Review: Creation Illustrated

Three weeks ago I received the Pine Trees Unit Study ebook from Creation Illustrated. Since we have pine trees around our house I thought it would make for a nice little “time out from the normal” study with my lad. My thinking proved correct as my lad worked happily on the pine tree study rather than doing his normal course work, it’s good to have a break before Easter you know? 🙂 The Pine Trees study is part of the Creation Unit Studies that fit well with their magazine articles.

Who is Creation Illustrated?

Creation Illustrated is a company that focuses on showing God’s truth through nature. They do this via a magazine format. They have chosen to help students expand their knowledge of a topic in their magazine using a unit study. The unit study contains a link to the magazine. So not only do you get to read the article that corresponds to the unit study, you also get a chance to see what a great job they do with the rest of the magazine. This magazine is for all ages. Below is the cover to the spring edition.

What do you get?

I received two unit studies, Pine Trees and Snow, though my son only worked through Pine Trees. I thought though you would like to know if the unit studies are similar at all and they are! They at not identical in their set up, as in subjects are in a different order, some sections are longer or shorter and such like.

Some of the units you will encounter are:

List of resources
Brief introduction to topic
Vocabulary/Definitions/Spelling
Bible study
Geography/Science
Hands on lesson
Math
Art Aspect
Wordsearch

As you can see they do their best to make their unit studies well rounded. Teacher answer key provided.

How did we use it?

Before starting the unit study the lad and I went for a walk looking for pine trees. We found a variety in town, and a few on a favourite walk around the dam. I figured it would be a good thing to actually see the trees before we started so he’d already be able to spot differences in the trees before we started. 🙂 It was interesting to see the colour variations… some were light green, others dark, still others with a bluish tinge. The needles didn’t all feel the same either and noting the differences in the bark texture surprised my lad.

Each study encompasses several worksheets that the student fills out after reading and watching various resources provided. My son commented that some of the line spacing is too small. He’s still improving his cursive and struggles yet to make his writing fit narrow spacing.One issue we ran across in the Pine Trees study was the some of the bible verses provided didn’t seem to make any mention of Pine or fir Trees. We didn’t find that to be a big deal as it was more fun to go out and measure a pine tree using a pencil! 🙂 But to alleviate this concern for other parents, it would be VERY easy to just include the bible verses in print form. This unit study fit in well with the Fall 2017 Copy of the Creation Illustrated Magazine. The unit study about snow goes along with the Winter 2018 magazine. In that study you will, in part, learn how snowflakes are categorized and make some crystals.

Anyways, back to our study, after we did our nature walk we worked on the worksheets of the ebook. First I had my lad go through and see what he already knew. Then we looked through the various resources in order to answer the questions. My son choose to do all the easy worksheets one day and then write his essay the next.

All in all it took three days to complete the unit study. We could have stretched it out over a week doing a little every day, or used the questions as a stepping stone to dig deeper. Instead we enjoyed ourselves with a walk, took a partial day to learn about pine trees, and then worked on the finer details of writing an essay. It fit into our week well and the lad found it helpful.

Pine Trees
Creation Illustrated
Pricing: currently 30% off for the unit studies.
Series: Creation Unit Studies.
Unit studies are geared to grades 5-8.
New subscriptions to yearly membership to magazine are 25% off. 
Creation Illustrated. 
Creation, Nature, Magazine, Unit Study, all ages, faith based

60 families from the Homeschool Review Crew have reviewed The Snow and Pine Tree unit studies distributed by Creation Illustrated. Please check out their reviews here.