Review: Walking with the Waodani - A Unit Study - Simple Living. Creative Learning

Walking with the Waodani is a brand new study from Homeschool Adventures. After reading Through the Gates of Splendour, our oldest boy was really keen to learn more about the Waodani (previously known as the Auca) people.

Home School Adventure Co. creates resources that are designed to help you educate and raise your children to be loving, compassionate, strong and wise. Currently, this Waodani unit study is a working progress, but when finished it will contain 4 lessons that are intended to be completed over a month. Each of the four lessons is about a different topics: Lesson 1 – Shell Mera (Then); Lesson 2 – Shell Mera (Now); Lesson 3 – Ecuador and Lesson 4 – Quito. Each lesson includes 5 components which can be spread out over a week. The components include:

Lesson Introduction
People and Places
Meals and Markets
Animals and Agriculture
Worlds And Worldview

After the five components is the Travel Journal. This includes a variety of activities for the student to complete. There are reading comprehension questions, mark you map activities, notebooking pages, rating a recipe, draw an animal and creative writing. Each lesson also includes a list of recommended resources (books, videos and links) for further study.

How did we go?

The week before we received the downloaded pdf file of Walking with the Waodani, our oldest boy had just finished reading Through the Gates of Splendour (which he really enjoyed). This book tells the story of ‘Operation Auca.’ About how five American missionaries attempt to reach the Auca people to tell them about Jesus, but sadly, all of these brave men were killed by the tribe. With this fresh in his mind, we started slowly working through this unit study.

As each lesson was broken up into 5 components, we decided to do one component a day, therefore each lesson would take us a week.

Day 1

On this day I would read aloud the Lesson Introduction to both of our boys and then they would answer the reading comprehension questions in the Travel Journal. We talked about each question together before they wrote the answer in the space provided.

Day 2

On this day we read about the people, the history and geography of a certain area in Ecuador. Then we completed the mark your map activities.

Day 3

Day 3 included reading about some of the native foods of this area. Our boys loved learning about the hunting techniques and the strange insects that were eaten by these people. The activities for this included drawing a picture of food, rating food and answering a couple of questions.

Day 4

Our boys love learning about animals, so they really enjoyed this day, learning about the animals and agriculture of Ecuador. After reading the information provided, they drew an amazing animal and wrote a short paragraph about it.

Day 5

After reading the information provided on the worldview, they complete the ‘Set the Timer and Write!’ activity.

We continued in the same fashion for all of the three lessons that we currently have access to. The library in our area is quite small and lacks pretty much all of the books and dvds that were on the recommended reading list, but we were able to use the internet and incorporate some of that into our study.

We have found this Walking with the Waodani Unit Study to be well-written and informative on the subjects it touches. We knew that this was a violent story, but the way Stacy has approached it is perfect. The activities included can be used with students in a wide range of ages, as they can go into as much depth as they would like with each activity. If a young child is unable to complete the writing assignments, then they could always draw a picture or even ‘verbally’ complete the. We have loved every minute using this study and am eagerly awaiting the finished product. Stacy has done a great job at capturing the culture of the Waodani and their story.

As I said at the start of this review, this unit study is a working progress and not yet completely finished. If you would like to know more about it and join the waiting list for when it is finished, then pop over to the Walking With The Waodani Study page.