Abraham Lincoln~~Heroes of History (A Review)

It has been a fun few weeks around here as we have been studying Heroes of History - Abraham Lincoln, a biograpphy from YWAM Publishing. We received a hard copy book along with a Digital Unit Study. This company offers a whole line of biographies and Christian history books and I am thrilled to have been introduced to this line of books and biographies! This is our first time reading one, and it was very enjoyable.

Since this was our first time reading one of these books, I opted to read it aloud to the boys. It felt like we had stepped back in history as we read, and the boys often didn't want me to stop. The story was exciting, and fact filled. I found the story to be very interesting myself, and I learned a whole lot about Abraham Lincoln that I didn't know. This book was easy to follow, and covered Abe's life from his young childhood all the way until his death.

As we read through the book we used the Digital Unit Study to help supplement the readings. To do that I printed it from the website which has other downloads and goodies as well. You don't have to print it, you could save it as a pdf, but I wanted to have it on hand each time we read. The unit study is awesome. It is packed with all kinds of things to go along including quotes, crafts, writing ideas, geography, community ideas, and chapter questions. I found the chapter questions to be very helpful.

Building Abe's log cabin

Eating Abe's log cabin :)

There were many fun, great suggestions in the study guide for projects, including reasons why they tied into the book. I found myself wanting to try them all, and they could very well make for a well rounded unit study. But, for the time that we used this book we were able to complete only a few.

One of the hands-on explorations was to create a log cabin. In the book it specifically talks about how big Abe's log cabin was that he grew up in, and the guide suggested we measure out the 18' x 20' rectangle to see in reality how big that is, and to build a scale model. Ours wasn't exactly scale, but the boys built a log cabin (or at least attempted to) out of pretzel sticks. The most important part of this whole project was them trying to figure out how to build it and make it sturdy. Lincoln and his father had to do that when they built their log cabin, I'm sure!

Their completed log cabin. They never finished the wndows or doors. Oh well, they still had fun.

There were also some printable maps, and fact pages in the study guide. We mapped the state of Illinois since this was where Abe lived most of his life.

These are the printed maps that came in the study guide. They looked for major rivers and cities.

It was also suggested in the study guide to create a display corner. This is what we came up with. It isn't much, just some of the projects that the boys worked on while we studied Abraham Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln fact sheet is another printable from the study guide. I had hoped to find more as there were some great ideas in the study guide including a penny collection, and photographs.

Overall I loved this book, and I am excited to try some more. I will definitely be including more of these biographies in our future history units. I think this could very well be a complete history curriculum with the purchase of several of the biographies. Included with the digital portion is a homeschool curriculum guide which even lists all the books and the order to follow them in for a complete American history curriculum. I am thinking about using this for our history next year! I also noticed that they have audio versions that I am interested in trying. That could be a very good fit for our busy family.

If you want to find out about other Heroes of History biographies go check out what the other crew members had to say as most of them reviewed a different title. Click on the banner below: