HISTORY Through the Ages Hands-on History Lap-Pak: U.S. Elections Review

For the past several weeks, my son and I have had fun learning with the HISTORY Through the Ages Hands-on History Lap-Pak: U.S. Elections by Home School in the Woods.




This hands-on activity really helped both of us learn how the elections work and let us explore the history of how they came to be. This is actually the first lapbook we've ever done together, even though we have been homeschooling for six years.

The directions for assembling the lapbook were great. The visuals and instructions were easy to understand and follow. I did have to help quite a bit with the cutting, taping, and gluing of the individual parts and pieces that make up the lapbook. It IS titled 'hands-on' and does require a lot of the teacher's help. My son is eleven and I still did the majority of the cutting and taping while he did the actual assembling of the lap book and the coloring of it. If your children are younger, you will probably be helping them even more.

One thing I really appreciated about this curriculum is the fact that they give you two options for the writing part of the lapbook. You can print out papers that are already filled in or you can have your student fill them in. My son is not a huge fan of writing, so I was able to let him skip that part of the project and I just printed them out for him.

Here is our finished Hands-on History Lap-Pak



 

The curriculum comes with a book that I read out loud to my son while he worked on cutting and coloring the parts for the lapbook. The directions say to collect the pieces until you get ready to assemble your book, but I found that reading a section of the book and then working on the project that went with it worked best for us. It also meant that I did not have to keep track of all the little pieces that needed to be cut out and saved until the end.

The lapbook covers twenty-one different parts of the election process including the definition of election, terms of office, the three branches of government, raising money, caucuses and primaries, and more. As you can tell, it's a pretty good resource for learning more about our presidential elections. I'm not embarrassed to say (because we should never stop learning) that I did not know a lot of this information myself! I must have been sick that week at school... or did not retain the information. One of my favorite things about homeschooling is the ability to learn right along with my son!

This lapbook couldn't have come at a better time considering this is a presidential election year. My son and I had the opportunity to talk about the different parties and what they stand for. We've discussed the different candidates that are running this year and whether we agree or disagree with their stand on certain issues.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the Hands-On History Lap-Pak. I would definitely not hesitate to purchase material for a lapbook project from Home School in the Woods again. They made our first time experience easy, and I'm happy that my son has a resource to keep that has all the information in it that we learned together. I'm sure he will be referring to it many times over the next couple of months as the presidential race heats up.

Thanks for stopping in to read this review! I hope you consider trying this lapbook, especially for a child who is around my son's age of eleven, as it really did help him to learn about the United States election process.

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