Ever dreamt of a history class that felt more like time travel and less like memorization? Katie Berry, our curriculum connoisseur, returns to share her experiences with Homeschool in the Woods, an immersive program that makes the past come alive. As Katie recounts the joys of discovering this gem, you'll learn how it can ignite a passion for history in your child, and perhaps, rekindle your own love for the subject. Our conversation delves into adapting the curriculum for different ages, with an emphasis on family-style learning that brings everyone together for a shared educational adventure.
The episode unfolds the practicalities of integrating Homeschool in the Woods into your weekly routine, ensuring that the rich content remains both manageable and enjoyable. Katie walks us through the day-to-day application, giving us a glimpse into how to transform a single lesson into a week's worth of engaging educational experiences. If you're on the hunt for a curriculum that's comprehensive yet flexible enough to fit your family's unique homeschooling voyage, Katie's insights might just be the compass you need. Join us, and let's chart a course through history that's as educational as it is enthralling with the help of Homeschool in the Woods.
Ever dreamt of a history class that felt more like time travel and less like memorization? Katie Berry, our curriculum connoisseur, returns to share her experiences with Homeschool in the Woods, an immersive program that makes the past come alive. As Katie recounts the joys of discovering this gem, you'll learn how it can ignite a passion for history in your child, and perhaps, rekindle your own love for the subject. Our conversation delves into adapting the curriculum for different ages, with an emphasis on family-style learning that brings everyone together for a shared educational adventure.
The episode unfolds the practicalities of integrating Homeschool in the Woods into your weekly routine, ensuring that the rich content remains both manageable and enjoyable. Katie walks us through the day-to-day application, giving us a glimpse into how to transform a single lesson into a week's worth of engaging educational experiences. If you're on the hunt for a curriculum that's comprehensive yet flexible enough to fit your family's unique homeschooling voyage, Katie's insights might just be the compass you need. Join us, and let's chart a course through history that's as educational as it is enthralling with the help of Homeschool in the Woods.
Welcome to the Homeschool How-To Find my Curriculum, a series where we talk all about curriculum. I've been interviewing homeschooling families for over a year now on my main podcast, the Homeschool How-To, but I really wanted to zero in on curriculum. There's so much out there. How do I know what would work best for me and my child? How do I know what works for one child would work for the other? I might like the curriculum I'm using now, but how do I know there's not a better one out there, especially if I don't know all the curriculums? And what about supplemental curriculum? Should I be using that too?
Speaker 1:
This series is to help you decide just that. I'm going to interview parents who are using all the curriculums so that you can decide the absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey. The absolute best way to unfold your homeschooling journey. Welcome. And with us today we have Katie Berry. She is my curriculum expert from episode four, which about 1500 of you listened to because she had so much insight into curriculum, and she is going to talk with us today about Homeschool in the Woods. So, katie, thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to talk about Homeschool in the Woods. It is a lesser known history program and one that we have used in the past and I have very fond memories of.
Speaker 1:
So what made you even pick this curriculum?
Speaker 2:
So I mentioned in my Mother's Day book suggestion episode that I did with you that history and social studies is my favorite subject to learn about and, as a mother, if I'm excited about it, then I hope that my kids are too Right, and so for me. I love history so much that I want to be immersed in it Like I want. I want to time travel and go through history and meet the people and and see what it really felt like and live those experiences. I really wish that I had that ability and in my search when I probably two or three years into homeschooling, I was searching for a history that would give me that and I found homeschool in the woods give me that, and I found homeschool in the woods Awesome.
Speaker 2:
So what is what are the ages that you can use this with? The ages they put on their site say that it's best for third through eighth graders, but when we used it, I had a child that was in first or second grade and we just adapted down. So I think that it really could be. I think that you wouldn't want to do it unless you had at least one child that was third grade or older.
Speaker 1:
And you had a back on episode four introduced me to the concept of family style learning. So, versus like something more like a math that you do one-on-one, this family style learning is that you get all the kids together and you do the curriculum and you kind of just like level up, level down for what you are going to ask them as far as their participation in at their level. So is this one of those family style learning curriculums? Yes, Awesome. And what does the day-to-day look like with this?
