Silverdale Press LLC ~ Review

We were given the opportunity to review some unit studies from Silverdale Press LLC. We received the White House Unit Studies which consists of six different unit studies.

The six holiday unit studies we received are as follows:

• Labor Day - 3 lessons
• Veterans Day - 3 lessons
• Thanksgiving - 5 lessons
• Christmas - 4 lessons with 6 activities per lesson
• MLK - 5 lessons
• Valentine's Day - 5 lesson

Each of the unit studies is designed for children ages 5-18. All of the studies come with plans for elementary and high school, which helps when you have a large range of children you are wanting to do the studies with. Each unit study is designed to be completed in a week. If you are wanting to spend more time on each study it can easily be spread out over a few weeks for each study.

During this review, we focused on tow of the studies ~

The first study we did, over a period of a couple of weeks, was the labor day unit study. This study teaches children about the history of labor day. The unit is fifty three pages long and includes an overview for the teacher and three lessons each for K-6th and 7th-12th.  The k-6th lessons take approximately one hour to complete and the 7th-12th grade lessons take anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours to complete depending on how in depth you do the activities.

The first lesson focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt’s involvement in fighting against child labor and unsafe working conditions.  There is an activity after each lesson and this one shows a picture of families with small children who are all working and asks different questions about the picture. Lesson tow talks about the first labor day and lesson three tells about how the President proclaimed Labor Day a holiday.

I have four children in different grades. I only have one elementary child and three middle and high school age children. The studies are set up where it is easy to use for each level. The 7th-12th grade level does go more in depth and the activities are longer, but it was easy to involve all of my children and discuss the holiday with them.  The older children understood more than the seven year old, but she also learned a lot about why we have Labor Day and what we can learn from it.

The other study we focused on during the review period was the Veteran’s Day study. This study is forty nine pages long. The lessons include President Wilson and Armistice Day, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and Dwight Eisenhower and How We Got Veteran's Day.

My seven year old enjoyed this study and is looking forward to being able to do the activities listed this coming Veteran’s Day that include going to a parade, visiting veteran’s in our town, and writing letters to veteran’s. My older kids really did not know very much about Veteran’s Day and they were thankful to be able to learn more about the holiday. We will probably revisit this study in October before Veteran’s Day and do more of the activities listed for this study since we have many nursing homes and a Veteran’s home in our town where we can visit.

 
 

We plan to use these studies during the school year. One for each month from November to February to learn about these last four holidays.

Overall, we enjoyed going through the studies and learning more about the holidays and about the history involved around the holiday.