Review: Progeny Press ~ The Indian in the Cupboard

We love using all the downloadable literature unit study guides from Progeny Press. For our latest review, we have been using The Indian in the Cupboard E-Guide.

Progeny Press study guides are hands-down, some of the best study guides that we have used. They are fun, interactive and so well-organised that it makes them so easy to use. The study guides you will find at Progeny Press are for many well-known novels and are written from a Christian perspective. Even though many different authors write these study guides, you will find that they all follow a similar format, so you always know what to expect. Many of the e-Guides are interactive which allow your child to type in the answers on the pdf file which saves on ink and paper.

Progeny Press has many study guides available which they divide by grade levels:

Lower Elementary ( for K- Grades 3)
Upper Elementary (for Grades 3 – 5)
Middle School (for Grades 6 – 8)
High School (for Grades 8 – 12 )

How did we go?

We have already used many of the study guides from Progeny Press and love them, so we knew we would love this one too. (You can read our past reviews here: Stone Fox, The Door in the Wall and Uncle Jed’s Barbershop and Mr Popper’s Penguins.)

The E-Guide for The Indian in the Cupboard is geared for students in grades 5th- 8th grade. It’s listed under the middle school tab on their website. It is 52 pages in length (including the answer key) and contains a synopsis, author information, a note on how to use the guide, pre-reading activities, chapter studies, summary and a list of additional resources.

Each chapter contains a variety of activities which include:

Vocabulary
Characterization
Short Answer Questions
Thinking about the Story Questions
Point of View
Dig Deeper Questions
Writing Project

As the novels don’t come with the studies and we already had the book, the boys were ready to go as soon as we received the guide. If you don’t have the books, you can also purchase them from the Progeny Press website.

Before starting the E-Guide, we read the book from cover to cover. Then we took a look at the pre-reading activities. These included researching the Iroquois Indians and the French and Indian War. As we could spend a lot of time completing these activities and we were waiting for the library to get the books we needed, we decided to complete these after we have finished the rest of the study guide.

As each section in the study guide covered 2 – 3 chapters of the book, our oldest boy (who completed this study guide), decided he would read the chapters for each section again, on his own, before completing the questions.

Each section contained about 5 pages. R would read the chapters needed and then complete the section of the study guide in one day. It did take him roughly an hour, but he really enjoyed the book so was keen to do. This did not include the writing activity or project that many of the chapters had. He is completing them the next day.

Overall, we really love the study guides from Progeny Press. We have used quite a few now and really look forward to the next one. There are so many to choose from, they are easy to prepare and cater to so many learning styles. I also love that they are written from a Christian perspective and how they encourage children to read and study not only the books they are reading, but also the Bible.