An Adventure Thru History With An Old Friend – A Review of a American History lessons in the One Year Subscription to Drive Thru History Adventures
What Is It?
But now there is a new way to experience history and once again, Drive Thru History® and Dave Stotts have created an online curriculum called Drive Thru History Adventures.
A one year subscription to Drive Thru History Adventures includes the basic materials you need for a full year of American History, Ancient History, and Bible History. You will find videos, thought-provoking analysis, and even primary source documents for your teenager to study, enjoy, think about, write about, and expand his knowledge of history.
You can use this affordable resource simply for it’s Adventures TV feature, which offers an easy way to stream over 40 Dave Stotts videos to your television. Or you can let your child expand his horizons and jump into the adventure with both feet by exploring the additional documents and study materials.
All of this is just one price for the whole family!
Will It Enhance Your Homeschool?
Absolutely. The beauty of this membership to Drive Thru History Adventures lies in it’s flexibility. It will fit any homeschooling family – and even families with children who attend traditional school.
You can simply watch great history videos using the membership, as my husband using his mobile phone does during his lunch hour at work.
Or you can watch the episodes and read the commentary and lesson material and answer questions, as I do together with my two teens in a discussion format in the living room every Friday.
Or, you can even live and breathe everything that Drive Thru History Adventures has to offer, read all the blog posts, and study the primary source documents like the Mayflower Compact, and even dig deeper on your own. That is my teenage son. He loves this even more than anything Dave Stotts has done over the years, which is a HUGE complement!
What Comes With A One Year Membership?
Subjects
- Bible History (18 weeks on the Gospels)
- American History (12 weeks on early American history)
- Ancient History (12 weeks on early Greece, Rome and Asia Minor)
- New content added to your membership so even if you already have seen the videos with your kids, and are not interested in the supporting curriculum, there will continue to be new videos added over time – and that is a deal you cannot beat!
Included in each Subject
- Videos
- Discussion questions
- Primary Source Documents (no extra books required)
- Diving Deeper explorations of topics for older kids and teens
Extras
- Adventure TV (video content designed to stream or cast to your TV or watch on your phone or your tablet or computer)
- Community & Support in the Facebook Group (a chance for you to interact with Dave Stotts and share your children’s excitement with others. A place to get encouragement and share the adventure with like-minded families!)
Time Required To Teach This, if you decide to work through the material with your child
Preparation Time: 10-15 minutes (read material, and review the relevant sections of the Bible if applicable)
Teaching Time: 25-90 minutes (The time here depends on whether you simply watch the episode, which is about 25 minutes for each, or if you add a discussion afterwards and work through the curriculum materials it can add as much as an hour to the time if your kids are really interested in the topic.)
How We Used It
The kids and I sat down every Friday to go through on
e or two episodes together in a sitting.
Our first stop is always the Dave’s Adventures section so we can listen to updates and general hilarity (he has so much great content to share, all delivered with good humor!)
Then we talked about the episode and I used the discussion 
guide to direct the conversation.
My kids really don’t like having me read questions to them that I want them to answer. They think that if I expect them to respond in complete sentences, I should at least be able to ask them a question without having to read it. I get that, and they are both teenagers, so I try to pick my battles.
These questions make a great springboard for all sorts of discussion with older children, but I think they would work great for the middle school and upper elementary set too.
My son is hooked on the additional resources for each lesson.
He does these on his own, mostly because I want him to be able to read and think at his own pace as he explores all the great additional primary resource documents and ideas.
Adventures Streaming Laptop to TV
We were planning to watch an episode and do a lesson together each day using our TV in the living room. For the first couple of weeks, I tried connecting my husband’s laptop to the TV in order to stream Adventure TV. We don’t have a TV with WiFi – we still have the TV we bought used when our teens were born, or maybe it was even before the kids were born. I cannot remember it was so long ago. So our technology really is in the stone age. This method (laptop cabled to TV) was cumbersome for me to set up and in spite of my children begging to do a lesson every day, I could not face all the cables and connections every single day.
Streaming, or Casting, Smartphone to Roku/TV is Your Friend!
Then I realized after a couple of weeks that I could stream (or “cast”) the content from my mobile phone to our first generation Roku box, which is connected to the TV. (Yes, we are that family that gets dragged kicking and screaming into new technology. Why buy something new when my good old Windows XP computer still works? That is my motto!)
And so I used the Adventure TV feature streamed from my smartphone to our Roku box. This was fantastic! (I realize that this feature is not specific to Adventure TV, but for those of us living in the stone age with a super-old and bulky TV set without anything fancy like cable TV or built in WiFi, it was amazing to be able to stream from my phone to the TV)
Did We Like It?
Oh, boy howdy – did we ever! (and yes, that is my son’s thumb and his beloved Windows XP computer!)
Product Overview
General Features
- Easy to Adapt To Your Homeschool
- Adapts to Teach Multiple Children (Multiple Ages)
- Accessible to Children with Dylsexia / Dysgraphia
- Works with Gifted Children
Works with these Age Ranges
- Middle Years (6-8)
- High School (9-12)
Good For These Educational Styles
- Charlotte Mason
- Classical
- Eclectic
- Traditional (like public school)
- Unit Study
- Unschooling
Subjects Covered
- Art
- Religion
- Social Studies / History
- Writing / Language Arts
For Kids Who Like
- Discussion
- Video Instruction
- Face it – I do not know anyone who does not love Dave Stotts and Drive Thru History!
