Laura Ingalls Wilder, A Storybook Life (A REVIEW)

We had the opportunity to try out another biography from YWAM Publishing. This time we chose Heroes of History- Laura Ingalls Wilder from their  Heroes of History series. We love these biographies because they are packed with so much information, and they are fun to read aloud together. This title was just as great, and really gives a great overview of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life through all her books.

For this review we received a physical copy of the book Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Storybook Life, and and electronic access to the Unit Study Curriculum Guide. The book is a standard sized book with a nice soft cover, and almost 200 pages of reading inside. The Unit Study Guide is available in pdf format and easily printable. I was able to print it up into a booklet about the same size as the book, and the pages printed back to back very easily, so I was able to save a lot of paper. I had it stapled in the middle so it would stay together, but in the past I have also coil bound these books.

 The book

Laura Ingalls Wilder--A Storybook Life

As I said before this book is packed with information about Laura Ingalls Wilder, her life, her books, and her family. It has many portions of her story from her own books along with some new information to tell the story of her life. Some of the chapter titles are even the same as the titles of some of her books. As an avid fan of her books it was fun to recognize and read portions of her books as I read this biography. I was also excited for some of the new information that is intertwined into the book. A Storybook Life is a great compilation of her life using her books, along with other pieces of her history that she may not have written about herself.

The Study Guide 

Unit Study Curriculum Guide

The Study Guide is just packed with really great ideas to go along with the reading. Not only is there the Chapter Questions (which we use the most), but there are ideas for student explorations, quotes, a display corner, and much more. This can help cover so many subjects including History, Geography, Writing, Public Speaking, Drama, Art, and Reading Comprehension. Unit studies are a great way to accomplish a lot of subjects, and this study guide is a really great resource for that. We didn't even get to half the things suggested.

One of the things we did do was a display corner. I've always wanted to do this for the past YWAM books we've read, but never really had the resources or time. This time we were able to pull some things together including displaying a good portion of Laura's books that we own, some paper dolls to represent her family, some era clothing (including bonnets that we had), a barn and a log cabin to represent her life on a farm and living in a cabin as a child, and a quote board with some of her quotes. What I didn't get around to doing was some actual pictures of real-life Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was going to print a few up and put them in a frame. I am pretty happy with how our display turned out though, and would highly recommend doing this with your children. My boys (who have a hard time really getting into Laura) had a blast putting some of these things together with me.

Laura Ingalls Wilder display corner

At the beginning of the biography it introduces Laura in her older age when she was attending a book signing for her ever popular books. It talked about how she longed to just be back home on her farm because that is where she was most comfortable, so one of our first projects was to make a barn for our display. Somehow. I brainstormed a bit because I really wanted my boys to be involved in the making of these things for our display. Then it occured to me that they could build something! My boys love to build. Luckily, we didn't have to build something from scratch. I was able to do a quick search on our favorite online marketplace and found a wooden barn kit. It was reasonable price, and looked fairly easy to build.

My 8 year-old and I worked on it one morning. It needed to be glued together as we built it, so he couldn't really do it all himself.

I did most of the painting as I wanted it to look a certain way. But my boys gave lots of suggestions that I took.

Painting the barn for Laura's farm display.

The final result was a cute barn complete with animals. Alex had fun putting all the animals around it.

Creating a farm scene was so much fun. It was Laura's favorite place to be.

Another thing I wanted to do was represent Laura's family in some way. I thought about doing a family tree, but didn't have time to fully develop that idea. I did come across some Little House paper dolls though. I thought that would be a perfect way to include the boys. Again, I had to find something to accomplish this. I thought about just printing some up, but I found and purchased this book of paper dolls instead because they would look better.

I purchased the paper doll set to include in our display

The boys had fun cutting them out even though this is a very "girl" activity. I was so glad that they were happy to do this. It also turned out to be a great activity for them to do while we read the book aloud together. I did end up having to do a lot of the cutting out, but theyd did some. These are very detailed pictures!

Some of the activites for the boys to do while we read the book included cutting out and making paper dolls to represent Laura's family.

As a review crew we had many titles we could choose from, so other members of the crew are reviewing different names such as Heroes of History- George Washington, or Christian Heroes- C.S. Lewis. You can click on the banner below to see what titles the other crew members chose to review. Maybe there is someone that interests you!