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Review: Famous Figures of the Middle Ages & Renaissance

This year's history class is over the middle ages and the renaissance time periods. We got Famous Figures to go along with it since it was so nice to use for 1st grade. In the front of this book there are little paragraphs that go over who each person is and what they did that makes them so memorable. I did not really use these last year. In fact we only ended up using half of the pages. For each person you get a teacher cut out and a student cut out. Our daughter at first had fun coloring the people but by the middle of it she was bored and did not want to color them so instead I just had the teacher ones cut out and put together for her to play with. 


Sometimes I do have her color them just so she learns some patience. She thinks it takes to long to color them. Or sometimes I will color them with her to show her she can take her time and enjoy coloring even if it take awhile. I wish that the book came with the little pins to to put them together with but I found them at Walmart for like a dollar. Just like the title of the workbook suggest it has famous people from that time period. At first last year I was just doing them when ever they popped up on our homeschool schedule but then I started using them when they showed up in our history textbook, Story of the World. So, it is pretty easy to use. When you want to teach about one of the people in the book you can read their paragraphs, cut out the people and put them together. The student ones they cut, color and put them together. 



The completed people are a great size and the back of the body for each person they say each person's name. I love this because without it I do not think that I would be able to remember who is who. It is also really nice that the clothing looks like clothes from that time period. And some of them are very detailed they will have extra things with them. For instance Shakespeare has a quill and paper with him. Genghis Khan has a sword and hawk with him. He is known for using a hawk to scout out the opponent so it is really neat that they included that. I would not consider this a must have but it seemed to help bring the history book to life for her and she had fun playing with the cut outs. Even though we only use the teacher pages I will continue to use this for next year's history class as well. Our daughter likes to act out the stories in the textbook with the people. Ours came with our 2nd grade Timberdoodle kit. Have you used these? Do you have any fun things for history? Let us know in the comment section below.


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