It may seem a no brainer to do literature studies when we read so many great books. Sometimes we just enjoy reading for the fun of the story. Other times, I want to take advantage of the learning opportunity. That is when we seek out study guides. We have used many guides from Progeny Press. We know their Christian worldview means one less aspect to worry about as we study a literature selection. We were excited to review with them again. This time around, we chose something to read with our youngest learners, a title by Alice Dalgliesh. We received The Bears on Hemlock Mountain Study Guide as a download, one of their E-guides.
We had six activities to choose from prior to beginning the reading of The Bears on Hemlock Mountain. We chose to do most of them. We defined a few words, listened to some bird songs. I love how this tied in with something we were doing in morning time. We also spent some time outdoors looking at animal tracks. Raccoon tracks were the easiest to spot; they love the creek in our backyard. We were on the lookout for cougar tracks as one has been sited in our area. Praise the Lord we didn’t find any of those! We have some books with animal tracks, so those were brought out as well.
The last two activities were different and part of the reason we love these study guides from Progeny Press. We talked about hospitality. We talked about what it means and then my little ones (7 & 9 year olds) collected images showing hospitality. They brought up examples from the Bible and pointed out times we have been shown hospitality as well as times we have shown it to others. See? way more than just a literature guide!
For our first read-through, once we completed the before-you-read activities, we listened to the audio book. It is always interesting to listen to audio books, a different voice, for our reading adventures. We employ them often in our studies and for fun. The audio recording of the book is 75 minutes, easy to listen during a day of errands. We did the vocabulary work after our first listen. In each segment, covering two or three chapters, the first part is vocabulary. They matched the definition, used the word in a sentence, looked it up in the dictionary comparing their own definition with the dictionary’s. Some of these we tweaked from what was written because of we chose to do this part prior to reading the physical book.
Next, we snuggled in to read together. As needed for the study guide, we stopped and completed the questions. Some of the questions asked us to read a passage of Scripture or to dig deeper and apply some part of Scripture to their own lives. These questions are not simply retelling the story for comprehension, but actually learning something from the story and seeing how it can apply to your life. I love this! This is what makes Progeny Press stand out.
There were four sections of questions for The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, 10 chapters. The Mystery Word section was my 9 year old daughter’s favorite. It required her to fill in the words by finding that sentence in the book. Some of the letters of the words had numbers under them – leading to one last sentence to complete by copying those numbered letters. It was a secret code! So much fun! By the time we did both the before and after reading activities we spent about two weeks on this. We could have stretched this to be three weeks had we been doing other school work, but we were still enjoying our summer break.
Especially for my elementary age children, I prefer to pick up literature guides like these to use throughout the year rather than trying to fit in a full literature curriculum. Progeny Press has study guides for numerous titles and all ages. Read more of my fellow Crew members reviews of The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, Charlottes’s Web, The Silver Chair, and Macbeth by clicking the image below.
