Evan Moor’s History Pockets: Moving West, Grades 4-6 is part of our Winter Promise (American Story 2) curriculum. History Pockets work well for people like us who enjoy paper crafts and lapbooking. Here is the book and our pocket.
I mostly made it part of Sprite’s “On My Own” work. Each week I give her page numbers, and I let her choose which of the activities she’d like to photocopy and complete. Some of the reproducibles are more interesting than others.
I was a tad disappointed in the amount of reading pages in the History Pocket. You copy them, affix them to cardstock and read them. Not very interactive, but I used them as a chance for Sprite to practice identifying key points with a highlighter.
We use lots of living books in our studies, so reading information on reproducible pages is not necessary for us. I guess that if one used History Pockets as a stand alone curriculum/unit study, the factual pages would be essential. At any rate, we chose only the most interesting and relevant pages to read.
There were quite a few fun activities that you can see here — a quilting craft, a buffalo, a covered wagon shape book, a trunk, an animal mobile (that we converted to a minibook), a pop up train, and a poem. These are the parts Sprite enjoys the most.
There are also a timeline and a mapping activity included.
Overall, I find History Pockets a worthwhile supplement for a child who likes papercrafts. Like anything, we pick and choose which to do and what to omit. I plan to use the grades 4-6 Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt History Pockets next year.
I’ve used books from this series before and really liked them.
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We need to decide on history for this next semester. Finally finished WP AM2… I was planning on doing Mystery of History but Sonlight’s Core 5 Eastern Hemisphere looks really really interesting to me. The only thing is that we are trying to keep the history activities to a minimum this next year… I almost just want read and go. I think I’ll be more like you and just ask the kids which they would prefer, since both are acceptable options to me.
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I have been an avid follower of yours, homeschooling my five kids ages 6-13 about six months in history behind you. I have totally structured many of my studies after yours, and I use your squidoo pages all the time..Thanks many millions! You are often a part of our school day!
As I am very challenged, however, to keep up the pace and not get lost on rabbit trails, I am considering using an actual curriculum with a day to day “to-do” list I would love your opinion on Winter Promise so far, whether you will use it in the future, and whether you use all the parts or just a percentage of the curriculum. It looks delectable, but can I use many of the components like the history pockets and time travelers CDs, etc and still do a decent job? I’d like your opinion, or to be directed to a review on winter promise that maybe I’ve missed. I ‘ve read the one comparing them with TOG and SL.
Keep up the wonderful work, your delightful posts, and peeks into life in your country. We LOVE it!!!!!
I agree. These are a great supplement. What we’ve done in the past is shrink the pages to about half the size or small and make mini books out of them. Then, they fit nicely on a notebooking page. And thanks, sometime I get so so caught up in having to finish everything, ‘cuz it all looks so good, I never thought to have my son pick only the ones he finds interesting.
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We enjoy HP here too. This year we’re doing the Plymouth Colony and Native American pockets.
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Evan Moor is probably one of my favorite resource companies. We love the History Pockets, too.
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