Speaker 2:
Oh it's. It's really depends on how much you want to do. So the unit that we did was early 19th century, so it was kind of like a westward expansion and and so it was a time one of their time travelers curricula. So they have the time traveler series, which is american history, and they have project passport, which is world history.
Speaker 2:
Okay, so we used one of an early 19th century unit from the time travelers, early, uh, american history, and in it it's structured into 25 lessons, but there's so much in that lesson that we actually did 25 weeks. We did one lesson a week. Uh, you could do it in 25 days, but if I, if you did that, I would highly suggest not doing anything else, like you would just do your math and then homeschool in the woods, nothing else that day, because if you do everything as written, your day could be up to three to five hours of homeschool in the woods per lesson okay, so it sounds like one lesson a week is much more manageable and wouldn't tire you out, so that makes more sense about an hour a day or whatever.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Or you could just be more selective and not do everything in the lesson, because each lesson had anywhere from three to five activities per lesson, and so you could just decide to only do one or two of the activities, and then you could go at a faster pace. We wanted to do everything that was offered, and so that's why we spread ours out one lesson a week, but if you didn't want to take that much time, you could just cut some things out.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, my OCD kind of leads me to doing it all because I feel like, well, if you pay for it, I want to get the most out of it. But also, you know you just this sense of completion and I don't think 25 weeks long is really that long, for I mean, it's pretty much your a lot of homeschoolers homeschool year round anyway, so it just is pretty much half of of your year, and then you got time to do other stuff as well. So what would a week, let's say a week look like if you were planning it out one lesson for the week?
Speaker 2:
So I, like I said, we've only done the one unit from them, so I can't say every unit is designed this way, but the one we did had, um, it had handwriting practice, um, we did had, um, it had handwriting practice, um, and it had, uh, folk songs. I'm trying to think what else. Oh, there was a timeline and then a lap booking project every day, and if you don't know what a lap book is, that's basically an interactive notebook that you build over the unit and at the end you have this really cool keepsake of what you did, that that unit, um. And then there was, uh, usually some sort of hands-on craft or activity, so, uh, that was usually in one lesson, Okay.
Speaker 1:
And like how would it kind of teach them if you were doing the westward expansion? Like, is it giving them a story? Is it putting them right in the story? Is it just talking about names and dates? What did that look like?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so each lesson has two to three pages of text that goes with the lesson. That is just a basic overview of that lesson. That was probably the one thing that I didn't love about it was that those two or three pages of written stuff wasn't very engaging that those two or three pages of written stuff wasn't very engaging. If I were to do it again, I would supplement with picture books or living books rather than the text. They did give some book suggestions at the beginning of the unit, but they were a series that is out of print and I didn't want to go source all those and pay for all those myself, so I just read the text that was provided. But if I were to do it again, I probably would search and find books that I could read instead of the text.
Speaker 1:
Okay, maybe like a children's book set in that time period. Yeah, okay, all right, that makes sense, and so did your kids enjoy doing this. Did they look forward to it when it was time for history?
Speaker 2:
Yes. So let me just tell you some of the cool things we did. So, um, when we studied about mountain men, we actually made coonskin hats. So we we took a whole day off school. We went up to my mom's house.
Speaker 1:
I went to Hobby Lobby and got fur, faux fur fabric and we made coonskin hats, so you did not go out into your yard and shoot a raccoon I mean I think you're skipping.
Speaker 2:
You didn't quite do everything, but I'll accept it yeah, yes yeah it would be way more authentic and cooler if we would have shot her a real raccoon.
Speaker 1:
But no, so night we were driving home last night we saw a raccoon, so I guess I could have potentially completed that exercise for you.
Speaker 2:
Yes, and then when we studied the Mexican-American war, we made a poncho out of, uh, just fleece fabric. There was a weaving project we did to make I think it was no, it was a quilt, a quilt block. We made a quilt block and then we made a little. It was like a little cardstock with brads, like a jumping jack thing. We made corn husk dolls. There was like a cool little log cabin that you print out on cardstock but it's 3D and you put a tea light in it so it looks like the light's flickering in the little log cabin and then at the end of the unit you do, you plan a big celebration in it. So every week you're learning like they give you recipes that are authentic recipes you can try.
