Home School in the Woods: A La Carte {Review}

I sometimes get questions from friends about the fun activities we do in our homeschool.  It's no secret.  Many of our history games and projects are from an amazing company called Home School in the Woods.  They are a great resource for homeschool families.  We have used many of their products including the big Time Traveler series that is a stand alone curriculum that covers a few months of material.  But I love that Home School in the Woods has pulled out some of the games and activities from their bigger products and are now selling them A La Carte PDF downloads so we can pick and choose what we want to use without having to buy the whole curriculum.

The Homeschool Review Crew gave us the opportunity to try two of the A La Carte products.  I chose A Trip to Town File Folder Game and the Taxation Frustration! Game.  We love playing games as a family so it just makes sense to incorporate some games into our homeschool.  It makes for a fun review of what we have been studying.

We enjoyed A Trip to Town File Folder Game the most.  This game can be found in the Time Travelers: Colonial Life.  It teaches children about the vocabulary from Colonial Days including medical diseases, food terminology, and different artisan jobs from those days.


Home School in the Woods  Á La Carte products
I began by printing all of the pages.  This game is a file folder game.  I love these because there is a game board printable that gets glued into a file folder.  There are also game markers, store cards, and question cards.  The file makes suggestions as to whether to print on regular paper, cardstock, or different colored paper.  This is a picture of everything I printed for this game.


While you don't have to do this, I love to add a pop of color to the game so I colored the game board and the game markers.  I think it makes the game look more appealing.


Each child starts with 5 artisan cards.  They have to work their way through the game board to each artisan shop they have a card for in order to get a matching card.  The first player to match all five of their cards wins the game.


However, before you can roll the dice to move on the board, you have to pull a question card and be able to define the vocabulary word.  Some of them are pretty gross.  My kids actually love the gross vocabulary words the most!  Here Rachel pulled the card for Grocer's Itch - a cutaneous disease caused by mites in sugar and flour.  Ewww!


There are a few special cards in the deck that cause you to lose a turn or that let you advance to the artisan shop of your choice.  This is a fun game and a great review of vocabulary and terminology from Colonial Days. A Trip to Town File Folder game can be downloaded for just $4.95.

The other game we reviewed is called Taxation Frustration!  It demonstrates the frustration that American colonists would have felt at the unfair difference in taxes that they were forced to pay to Britain versus what the British citizens had to pay.  This game can also be found in the Home School in the Woods Time Travelers: The American Revolution.
Home School in the Woods  Á La Carte products
This is also a PDF printable but it does not have a game board.  It uses play money which in those days were shillings.  Look at the beautiful printables that this game comes with!  The file is formatted in such a way that you can print these double sided.  This way you have the real picture of the various shilling denominations on one side and then you flip the card over to easily read the amount.  I just love this realistic touch to the game.


The game is played by choosing a card for an item you would like to buy.  In this case it is a barrel of gun powder which has a tax of 8 shillings.  Next you draw an orange card to determine if you are American or British and the corresponding tax you will have to pay.  If you are British, then you simply pay the 8 shillings tax as noted on the card.  But you can see that some of the other orange cards might state that you are an American colonist and therefore you have to pay double or even triple the amount of tax for an item.


Taxation Frustration! is a simple and quick game to play but it demonstrates the frustration that the colonists felt.  This printable sells for just $3.95.

As a homeschool mom, I simply love using Home School in the Woods products for history.  In case you are interested, here are a few other products of theirs that we have used:

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If you would like to read additional reviews on the A La Carte products by Home School in the Woods please click on the banner below:

À La Carte Projects - Individual projects designed to enhance your studies! {Home School in the Woods Reviews}

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