Homeschool in the Woods Project Passport

Project Passport is the long-form world-history line inside the broader Homeschool in the Woods catalog. Where the parent publisher runs short Time Travelers units and quick Activity-Paks, Project Passport asks for ten weeks at a time, stretches each ancient civilization across twenty-five "stops," and produces the kind of project portfolio a student actually keeps. It is the same family behind it and the same illustrator's hand, but it is a specifically heavier commitment than the rest of the line.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Unit studies; literature-based; hands-on projects
Worldview	Christian-evangelical (biblical figures treated as historical; Scripture referenced in sample prompts)
Grades	3-8
Formats	Digital download (PDF); CD (where available)
Cost tier	Standard (for a multi-month unit)
Parent intensity	4 (prep, printing, supervision across 25 stops)
ESA-common	Yes (where Christian curriculum is approved)
Accredited	No
Established	Series developed through the 2000s and 2010s; current titles cover Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and Reformation
Website	homeschoolinthewoods.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	4	A complete 25-stop unit produces real content coverage across a period
Ease of teaching	2	The prep and printing load is the real cost of the program
Content quality	5	Pak-family illustration, consistent voice, and genuine craft throughout
Flexibility	3	The unit is designed to be run as a 10-week commitment; compressing it loses a lot
Value for money	4	$34.95 for a 10-week multi-child multi-year unit is a strong dollar-per-week rate
Worldview scope	3	Protestant-Christian framing throughout; manageable for most Christian families, adaptable for secular use with substitution
Visual/design	4	The most visually engaging printable history materials in the homeschool market
Support resources	3	Detailed tutorials in each pack; small customer service team

Who the publisher is

Project Passport is one product line inside the Homeschool in the Woods catalog, which is run by Amy Pak and her family out of upstate New York. The parent company's overall editorial voice, illustrated, hands-on, Christian-evangelical, family-assembled, applies throughout. This review focuses on what distinguishes Project Passport from the rest of the catalog, because families shopping Homeschool in the Woods often have to decide between Project Passport (long-form world history) and Time Travelers (shorter-form U.S. history), and the choice matters.

Amy Pak designed and illustrates Project Passport. Son Jaron Pak does much of the research and text writing. Son Jonah Pak runs the digital publishing side. The materials are distributed via the family's own retail site as PDF downloads or, where available, physical CDs; ordering, fulfillment, and customer service are handled in-house. The catalog has expanded over roughly two decades from individual timeline figures and Amy Pak's early projects into a full hands-on history program.

The Project Passport line specifically covers world history's ancient and medieval-to-early-modern periods. Per the publisher's current catalog in April 2026, the available titles are Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and Reformation. Each title is a standalone unit; the titles are not prerequisites of one another, though a family running them in chronological order across multiple years builds a coherent four-to-five-year world-history sequence from ancient through early-modern.

The core pedagogy

A Project Passport unit is built around a travel-themed metaphor: the student is taking a "journey" through a historical period, and each of the 25 "stops" on the journey is a lesson-and-project combination. At each stop, the student reads a section of Guide Book text on a topic, daily life in Ancient Rome, the construction of medieval castles, Gutenberg and the printing press, and so on, and then completes a project or activity that connects to the stop. The range of projects across 25 stops is deliberately varied: some stops have a notebooking page, others a lapbook piece, others a larger hands-on construction (a model aqueduct, a printed newspaper in a period font, a reproduction-style illuminated manuscript page). The student also maintains a running "Snapshot Moments in History" timeline scrapbook across the unit, which becomes a physical portfolio of the period by completion.

Each unit includes over fifty projects and activities, a Dining Out Guide with period recipes, several dramatized audio tours (totaling nearly an hour of listening content per unit), a file-folder game, a passport-and-luggage folder for portfolio assembly, and teacher keys. The unit is designed to run over 8-12 weeks at a pace of roughly one stop every two to three school days.

Signature mechanics that differentiate Project Passport from the broader Homeschool in the Woods catalog: (1) 25-stop structure. Time Travelers units run fewer stops over fewer weeks; Project Passport is specifically the longer-form, higher-commitment line. (2) Travel-themed framing pushed harder, the passport, luggage folder, stamps, and itinerary language are more elaborately developed in Project Passport than in sibling products. (3) Audio tour component, the dramatized audio tours are a Project Passport signature; Time Travelers does not use them to the same extent. (4) Period-depth rather than topical breadth, a Project Passport unit stays inside a single civilization or period for ten weeks, while Time Travelers episodes cover a shorter American history period in a tighter window.

A day in the life

A fifth-grader and seventh-grader running Project Passport: Ancient Egypt together as a shared history unit spend roughly an hour a day, four days a week, across ten weeks. Parent has pre-printed the current stop's Guide Book text and project printables from the PDF. Monday: children read the stop's Guide Book together (parent reads aloud or children read in parallel depending on grade). Children complete the stop's short notebooking entry. Tuesday: the stop's hands-on project, today, building a cartouche using a printed template, modeling clay, and gold-foil paper from a craft store. Wednesday: audio tour listening and discussion; timeline entry for the stop. Thursday: stop review, reading the next stop's preview, and portfolio assembly (placing completed pieces into the passport folder). Parent prep time is roughly 20-30 minutes once a week to print and gather materials for the coming week's stops.

A single-child family running Project Passport alone uses the same rhythm at a more leisurely pace, typically across twelve weeks rather than ten. Co-ops sometimes run a Project Passport unit as a group activity with each family doing the Guide Book readings at home and the hands-on projects together weekly; this adaptation is common and works well because the materials support it.

