Going West!: Journey on a Wagon Train to Settle a Frontier Town

My kids are interested in pioneer days, and this book has a vast array of make-it-yourself crafts for kids to work on, using common household objects like milk cartons, rubber bands, pillow cases, tape, etc. The crafts are very practical things like covered wagons, paddle wheel boats, forts, water-driven mills, sluices, and canals. Your kids won't need much adult help to accomplish good results. I think I had to use a craft knife once for this book -- otherwise, I helped them gather the supplies and gave them space to work. We have been reading about Lewis and Clark and Laura Ingalls Wilder this year, and this book cements some of that learning in their little minds. The text is great for young explorers -- it is easy to read, chunked into small paragraphs, with lots of bullet points and illustrations. The crafts have been the biggest teacher for us... there is nothing like building your own canal lock to teach about canals. With enough milk cartons, you can build a canal from the bathroom sink to the tub and have a blast. **** update August 2009 **** We took a summer driving trip out the Oregon trail, and this book got a lot of use! Excellent throughout the trip, it really gave us things to DO to relate to the experiences of the emigrants. Excellent. But the binding is quite poor -- pages were flapping out almost daily. I ended up getting a cheap scrapbook and some blank page holders, disassembling Going West!, and letting the kids reassemble it into the scrapbook. Just FYI.

This book was a wonderful purchase. We are using it right now within our home school study of westward movement in the mid-nineteenth century. We have found the text engaging and many of the projects suggested both simple and enjoyable-- which cannot be said of many of the projects suggested in similar books! Thus far we have selected to make a working model of a canal lock, dried apples, churned "bump along butter" (even easier than I expected),made a simple "buzz saw" toy, and constructed a prairie schooner model (the most involved activity, but still was not too hard). Next we will make the paper cabin "windows". Using the trail supplies list, we made choices to outfit our imaginary wagons, practicing math along the way as we had to multiply quantities, add weights and costs, and subtract from our allowance. The text engages children with interesting presentation of information, plenty of reference to a pioneer child's perspective, and "What would you do?" or "What do you think?" questions. Though it is titled Going West!, it does focus primarily on travel along the Oregon and California trails in the mid-nineteenth century. The hypothetical family loosely followed in the book does start their journey from their home in NY, so travel by canal, train and steamship to Independence are very briefly covered, and the National Road is mentioned in a sidebar. What the book lacks to make it a sole resource on the topic for purposes like ours: Real photographs of the period (or artifacts from the period), and the more in-depth information you might crave on some aspects of the topic. For this, you can always use other resources. We have been using Going West! as the "spine" of our unit, while supplementing with a couple of other books by looking up topics concurrently in the indexes. Nothing beats a real photograph of the time, especially since this is the first era for which they are available! The two main books we've been using for this have been Daily Life in a Covered Wagon, by Paul Erickson, and Growing Up in Pioneer America: 1800 - 1890, by Judith Pinkerton Josephson. I could easily see this book being read and used enthusiastically by a curious, history or craft-loving kid in his spare time. I hope this is helpful to a fellow homeschooler or anyone else looking for a fun book about Going West!

This is a nice activity book about westward migration and the pioneer life. The facts and the activities in this book are entertaining and fun. Both adults and children would not be hesitant to make the items for fear it would take too much time or require materials that one is not likely to have on hand. I found many facts that I had never heard or understood completely before. This book is great for the future engineers in your family or kids who would benefit in understanding how things are made. The reading is easy, interesting and fun.

I'm 10 and I really liked the book and felt like I was really riding on a wagon train across the country. I made the Fort Laramie project out of old popsicle sticks, it didn't look perfect but I had fun making it. On winter vacation, I want to do more of the projects.

This is an awesome activity book that will provide learning in a hands on way. We homeschool on a limited budget and it was one book we bought to use over the years.