The Story of the World Volume 1 Activity Book

This program was too dull to captivate my children. I liked the map work and coloring pages in the student activity book, but didn't find a single activity to be worth our time. They all seemed too complicated, and too tangentially related to make them worth the effort.

These are WONDERFUL activities for my seven year old to reinforce the main points of each chapter. She really looks forward to map work and the coloring pages. I love that her interest in geography has really blossomed thanks to this. The questions to ask are straight and to the point and there is all kinds of extra resources you can look into if your student shows interest in a particular chapter. I would recommend it.

"Story of the World Volume One" along with this Activity Book can really be a full history curriculum in and of itself, as long as you have a library card or a penchant for book shopping. There's hundreds of activities in this book. You can't do them all - luckily. Some require only provided worksheets from the back of the book. These are often coloring pages but you'll also find mini-board games and templates for paper crafts. Other activities require specific materials you'll need to pick up ahead of time. I appreciate that this is such a flexible curriculum. If you want to keep it simple or are short on time, you can read a chapter, color a page while you talk about it, and move on. Or, you can stop anywhere and delve into a deep unit study of mummies or greek gods or whatever tickles your fancy. However, my first year took a bit of figuring out how it worked. I can always find an easy activity on the suggestion list that I can pull off doing alongside a chapter. We do the mapwork (so great), the coloring, the Q&A discussion, and they create a short narration and/or illustration of what we learned. I adore how much they (and I!) have learned. This is my favorite history curriculum, and well-priced. I also recommend, along with it, "The Well Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer (same author). It has a great section on how to teach history that she aligned this program with and can show you exactly how to best use it. That's a welcome addition, not a necessity to follow this curriculum, though!

Love this book. Great addition to use along with reading the book. Before reading the corresponding chapter we go over the review questions so that my girls know what they need to listen for. After going over the review questions I give them the coloring sheets to give them something to keep their hands busy while listening to me read to them.

We complete the map work for each chapter and sometimes the activities; however, many of the activities require a lot of materials to complete or are very complicated and require planning ahead. I appreciate that each chapter has a list of recommended reading material. We can often find the books at the library.