What they do exceptionally well

Travel-themed engagement across 25 stops. The passport and itinerary framing is not a cosmetic gimmick. Across ten weeks, the "stops" metaphor gives a student something to look forward to and a sense of cumulative journey that most history units fail to produce. Children who start the unit curious about ancient Egypt are, by week eight, actively asking when they'll reach the next stop. That sustained engagement across a long unit is the hardest thing to produce in hands-on history, and Project Passport produces it consistently.

Portfolio that a child actually keeps. The completed passport folder, with its stop-by-stop notebooking pages, timeline scrapbook, hands-on artifacts, and recipe cards from the Dining Out Guide, is the kind of work a student returns to as a teenager and shows their own children. Most homeschool history units produce scattered worksheets; Project Passport produces a coherent bound artifact per period studied.

Audio tours add a dimension. The dramatized audio tours, roughly an hour of listening content per unit, voiced in period-appropriate dramatization, give a passive-listening mode that supplements the active reading and building. For children who absorb content aurally as well as visually, the audio tours are disproportionately effective. They also travel: families listen to them in the car on the way to errands, which expands the unit's reach beyond the school desk.

What they do poorly

Prep and printing load is real. Running a Project Passport unit at pace requires consistent parent time on the prep side, roughly 20-30 minutes per week for printing, cutting, and gathering materials. Families who underestimate this load and try to run the unit reactively fall behind in week two and spend the rest of the unit catching up. Families who treat Project Passport as their main history spine and block out dedicated weekly prep time fare well; families who layer it on top of an already-full week tend to abandon it mid-unit.

Longer commitment than sibling Time Travelers products. A Project Passport unit is specifically a 10-week commitment to a single civilization. Families who prefer shorter 4-6-week topical units, or who want to move through history at a faster survey pace, should choose Time Travelers for American history periods or sibling Activity-Paks for shorter topical work. Project Passport is the right product only when a family wants depth at one period.

Reformation unit carries a Protestant historiographical posture. The Renaissance and Reformation title handles the Protestant Reformation as a significant and generally positive historical development, in the voice of Protestant historiography. Catholic families running the unit often supplement with Catholic-authored materials on the same period to balance the framing; the publisher does not claim doctrinal neutrality on this period, and the design of the unit reflects that.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Project Passport if: you want depth at a single historical period across two to three months; you have two or more children in the 3-8 grade range who can work through the unit together; you enjoy hands-on projects and have the parent bandwidth for weekly prep; you are within the evangelical or broadly Christian spectrum and comfortable with the framing; you value portfolio-building as an educational outcome.

• Skip Project Passport if: you want a survey approach that moves quickly across many periods in a year; you need a program with minimal parent prep; your student is in high school and needs textbook-depth historical reading; you prefer secular history materials without Christian framing; you want a reading-first approach with modest hands-on elements.

Cost honest assessment

Per the publisher's store in April 2026, individual Project Passport downloads run $34.95 each. The full Project Passport Bundle, all five current titles, is $149.95. Per-unit, the pricing stretches across ten weeks and multiple children in a single family under the publisher's family-reproduction license, which makes the dollar-per-week cost quite low. A family running one Project Passport unit per year across five years of elementary-and-middle-school history spends $149.95 total, or $29.99 per unit when purchasing the bundle.

Compared to Beautiful Feet Ancient History Guide (roughly $50-$75 per guide, literature-led, less hands-on), to Mystery of History ($40-$60 per volume plus activity components), and to the History Revealed series ($250-$400 per level, heavily hands-on), Project Passport is the most project-dense option at its price point. What the family gets for the $34.95 per unit is approximately 10 weeks of structured content, 50+ projects, audio tours, and a portfolio-ready output, against which competitors typically offer either shorter hands-on content or longer text-focused content, but rarely the density Project Passport delivers.

A realistic all-in budget for a family using Project Passport as its world-history spine across grades 3-8 is $150-$250 total across six years of elementary and middle school, plus modest annual printing and craft-supply costs.

ESA eligibility notes

Project Passport is approved across most state ESA marketplaces that accept Christian curriculum publishers, on the same terms as the parent Homeschool in the Woods catalog. Arizona's ClassWallet, Florida's Step Up For Students, Utah Fits All, West Virginia Hope, and Iowa Student First typically list Homeschool in the Woods as an approved vendor, with Project Passport downloads reimbursable as consumable educational materials. A few state administrators have historically restricted reimbursement for download-only products to specific categories; families should confirm with their state administrator before assuming coverage. CD versions of the units (where still available) are more consistently reimbursable where CDs remain an approved format.

Alternatives

• Time Travelers (Homeschool in the Woods, U.S. history), a family would choose Time Travelers because it covers American rather than world history, runs shorter units (5-6 weeks rather than 10), and fits a lighter schedule.
• Mystery of History, a family would choose Mystery of History because it offers a chronological world-history spine across four volumes with lighter activities, suited for families preferring a textbook rhythm with optional projects.
• Beautiful Feet Ancient History, a family would choose Beautiful Feet because it is literature-led rather than project-led, with carefully scheduled reading plans built around living books.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Project Passport product catalog and individual unit product pages (Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation) at store.homeschoolinthewoods.com, examined the publisher's unit structure and pricing, and cross-referenced against the Schoolhouse Review Crew's published reviews and the HSLDA publisher directory. Prices and program details verified April 2026.