Great Expectations Study Guide from Progeny Press #REVIEW

 I don't have many academic memories from high school. Most of my classes are a blur. However, English was the exception. I have always loved to read. There is something about reading great literature and discussing it with knowledgeable teachers and students that just thrilled me and has always stuck with me. My husband and I were talking recently about some of the books we read in school and Great Expectations came up. Characters like Pip and Mrs. Havisham were wonderfully complex. I think Mrs. Havisham was a mental image that was awesomely horrifying - I can just picture her decaying. During our discussion we both agreed we wanted our kids to make a pit stop with this book during their literature classes before graduating. About a week later we were offered Great Expectations E-Guide from Progeny Press for review. I was so excited to add this book and the E-guide to our end of the year and we took it on as our last project before closing out the school year.

What We Received:

We received a 72 page interactive study guide. This is an E-guide (which means it is entirely online.) It also included an answer key. It is interactive because students can plug in answers on the computer or you can use it more traditionally by printing pages out.

What It Covers:

• Vocabulary
• Literary Analysis
• Comprehension questions
• Writing exercises
• Final projects
• and more!

How We Used It:

I had two students working on this review. My oldest is just finishing up tenth grade and my second born is finishing eight grade. I felt confident that both could tackle this book and the E-Guide as a final literary project to end out the school year. The first thing I did was download the material and review it for myself. This gave me a feel for the whole guide and how it would be best used in our time frame and accenting my boys strengths with literature.

Then I printed out pages for the two boys to work on. They were supposed to read the entire Great Expectations book first before tackling the guide but this book is 59 chapters long. It became clear to me that this was going to take longer to complete than I originally planned. When both of the boys were 35 chapters into the reading I had them start in the guide. This was a good place because they could work slowly and not feel to overwhelmed. The sheets focused on vocabulary and comprehension.  Truth be told my boys don't love literature. I often wonder if we are even related! They don't mind reading but once we have any written work they don't want to do it. With that in mind I assigned the work by giving them every other question and doing some of the answering verbally. (If we weren't at the end of the year I probably would have had them complete the whole guide.) We could have had them plug it online because this guide has an option to fill in through the keyboard but we didn't use it that way.  Having a laser printer makes printing affordable for us and we like hard copy pages in hand but if you were wanting to save printer in that would be a great way to have your student complete the guide.

Our Thoughts:

This Progeny Press E-Guide was very easy to implement. You just need a copy of the book to start and then a printer or computer (if you work online) to progress. I liked that as a teacher there wasn't much prep work. This was very helpful for me because my personal style is more grab and go. Great Expectations was a challenging book to pick but it was one that I think every kid should read in high school so I was happy with that option as a choice. Overall this was an enjoyable literature study. We used it as more of a project but in the past we've used these guides as our literature doing a few over the course of the school year. I like that flexibility. I found this product easy to modify to our needs as well by doing things verbally and alternating questions.

Want to learn more? Check out what the other CREW members thought of PP. We all had different levels and books so there is lots to see and learn!

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