Prairie Primer

Cadron creek sent me the Prairie Primer to review for you. I was very excited to receive it. I’ve looked at it several times but never actually bought it. Honestly? I wish I’d purchased it years ago, when I read through the Little House series with the girls.

Prairie Primer covers literature and history of course but also covers social studies, geography, writing, science, health, nutrition, Bible, character building, and life application, so says their website, for children in grades 3 through 6. As with any unit study this study could easily be beefed up for older students or simplified for younger ones. Personally I love unit studies for this reason. You could easily, with a little tweaking, make this study work for almost all ages.

The girls and I worked our way through week one and had a great week. I am quite pleased with how this enormous unit study is laid out. For every week you have a planning guide for you to use to gather the necessary items and books you would like to use in addition to the Little House books. Obviously you would not do every activity or read every book or you’d be at it for years!

It is further broken down into daily assignments. You have a certain amount of reading every day, and then there are comprehension questions to ask your students. These are great springboards for discussion. Then, for each of the subjects listed above, there is an assignment or activity suggestion using the items you have already collected.

Personally, I love the units from Cadron creek. They are well thought out, well organized and extremely well researched.

My only concern is that the kids might get a little tired of the frontier era after a year of studying it, but the study does span most of the 1800’s, and you could always stop it between books and do something totally different for a few weeks then come back.

You can go here to find out more about Prairie Primer. This site has wonderful sample pages so you can really get a good idea of what you are getting when you buy it.

Happy Homeschooling!