This review is for a biography of the life of C.S. Lewis. The book is part of the series Christian Heroes: Then and Now published by YWAM Publishing. In addition to the book C.S. Lewis:Masterstoryteller, we are also reviewing the accompanying unit study guide.
We used the biography as a read-aloud for the whole family. My youngest was perhaps a bit young, which you can see reflected in his two-star rating, but the rest of my kids really enjoyed learning about the life of one of their favorite authors. The book is very well written and I enjoyed reading it.
Between the book and the chapter questions provided in the Unit Study guide, we were led into some interesting conversations about a variety of topics. I would say my older kids enjoyed this the most and if you want engaging stories about real people with thought-provoking questions to engage you middle-school to high school aged kids, this is a great choice.
I will buy more books from the series Christian Heroes: Then & Now, but with 47 titles I will have trouble deciding which one. Perhaps George Washington Carver or Milton Hershey?
I think my two favorite parts of the study guide were the suggestion to set up a display corner and the chapter questions. You can see our display corner in the picture above, the white paper being a timeline (unfortunately we used pencil so you cannot really see what is on it in the picture). We used the chapter questions aloud after finishing each chapter. The questions include a vocabulary word for each chapter, these are well selected and even my older kids often did not know the meaning of the word. There are some easier questions, which I encouraged my older kids to be quiet for, so that their younger siblings could answer. The last question was always more thought-provoking and these were great for generating discussion with the older three (12 and up).
The unit studies are downloadable and inexpensive. In addition to the suggestions for creating a display corner and the chapter questions the unit study contains the following resources:
Creative Writing Assignments
Arts and Crafts
Community Links (suggestions for field trips)
Social studies (there are two printable maps, a worksheet, and suggestions of cities you could find and pin on wall maps)
Vocabulary (this is in addition to the one vocab question for each chapter and is an extensive list that you could pick and choose from depending on your childs age)
Suggestions of related themes to explore
Books & Resources list (include website and documentary suggestions)
Answer Key (for chapter questions)
Overall I would say it is a well organized and comprehensive study and you could use it to dive deep into the topic, time period, and place, or you could just use it for the chapter questions, it is that inexpensive, I would buy it if all I had time for were the chapter questions.
There is a note in the back of the book explaining that other books in this series use the first-person retelling. For this book, they chose to use third person retelling in order to cover more of the historical events that happened during Lewis’ life.
There are many more reviews of other books and their accompanying unit studies, you can find them on the Homeschool Review Crew Blog.