Home School in the Woods Route 66 Game {Review}

This review was originally published March 2018 on our Gypsy Road site.

From the maker of Project Passport and History Through the Ages, a new line of a la carte products is being released by Home School in the Woods. Two of the new products include 'Get Your Kicks on Route 66' and 'New Figures of the 20th and 21st Century.'

Get Your Kicks on Route 66 - board game

Get Your Kicks on Route 66 is a simple cut & go game designed for 3rd-8th graders. You print it out (there are directions for both single and double sided printing), cut out the game cards, and go!

We chose to color the game board, since we'll be laminating it for future use, and had a little bit of fun along the way. Here I am, rocking out to the Eagles' "Take it Easy,".....'standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona....' 😉


Examples of cards include : questions & circumstances, challenges, and some of the more advanced questions. Also, the board itself has facts and trivia related to Route 66 scattered across it.


When we started the game, the players stayed fairly on target with each other. As the questions progressed, however, the oldest knew so many more (from his history studies), leaving the youngest one eating his dust... (Literally, on the old, unpaved Route 66!) I ended up screening questions for the youngest and weeding out some that he had zero shot of answering, just to even things up a bit.

New Figures of the 20th and 21st Century

New Figures of the 20th and 21st Century is an add-on pack for your standard timeline.  It includes twenty-four figures depicting notable people and / or events from this era.  There are two formats offered : figures with and figures without text below them (these two are shown above in the Haiti example).  They come in an easy print PDF format, or you have the option of pulling them up one picture at a time in JPG format.  There are no accompanying timeline pages, so you will need to make some or add to your own pre-existing set.

We do maintain a timeline of historical events, but our pages did not go all the way up to this era, so we simply made a new set of pages for this set.  While aimed at students in 3rd to 12th grade, I've always found timelines to be something that even kindergartners can do and enjoy.  We prefer the figures with text beneath them, and my son reads aloud about each figure.

One thing I noticed about this set is that it is missing several important events from era.  A few we noticed were missing included :

• Black Tuesday
• World War I
• Great Depression
• birth of any US Presidents other than Obama
• Pearl Harbor
• World War II
• Elvis / Birth of Rock & Roll
• the Kennedys
• Martin Luther King Jr. / segretation
• Vietnam War
• Women's Rights
• Berlin Wall
• Iraq / Desert Storm
• September 11th
• Afghanistan

I consider all of these to be fairly important in the realm of US History, and cannot understand why some of the twenty-four figures would make the cut, but not one of these did.  While we were very pleased with the board game, we will probably look to another source for our modern history timeline figures.

Pros

• The timeline add-on includes pieces not typically found with your standard timeline.
• The game offers a chance for older kids to play while reinforcing new knowledge. It can be difficult to find educational games for older children.
• The a la carte products are all reasonably priced, at $5 for Get Your Kicks on Route 66 and $3 for New Figures of the 20th and 21st Century.

Cons

• Several important events seem to be missing from timeline add-on.
• Game is difficult to play (fairly) with children of various stages.

A Few More Notes…

• Visit Home School in the Woods to see all the other products they have available.
• These dovetail nicely with our Modern History studies...focusing on the 20th century.

See what others are saying about Home School in the Woods over at the Schoolhouse Review Crew!