Heroes of History: Milton Hershey from YWAM Publishing: A TOS Review Crew Review

 Our family enjoys learning bout the origins of what we take for granted in our daily lives. There are so many things we can't imagine living without even though most of those items are luxuries and for convenience. Take chocolate for instance. I can't imagine not having a Hershey's candy bar available whenever I want and neither can Grace! If she is ever asked what her favorite candy is she responds without hesitation, "Hershey's chocolate!" When I told the girls we were going to get to learn more about the man behind the chocolate everyone was excited. We have been reading Heroes of History- Milton Hershey, a part of the Heroes of History series from YWAM Publishing.

 

    We are already familiar with the biographies YWAM publishes and have enjoyed every one we read. This was especially exciting for us because we were already planning to take a family trip to Hershey, PA. The girls enjoyed having the opportunity to learn about the man behind the candy. We read this in the evenings together as our family story time. It was engaging and interesting. While I usually only read one chapter a night, they would often beg for me to read more!  

  I really liked that there were many options so students of various levels can study together. Our girls ages are 11, 9, and 7. All three fully engaged and learned from this study! As a general rule we rarely do worksheet type studying. That means when the girls do use them it is a novelty and therefore quite enjoyable. They also like it that this was a unit done together which is also not typical of our studies.   

  We learned that there was so much more to Milton Hershey than merely making chocolate. His desire to create and provide a community for his workers is truly inspiring. I was especially impressed with his desire to provide quality education for the town. I'm fully aware that not everyone is a fan of this company, but his ideas for the community he built were forward thinking for the time. We were also impressed to learn that the company still uses locally sourced milk to make their products.   

A little peek at our fun trip to Hershey after learning about Milton Hershey!

One of the things I appreciate most about the books from YWAM is that they include study guide materials for use with my girls. While it is fun to learn and read together, I want to make sure the girls are gleaning as much as they can from this time. Each of the study guides includes a number of excellent options for furthering learning. Since these study guides are also written for traditional classrooms there are some interesting ideas, yet a bit impractical for our in-home implementation. Some of these include group activities and classroom display ideas. These are really fun things, but not very practical for us. The items we did make use of were chapter questions and key quotes. We also utilized the written study guide which are highly valuable for students to record while they are reading. While we did not use the essay and further studies section, these are both excellent and well-suited for older students.    Take a look at what my Crewmates had to say!