Includes the Student Guide and Teachers Guide for Story of the World Volume 3. The Student Books are amazing. Full of colorful artwork and photos as well as black & white illustrations, vocabulary tidbits, maps, and biographical sketches, it is skillfully formatted into an appealing and engaging text. Each of the 28 chapters (i.e. weekly lessons) have text interspersed with Narration Breaks (place to stop and recount orally the information that has been covered) and questions: "Ready to Explore" (America's Story) and "Analyze/Connect" (World's Story). Each chapter ends with a two-page photo montage (a feature I love) that pertains to the chapter's focus. For instance, there is a collection of Native American dwellings each with short informational captions in America's Story while in World's Story there are montages of an ancient city such as Jerusalem or Kerma in Sudan.
The Teacher Guide is a combination book. It is part teacher book, part student workbook. Teacher content includes instructional information, detailed daily lesson plans, an overview of the activities built into the student worksheets, teaching tips for struggling learners, supply lists, suggestions for special projects, and answers for student worksheets. Information for the teacher (about 10% of the book) includes a section on the importance of narration and words of encouragement from the publisher. The remainder of the book is student worksheets (which are reproducible for your own homeschooling family). These worksheets provide the heart of a student's journal to accompany the course. At this time, worksheets are not available separately. Nicely designed and well-illustrated, there are daily front-and-back worksheets. These are similar but appropriately different for each age level between the two series. The whole TG is three-hole punched, and for the record, there are no tests in either series.
World's Story chapter worksheets include an introductory page (for the teacher materials needed and narration prompts and responses); Written Narration/Vocabulary; WorldQuest (short essay questions and copywork); Map Adventure (map related activities); My Timeline; Dig Deeper! (suggested questions to research); and Art Study (informational with activities). Also included are Review Sheets (quarterly), Research Aid Worksheets (optional helps for research projects), Artifact Studies (12 worksheets with informational snippets accompanying artifact photos coupled with discussion questions), materials for a couple of special projects, Timeline Supplements, Craft Suggestions (6), and answer keys.