Yes I love using this much more than I thought! It’s kind of my spine this year, and I’ve just been reading it as a read around with my 2nd grader (1st grader listens in too). I keep it in a basket by the couch and we open it maybe twice a week. We don’t do the teachers guide with it or any worksheets, but talk about it. I read a page or 2 at a time till their attention span is done. We like it so much I’ll be using America’s Story 2 next year alongside beautiful feet books too. I love the style of living books in beautiful feet’s line up but I find it’s not too much to do both since we just read and don’t do worksheets.

@@LizBlueandHazel Wow, thank you so much for getting back to me so quickly. I am filled with more confidence, hearing your experience. I was thinking of doing the exact same thing, no worksheets with it but pairing it with maybe a couple biographies and also, I'm thinking I might use Evan Moor's History Pockets of the Pilgrim period alongside this to give my daughter just a little extra with this, something she'll look forward to. We'd only probably do history 1 day a week, so maybe she'll just LOVE it!!!! I am pretty excited myself. I loved the flip through you did, it helped me so much in making my decision.

I was wondering about this as well. We love the beautiful feet books but have been looking for a different spine to go along with them and this looks great and thanks for answering about this it’s really nice to know what works well together.

Yep, we read this slowly and added in books from BFB Early American History read alouds from time periods we were in. Since many of those are more living book style, they were easier to read and listen to. We didn't read all their books, and if one was too long/dry/slammed with info we returned it to the library. It allowed us to go deeper and have better discussions for sure! Now that we are doing America's Story 2 in the Civil War Era, we are doing the same thing with books I can find. It helps the kids (and me) to feel like we're walking through that time period through someone else's eyes! I'll soon be doing a Civil War book haul video, but don't have a video specifically on how we used BFB book list plus America's Story 1.

We switched to try Gather Round US history (we are now up to book 3 the civil war) but i have flipped through both to compare and honestly think both are great! The main diff I see is Gather Round has a LOT more details which I sometimes skip over to keep their attention. So masterbooks was almost better in that regard…less wordy. What I like about Gather Round more is it presents info in a thoughtful way to allow discussion on seeing both sides of story when there’s conflict. Part of me misses Americas story…And it’s WAY more affordable especially since we don’t do the student packets that I paid for with gather round (we just use it as a read aloud from the teachers guide, similar to how we used masterbooks). I’d switch back but I’m also happy with Gather Round for now so we are just sticking with it. There’s a lot of opportunities for going down rabbit holes with gather round, and fab book lists included for all ages. The book lists are optional enrichment but match the history time frame which really expands understanding if you read any. I think Americas Story would be perfect with a 1st and 3rd grader and would try to toss in some living history books (check out beautiful feet books book lists for ideas!) to make it a little more memorable for the kids. Hope that helps!

@@LizBlueandHazel Thank you! So so helpful!