so much history that we tried to learn in field trips while we were there so we wanted to see how much stuff we could already do on our own. We used this for us all to chip in with the work, which made a great learning experience for all. Some things in the book were better fits for older kids while others were good for the younger ones so it makes a good team learning book. We ended up working on it daily. Not always in the order of the book, since Savannah has a lot of history in it we would see things that would prompt us to want to go find a place in the book to put it. We really loved the field trip section because we always do Fridays as a field trip day. The field trip pages were even labeled for us to go to certain areas, like a nature site or a historical landmark.

What we liked about it: The kids loved this book! Though we all tried to work on it, the bulk was done by my 9 year old. She is my reluctant writer. She excels in so many areas but she does not do well with writing reports or coming up with stories. I found if we did field trips she could always write about what we did and enjoy it (that is why we started doing field trips every week). This book was basically a big book of field trip ideas. While much of it we could get online also, we had just as much stuff we could do in person. It was great being in Savannah too because so much of the history was made here. This one one thing the kids didn't ever grown about when I would pull it out. My 9 year old says, "I love it!" while the others tell me it is fun work. You can't beat something that makes the kids enjoy learning and isn't that what homeschooling is all about? All three of my kids gave this a two thumbs up and so did this mama! Great job Hewitt Homeschooling.