History Pockets, Ancient Civilizations, Grade 1-3 (History Pockets)

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous!
Review: If you are looking for an easy way to add hands-on projects to your study of ancient civilizations in the primary grades, this is it. The blackline masters are very professionally done so the child's end product is high quality. All you need are basic school supplies including scissors, glue stick, crayons, and construction paper (and a few other things). You do need to photocopy the projects, so start up for homeschoolers might be a little more involved.

The projects touch on highlights of the culture being studied and create memorable products that facilitate discussion. My first grade daughter's interest in history came to life when we added History Pockets to our homeschool studies. She still enjoys taking out the stick puppets from various cultures and having them talk to each other a year later. It's been a great way to show relatives what she's studying and review it for herself in the process. Each culture has a written booklet of info. which creates a nice summary. They also include 4 vocabulary words per culture done in an appealing way. Then there are several other projects, most of which vary for each culture. For example, you make a Parthenon shape book for Ancient Greece.

There is too much coloring, in my opinion. We handled this by limiting what she would color per page and by using fewer colors. The projects still look good even if only certain aspects are colored or if some aren't colored at all.

I plan to use History Pockets with my younger children and look forward to trying History Pockets on other subjects.

Classroom teacher (former classroom teacher, myself): These projects are pretty simple and many could be done at a center with an example to look at. I would make the notebook pockets ahead of time for the kids or allow lots of time to create them with the kids if you're working with a large group. You could have small groups create a combined notebook per group to divide up the projects, depending on how much time you have to devote to projects. These projects would help bring any history text to life.