Home School Adventure Co. ~ A Homeschool Crew Review

I'm pretty familiar with Home School Adventure Co. and have won, purchased, and reviewed several of author Stacy Farrell's products.  I was very intrigued to see what her new unit study would entail.  I received a PDF of Walking with the Waodani.  It is, conveniently, one single download file.  As with most of the other merchandise offered, it will be available as a download or a physical book.

Walking with the Waodani: Adventures in Ecuador begins with an introduction to two very interesting men, 70 year old Gary and 18 year old homeschool graduate Russell Winter.  Gary has invited Russell to travel Ecuador with him, including a trip to Shell Mera where I-TEC is located.  I-TEC is a ministry founded by Steve Saint, son of Nate Saint one of the five missionaries killed by a Waodani raiding party in 1956.

This brand new unit study contains gorgeous photography and consists of five lessons.

1. Introduction
2. Shell Mera Then
3. Shell Mera Now
4. Ecuador
5. Quito 

Complete a unit either weekly or monthly.  There are plenty of things to do to round out a fairly full unit.  An included recommended resources list of links, books, and videos contains so many options, it would be difficult to make use of all of them as a weekly study.  I really debated about showing the films End of the Spear and Beyond the Gates of Splendor to the boys.  Yes, they've seen some violence in videos before, though not anything graphic.  And while nudity and partial nudity are a part of life in this situation, I just wasn't able to bring myself to show these movies at this time.  The Torchlighter film about Jim Elliot and the four other missionaries killed by the Waodani tribe in 1956 was plenty accurate enough for me.

The last four segments consist of a lesson and a "travel journal."

The lesson components are

• an Introduction.
• People & Places.
• Meals & Markets.
• Animal & Agriculture.
• and Worlds & Worldview.

There is a significant amount of reading to do (about eight pages), so we broke that down over several days.  The boys have difficulty listening to long segments, so that worked well for us.

The components of the travel journal are

• Travel Journal Notebooking Pages.  Q&A about the reading, 
• Mark Your Map.  Mapping a specific location and recording data related to the lesson.
• Rate the Recipe.  Critique a "recipe" from the lesson.  Piranha?  Grubs?  Anyone?
• Draw an Animal.  Draw an animal and tell what you think is interesting about it.
• Creativity Unleashed.  A freewriting assignment with an exciting prompt.

In the travel journal section, there is also quite a bit of writing for my boys. They loved the drawing and mapping segments.  They even wrote answers for the Q&A.  However, we completed much of the other assignments through conversation and oral story telling.

At the end you'll find a vocabulary section.  The Wonderful World of Words lists words alphabetically by unit with reference to the section and page where you can read the words in context.  There is space to write the definitions directly into the unit study page, or you can do what we do with new vocabulary.  Mal and Xav each have an ongoing dictionary where they can record all of the new words from various unit and literature studies.

Some things we did included imagining eating bugs and learning about animals!

These are Mal's recipe reviews.  The piranha is wearing a magician hat and carrying a wand.  "Watch my friends and I make this cow disappear!"

Xav drew the two toed sloth, greeting you very slowly.  His piranha picture (not shown) has grill marks X'ed across it.

Stacy has written an introductory post about first meeting Russell.


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Other members of the Crew were able to review various Homeschool Adventure Co. products, including Creative Freewriting Adventure, I'd Rather Be Your Mommy, Celebrating Manhood: a rite of passage guide, and more reviews for Walking With the Waodani.  Click the banner below to see those reviews.