Notgrass: American the Beautiful ~ A SchoolHouse Crew Review

What a huge box of goodies we received in the mail.  Beautiful books with beautiful photos.  America the Beautiful by Notgrass   

I need to list and share about all of these items that were in the box.

  The two hardback text books were designed to be used over a years time.  Part I:America from 1000 to 1877, and Part II: America from the late 1800's to the present- 150 lessons spread over the two books. In the front of the book, there are suggested activities for each grade that gives you the path to take with each lesson. Written like a chapter book, each chapter a lesson, with easily manageable chapters, it makes a good read aloud.  At the end of each Lesson there are suggested activities in a variety of categories  Thinking Biblically, Map Study, Literature, Timeline, Creative Writing, Vocabulary, and Student Workbook or Lesson Review.

Along with reading the lesson from the America The Beautiful text, there is a little reading from We The People text.  This is a hardback text with various Songs, Poems, Letters, Documents and Newspaper Articles that go along with each Lesson from the main text. 

The Maps of America The Beautiful, we used as a guideline for our large wall map.  Coloring in the states as directed, marking mountain ranges, mapping voyages - we were able to put these things on our large wall map - that meshes with other things we have learned and marked on the map.  The book has individual pages for each set of directions, so if there were only one child working on this (or if we bought another book) using the book would work great.
We used the Timeline book basically the same, as a guide.  We have a timeline that we are working on filling in - has been a work in progress for a while- so we used this workbook as a guideline. At the end of each chapter, if there is a timeline project, we would add that to our own timeline.  

The Complete Package, as I have described, is available from Notgrass for $99.95.

In addition to the Complete Package above, we also received the Student Workbook that is available for $11.95 and the Lessons Review, that is available for $9.95.  If you are big on testing, or keeping grades, or if your kiddos likes workbook type work, then I think these two additions are a great reinforcement for the rest of the program.

The Student Workbook and Lesson Review are spiral bound consumable pages. Since I had two kiddos reviewing this, we had to get creative with some of the items.  The Lesson Review was easy, because it was mostly fill in the blank type questions that they could answer on their own paper.   The Student Workbook, on the other hand, was the fun stuff. The word games, crosswords, newspaper articles that they got to fill in.  We decided to take turns with that book, so each of them would both have their fair share of doing the fun stuff!

I will admit, while I think we would love this curriculum, it was really hard to do a full blown curriculum in the middle of summer.  We were able to get through a couple of lessons and I looked through the rest of the book. The books are beautiful and make you want to read them.  I am really looking forward to our school starting so we can dig into these deeper and use these curriculum to it's fullest extent. The lesson plans are already penciled in with the rest of our work!  

Please check out what others on the Crew have to say ~