We love using Progeny Press study guides as a part of our Language Arts course, so I was excited to receive Shadow Spinner Study Guide and Hound of The Baskervilles Study Guide to review. These are a great way to earn school credit, including high school level credits!
What Is It?
These reproducible study guides come in a pdf format which you download to your computer after purchase. They are designed to accompany the reading of classic literature (guides available for books at many reading levels) and to help children understand and enjoy literature better.
Each guide will take an average of 10 weeks. The study could take as few as 8 weeks or as many as 12, depending on the speed and depth you choose for the assignments.
The guides can be used for multiple students, so you may print copies for each of your children within your homeschool setting, or even students in a co-op or classroom setting. They teach critical thinking, analysis, literary techniques. Students of all ages will study the issues and themes in the books from the foundation of God’s word.
At the start of the guide there are a few notes to the instructor, then they walk the student (and teacher) through the following sections:
- About the Author
- Background Information
- Prereading Activities (to set the stage, prepare the student’s mindset)
- Chapter Studies (Vocabulary, Questions, Thinking about The Story/Elements of Logical Thinking, Analysis, Dig Deeper, Optional Activities)
- Overview (short essay questions to help student sum up what they have learned)
- Optional Essays and Projects (to enrich the study, for customizing to your student’s needs)
- Additional Resources
Also provided is a separate file containing the answer key.
As I mentioned above, we are using study guides for two literature studies. Shadow Spinner is a wonderful book, perfect for drawing in the imagination of my 13-year old. It tells the tale of Shahrazad who is brought in to tell a story to the Sultan every night. If her story does not keep his interest, she could lose her life. As she runs out of tales to tell, she must find new ones to bring to him. Will she find a way to do this with the help of Marjan, an orphan girl who finds herself selling jewelry to the women still left in the Sultan’s harem?
We love a good mystery, and what’s better than The Hound of The Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle? My teenaged boys are not the only ones enjoying this book. It’s keeping the whole family entertained! The twists and turns of this story, which takes place in an eerie, ancestral estate on a Scottish moor keep us at the edge of our seats. Will Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson be able to keep Sir Henry safe and help ensure he receives his inheritance?
How did we use it?
My preference is to read the literature selection for the week out loud as a family, then let each child work on the questions and essays individually through the week, coming together at the end of the week again for discussion. For my high school students we choose extra activities and assign an essay midway through and again near the end. We all love hands-on learning, so we also choose a recipe to re-create or a craft project suggested in the resource list throughout the study.
As we began our school year this year, we had outside commitments that were already taking care of our need for creativity and hands-on activities so my high school students and my middle school student are all working independently, reading the passages and answering the questions during their language arts time in their homeschool schedule.
My boys (10th and 11th grades) each have a copy of The Hound of The Baskervilles study guide printed and bound in a folder. This is their workbook, easy for them to store on their shelf or pop in their backpack if we are doing school away from home. My daughter (8th grade) has opted to use the fillable fields on the computer. Writing is hard work for her, and she much prefers being able to type in her answers.
It only takes a few minutes each week for me to look through their answers, and we all enjoy discussion time at the end of the week. The publishers provide plenty of insight and thought-provoking questions to get us started.
Since these stories have been inspired by a folk tale the door is open to learn about folk tales that have originated in our region/culture. We will be spending time this winter researching these sort of things near where we live (like a haunted castle on the Atlantic seashore!)
Things we use to help in our study are: the book (Hounds of the Baskervilles from our own shelves and Shadow Spinner from our local library,) a good dictionary (for vocabulary and essay writing,) a Bible, a thesaurus, and sometimes a Bible concordance.
What did we think?
I am always appreciative of the consistency we see in all the Progeny Press Study Guides. The format is basically the same no matter what book we are studying or what grade level it might be. My children and I know what to expect and that makes it easy to get started.
We have been impressed with the type of questions offered for each story. They require more than a one word answer, requiring students to think. It takes more than copying and pasting to fill in the blanks! I love how analytical questions are introduced even at younger ages. This really lead the students to dig into the story. The analysis questions and Dig Deeper questions have been excellent for that.
With the suggested lessons and the optional activities you could easily turn each study guide into a full Unit Study. Students may cover math, history, geography, science, reading and writing, depending on which activities you choose. Using a combination of 3 different study guides in one school year would give you a full high school literature course with no problem. Using one guide at a slower pace is a great way to supplement any language arts course you are already using.
Our family gives Progeny Press and their study guides a big ‘thumbs up’ and is on the list of our favorite homeschool resources.
Visit my past reviews for literature studies in middle school and high school to get an even better idea of how much we love these resources! And be sure to check out how my fellow homeschool crew mates are using these studies with their children. You’ll also see reviews of guides for the elementary grades (The Long Way to a New Land for grades K-3 and Little House on the Prairie for grades 4-6.) Just click the image below: