Time Travelers or History Pockets?

[Sahamamama]

Help me decide. :D We plan to study US History for the next two years. The students will be 2nd/3rd and K/1st age range, with much higher reading levels and an eager interest in stories/history. They are all craft-loving girls, who could (and would) color, cut, glue, paint, and craft all day, if possible. ;)

 

Evan Moor History Pockets are around $10 each. Some of the pockets are listed for 1st-3rd grade, others for 4th-6th grades. From what I can see, the projects are mostly paper-based color, cut, fold & glue types. Not my personal favorite, but probably simple enough for the girls to do. I'm not sure how memorable or enjoyable the constant coloring would be, though.

 

Homeschool in the Woods' Time Travelers CDs are around $29 each. All the CDs are listed for 3rd-8th grade range, but I've read (somewhere?) that they can be used with younger students. ??? There seems to be a greater variety (and number!) of projects in the Time Travelers CDs than in the History Pockets. Probably some of the projects would be too time-consuming for us to do in the early grades, but we could re-use the CDs again when the girls are in upper elementary/middle grades.

 

What would you get? :bigear:

[Boxing Hare]

TT is much more involved than HP. It really depends on how much prep work you want to do. IMHO I think the TT cds are a lot more fun than the HP color/glue crafts.

 

We used TT for 3rd and 4th grades and loved it. But I bought HP this year for my 1st grader to use because I didn't have the time to do TT.

 

Good luck!

[Ali in OR]

We've used several TT products--Colonial Life, American Revolution, and I used The Civil War in a co-op. We only did the lapbook projects. The quality of the drawings and activities is superb. It is very beautifully done. That said, I would hesitate to recommend it for younger than 3rd grade. My kids were K and 3rd when we used CL and AR. I did quite a lot of cutting and assembly. When I decided to teach a co-op class, I set the age range for the class as 3rd-6th. And the 3rd graders had a tougher time than the older kids. I am looking forward to using TT again on our second time through the history cycle. I think my kids will get a lot more out of it. But I wouldn't say you *can't* use it--just be prepared to do a lot of work yourself and maybe plan to use it again when they are older.

[swellmomma]

I couldn't decide so we have been using both for Explorers. We will also be using the history pockets for native americans, the Moving west one. We will be using all the TT cd's that are currently available over the next 18 months. The kids really enjoy both. For some it might be a bit of over kill but I have found there is some explorers in TT that are not covered in the history pockets and vice versa. Of course I am also the crazy momma doing a 3rd explorers program at the same time focusing on explorers of Canada which is only very briefly touched on in History Pockets and TT.

 

In History Pockets there is a fair amount of cut and paste work but there is written work as well. The one I have say they are geared for grade 4-6 but I am sure they could be modified. An example of a pocket in the Explorers one would be the one we are doing tomorrow on Sir Francis Drake. The kids have to read about him, colour a map showing the route he took, Design an old ship taking the best features of the Carrack and the Caravel and combining them and lastly complete a mini book of weather reports from cape horn reporting the weather Drake encountered as he travelled around the tip of South America.

 

When we did Cortes, they had to read and do the map like Drake, and then they did a cut and paste activity making a sea chest that folded open and they had written what they would pack if travelling with Cortes. Lastly they had to write a peaceful story of Cortes, showing what the ending to his travels to Mexico might have been if he was not the ruthless man he was.

 

The rest of the pockets are similar. We have not started the other ones yet so I can't outline those just yet.

 

TT Explorers has similar elements ie: reading about the explorer and doing map work. The maps are different in that they use acetate paper to create overlays which is time consuming to make but very cool in the end. There is a fair amount of writing if you do everything like we do, you are doing copy work, explorer profiles, minibooks for the lapbook, Explorer Weekly (the "newspaper" you work on all unit), plus the extra projects including some cut and paste projects like the pop up sea monster picture we made the other day.

 

Again I have not used the other CDs yet so I can't say much about them, but it appears they are much the same.

 

Given what We are experiencing with these I would not use them with 1st graders. I am not even including my DS8 in these because there is just too much he would not get out of them at this point. The other kids are grade 6/7 and we are using them, but I could have seen us using them easily at gr 3-4. Not younger though. I would find an alternative and work from that. Maybe look at Winterpromise for ideas of books and crafts in this area instead.

[ClassicMom]

Hi There!

 

We are using History Pockets this year for my son entering 3rd this year. He is ASD so would be considered more like late 1st or 2nd. There is quite a bit of information in the History Pockets and it is more than coloring and pasting. There is information to fill-in some of the pockets and more-so for the 4th-6th grade pockets. We decided to wait before using the upper-grades but they are interesting.

 

If you go to Evan-Moor's website, you can view all the pages of the books on their site. That may give you a better idea of what they have.

 

History in the Woods CD's are wonderful and I have nothing but good things to say about them. However, they are quite involved and take a lot of teacher prep if you have younger children. With the ages of your children, you may want to wait a bit on those unless you really like to do a lot of the work yourself and have the time to do it. ;)