Charlotte's Web by E.B. White was one of my favorite books as a young child. I'm not sure how old our oldest was when we read it the first time, but he was instantly in love as well. His sister came along a few years later and she loved the story as well. I couldn't begin to tell you how many times we've read this book over the years. Our third came along and life got a little rockier. I don't know that I had ever read the book to him, but he had watched the movie countless times and it was one of his favorites. When I saw we had the opportunity to review the Charlotte’s Web E-Guide by Progeny Press I knew I had to have this! Issac was the only child out of three that hadn't enjoyed the Charlotte's Web book multiple times already, so I felt like this was our time to enjoy it together.
We've done a few literature guides over the years with the older kids, but never an interactive one before. I was excited to see how that worked and if Issac liked it. We've done a few small literature guides with Issac, but I'm usually doing all the writing. He still struggles with his handwriting due to fine motor issues, so it's hard for him to write more than a few sentences on his own. We've been working on learning to type, so I thought the interactive guide might be just right for him.
I downloaded the guide and looked through it. I made sure I knew where our book was because more often than not I've not been able to find a book when I was ready to use it :) Our book is pretty worn and it might actually be the copy I had as a child. I have a few favorites that I kept from when I was younger.
We started out reading about the author and illustrator pages that were provided at the beginning of the guide. There were also some pre-reading activities if you wanted to do those before you started the book. I thought this guide could be good for Issac because he could work on answering the questions himself as well as work on his typing at the same time. I liked that he could answer the questions and then we could save the entire section. I also chose to print them out after he answered them just to have them for our record. This is our first literature guide from Progeny Press and I have to say that I was very impressed. This was a very thorough guide and I felt covered all the material. The guide was divided into groupings of four chapters. I was a bit worried at first whether Issac would remember the material from four chapters when we sat down to work through the guide. I looked to see if there was a way to do it chapter by chapter, but there really wasn't. If I had one thing I would have done to "improve" the guide for us it would have been to label each question for the chapter it came from. That would have helped us when Issac was struggling to remember. When he struggled with a question I just went back and found where it was and then let him read that section again. It was a little time consuming a few times, but then again I'm not sure how common a problem this is for others. Issac often times has a little more trouble remembering than others kids his age. Often times things that are right in his age range can still be a little hard for him. This guide was suggested for grades 4-6 and Issac's in 5th. Some things he easily understood and others we had to work on a bit more. That being said my daughter, 15, blurted out many an answer while Issac and I were discussing the questions just because she's heard the story so many times. I really loved that she could still recall such details about the story! The guide was divided up into sections that varied throughout the guide. We covered vocabulary, fact & opinion, questions about the story, dig deeper, descriptive writing, etc. Even with a basic "plan" for each guide the activities still varied. Sometimes the vocabulary was fill-in-the blank and sometimes it was multiple choice. The questions ranged from being able to give a short answer to needing to expand a little. In thinking about the story there were Bible verses that we read that helped us to understand what was going on in the story as well as being able to apply the concepts to our every day lives. The dig deeper and some of the writing was a little harder for Issac. We had to talk through those sections more and I had to continually ask him questions to get a good answer. There is also a section at the end with post-reading activities. You could easily take this study guide and turn it into a unit study with all the activities suggested. All in all I feel like this was a great literature guide to accompany a wonderful story.
The above are a few samples of the interactive guide as we worked through it. Issac really liked being able to type his answers directly onto the guide and not have to do so much writing. The crew reviewed several different items and ranging multiple age groups. The following were reviewed this time:
I love that this was an interactive guide! I have seen/used a lot of literature units over the years, but never seen an interactive one like this. I will have to look into one of their guides to try out next summer.
ReplyDeleteThis was our first interactive as well. Sometimes I typed for Issac and then he worked on it, but the answers were much shorter when he typed :)
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