Sarah, Plain and Tall – Progeny Press Review

We have been homeschooling for 6 years now and I had heard of Progeny Press; however, I had never looked at their products in depth. We were recently given the opportunity to review Sarah, Plain and Tall Study Guides for Literature from Progeny Press and I must say, I am impressed!

We received a digital download of the Sarah, Plain and Tall Study Guide to review. In order to utilize the digital Progeny Press study guides you will need to have the literature book. We checked ours out from the library.

We printed out our study guide. It was only a few dollars to print it in booklet format since it is all black and white except for the cover page. So, though I could have done it at home, I sent it to a local print shop, mostly because I was sending something else at the time.

My daughter liked the booklet format of the study guide and I did print the cover in color for added effect. However, you could do it all online and then record your answers and activities in a notebook. That’s what I originally planned to do and would probably do in the future.
The study guide begins with a synopsis of the book, and “above the author” page, and some background information. The guide also includes a “note to the instructor” to help you understand how Progeny Press intended for the study guide to be used. I found this page helpful.

The unit study begin with a “Before-you-read activities” section that gives the student some guidance on how to get started on the upcoming assignment. The “before you read activities” include map work in locating the book’s setting and what ocean is nearby. There is a suggestion to find a pen pal and some questions to help with historical research. There are some discussion questions and a teacher read-aloud suggestion with questions to help set the tone of the story.

Next is the “As-you-read Assignment” which discusses note taking throughout the reading to help track the storyline. Then the unit study begins with Chapters 1-3.  In the unit study there is a Vocabulary section, a Setting section, Questions, Thinking About the Story section, Digging Deeper section, and a Comp
are and Contract section. Other chapters include working on simile’s and metaphors. At the end of the study there is a Summary section and a summary crossword puzzle and word search.

Then comes the “After-you-read Activities.” This was my 10 year old’s favorite part. She liked the book a lot and enjoyed the after activities, which included things like Art projects, science ideas, a cooking project with a recipe included, and, of course, watching the movie.

My daughter loves reading a book and then watching the movie so she always looks forward to this part. There are also suggestions for a class project and additional discussion questions. There is an included Additional Resources section as well which includes Other Books by the author, books of related interest, videos and pen pal sources.

The Digging Deeper section includes scripture that can be used in correlation to what is being studied in those chapters. I thought this section was great for a character development and Bible section and was very correlated.

Overall, we thought Sarah, Plain and Tall to be a great unit study guide. Getting the book from the library was easy and the pace of the study was easy to customize to our schedule. We worked on it 3 days a week and typically it only took 15-30 minutes each day to go through what we were covering; however, this could easily be an every day study or a once a week study.http://stores.progenypress.com

Progeny Press suggests that most middle grade or high school students will take between 8 and 10 weeks to complete the study, working on one section per week. We usually got through one section per week, but occasionally took a little over a week to go through a section, which was fine.

You can purchase your own copy of the Progeny Press Sarah, Plain and Tall study guide from the Progeny Press website. It is currently available for $17.99 as a digital download, interactive product.

There are many other study guides available from Progeny Press for Kindergarten through High School so be sure to take a look.

Check out Progeny Press on their website or on social media on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

You can see what the other TOS Review Crew had to say about Progeny Press and their study guides by clicking the button below.