Speaker 2:
And the very last day, the like lesson 25, we did like a hoedown. So my dad has horses. We went out to my dad's, we used hay bales for seating. We made all these authentic recipes we had like we played horseshoes. I did a little like in a kiddie pool. We did like a mining for gold thing and you did like three-legged races and it was just like a hoedown and we play it. I had a playlist of the folk songs that we had learned and we played the folk songs in the background while we were doing our hoedown my kids got to see, like they brought their lab books and timelines for and their notebooks that they had made over the unit for, like the grandparents, to go and see what they had learned about, and that was probably like the coolest thing was that big hoedown party at the end.
Speaker 1:
That is so cute. And then I'm just thinking of like, not necessarily co-ops, but just like different friends we have in the area that homeschool, that you could invite them to that part and like just to have a little make it really like for the people that are like, oh, my kid won't be in a classroom, they're going to be missing out. It's like no, you invite a friend or two to join you on that. How much fun is that you're having a three-legged race.
Speaker 2:
That's so cool yeah, invite all your public school friends so you can show them the cool things that you're doing. That that's one of the things, too is I'm like we're like we'll invite our public school friends and so they can see how awesome homeschooling can be. And I also think, and we invited like their parents too, and I think that helps dispel the myths that are surrounding homeschooling as far as they're not learning anything.
Speaker 1:
Oh, that's so fun. Okay, so this one was called homeschool in the woods and are they calling it that like because it's more learning, like survival stuff in the woods, how people survived back then? Like where do you think it got its name from?
Speaker 2:
so they were a homeschooling family that started this, and I believe that their home is in the woods okay, cute. So, um, it's very affordable. It's all pdf downloads. I think they used to offer maybe like a CD-ROM for your computer I don't know if they still do that, I just do the PDF downloads and very inexpensive. I think my unit was less than $40.
Speaker 2:
The one thing, though, is that if you do all the stuff, like if you're doing all the activities, then there is some material cost, right, like we had to buy the fur for this coonskin hats, for example, and you have to buy cardstock, and there's some supplies they recommend you invest in. So the curricula itself is very inexpensive, depending on the activities you choose to do. The materials can add price to that, so just be aware of that. Yeah, the other thing is they offer a lot of a la carte things on their page. So if you don't want to do like the entire unit like, for example, they have like a little game that you, if you buy the whole unit, this game is included in one of the days, but maybe you're doing another curricula and you just want the game you can buy that a la carte for a couple dollars.
Speaker 2:
Uh, the other thing is they have a couple resources that aren't full curricula that we are going to use this fall. They have an elections notebook not notebook, what is it? Lap book? They have an elections lap book pack where they learn about elections, presidential elections, and then make a lap book. So it's not a full year, but we're doing that for the presidential election cycle this year. And then they also have like a US president's curricula. They have like history of holidays, so they also have some things that are not full curricula.
Speaker 1:
Oh, nice Little supplemental things. And that makes sense too, because when you're looking at the timeline of 25 weeks, if you spend 25 weeks doing that, well then if your supplemental is three weeks here, four weeks there, 10 weeks there, you can kind of measure it into how many weeks you want to do homeschooling a year. Like I said, a lot of people do it through the summer. So whether you take a week off here or there for some breaks, if you're left with like 45 weeks, you know you've got 20 extra weeks of supplementals that you can add in throughout the year. So that that is fun, that's cool, Nice option. Anything else you want to let us know about homeschool in the woods?
Speaker 2:
No, I just think that, like I said, it's been one of our favorite curricula we've used. I have a very fond I have really fond memories of that unit that we did together. I like how affordable it is and I like that we're supporting a smaller homeschool business. It's a homeschool family that created this and so I like supporting them as well.
Speaker 1:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking to us today about homeschool in the woods, katie. Yeah, absolutely, it was a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Please consider sharing this podcast, or my main podcast, the Homeschool how To with friends, family on Instagram or in your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. The more this podcast is shared, the longer we can keep it going and the more hope we have for the future. Thank you for your love of the next generation.