Since I have been teaching my son's hands-on American history class at our homeschool co-op this year, I was super excited to get my hands on some great history notebooking pages that fit right in to our timeline of American history.
Note: I received the digital notebooking pages for free and was compensated for my time in preparing this review. All opinions are my own and I was not required to write a positive review.
Home School in the Woods provides dozens of lap books, timelines, and file folder games for supplementing learning in their A La Carte store. By offering bite-sized projects, they provide affordable options to meet your needs. You can choose just what you need right now without breaking the bank.
Browsing the store is like selecting food from a buffet. There is so much to choose from! Not everything appealed to me or fit American history. It didn't need to, because I could just get what I needed to finish off the year right. Many of the lap books, notebooking pages, and games are geared toward the third through sixth grade range, which is just perfect for me since it's hard to find hands-on activities for those ages.
Since I focused on early American history this past fall, I found some great learning products to accompany our twentieth-century American History learning this spring.
The first product we tried was a lapbook about World War I. I loved the pockets in the front that looked like an ammunition belt! It also held the various stand-alone items, like the medal and postcards. There was a variety of information to inform my son about the first world war, and since we were gathering it and coloring it together, it helped it all make more sense. There was a foldable timeline, a booklet about the army-issued bibles, a sample draft registration card, and even information about the Pledge of Allegiance.
I especially loved the WWI era postcards myself. I had to laminate them because my 6-year-old daughter wanted to "mail" them in our school room.
Following World War I, we learned about highlights from the roaring twenties. This simple timeline is made to look like a real of film, which seemed appropriate given the advent of film in the twenties! It was a perfect addition to our studies for the era.
An old time radio provided a booklet form for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Day of Infamy speech on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. We colored it and assembled it as we listened to his speech. The full text of his speech fits right inside the "old time radio" so we could mark it up as we discussed it.
I love Home School in the Woods gives clear direction on how to duplex print their lapbook items! It makes it so much easier to put together.
Finally, as a bookend to our studies of the Industrial Age, the Gilded Age, and the era of the Great Depression, we played Get Your Kicks on Route 66! I love file folder games because they are so well contained! I can put the game board inside the file folder, wrap the question cards in a rubber band, and put it away until the next time the kids want to play it!
Get Your Kicks on Route 66 had questions relating to the era from 1870 to the Great Depression, and the pieces to move across the board are old "jalopys" such as those used during the Great Depression in the migration to California. I loved how the game board was covered in facts about the era. My six-year-old daughter enjoyed coloring in all the states on the game board.
Playing the game is fun. Sometimes you move forward (rolling a 1, 2, or 3), but other times you must answer a tricky question and then stay there until you get a question right. My son loves maps so he enjoyed the fact that we were going through real towns as we progressed across the board. I will say, since the game was for older ages (third through sixth), my kindergartner was not able to fully answer questions, but we helped her out and by playing it and talking about the issues with us, I knew she was learning some key facts about American history. It was a great book end.
See also the Sonlight 50 States Notebooking Unit Study.
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