Truth Quest History Review

A couple of months ago I was given a new History curriculum to review for The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew. The program is called Truth Quest History and the guide we were given to try out was called Beginnings.

Beginnings goes over the span of Creation, the Old Testament, the Ancients and Egypt.
The program is ideally for Grades 5-12, but younger siblings can participate. Included in the curriculum is a book list with book recommendations for all ages. This history guide is available as printed book, or PDF eBook (for immediate download). It has optional "companion resources" (lapbook, notebook, timeline) which are offered on the website for purchase.

The cost for this History Curriculum is: $29.95 for the book version
or: $23.95 for the PDF version.
It is comprised of 88 lessons.

In this study guide you will learn the history of the world through God's Word, starting all the way back at the beginning of time.

Each day you will gather your kids together and read the commentary for the day. After the commentary has been read and discussed, children will be ready to dig into the historical event or personage being studied and can do so by choosing from a long list of books on the topic. These books can either be purchased on your own or by borrowing from your local library. Some lessons will include a Think Write exercise which will deepen their insights through writing, but most lessons simply have them read, talk and think. There are other optional resources but for the most part it's just the reading and everything else is optional.

Our thoughts:
We reviewed the first week of lessons in the Truth Quest book and although God's story is certainly an important and interesting one - we unfortunately didn't find it met our needs for a history curriculum. For the most part, we found the lessons far too wordy and filled with words my kids didn't even understand. I'm sure much of this was due to this book being geared towards 5th-12th graders. My students are just in 5th grade and 3rd grade now so it was definitely above their attention and comprehension level. And when I tried to secure the books from the book list at my local library I found that almost every single book I wanted was unavailable.
There were some companion resources, such as the Binder-Builder provided by A Journey Through Learning. This sets up much like a lap book to go along with the daily lessons. It is available for purchase for an additional $18 {PDF version only}. Although I didn't receive that part of the curriculum, I viewed a sample of it and found that it too was a bit drab for our taste. It was mostly copy-work or questions for the kids to answer, nothing to color, nothing to craft, no pictures, etc.

So basically we found that Truth Quest just wasn't the right fit for us. It's a very extensive curriculum and will probably work very well for many families, for us though it just wasn't the right choice. If you'd like to check out Truth Quest please visit their website. And if you'd like to read more reviews on this curriculum please check out The Old SchoolHouse Homeschool Crew and see what other homeschoolers are saying about it.

Disclaimer: As a member of the TOS Crew, I received this product, at no cost to me, in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are mine.