Evan-Moor publishes workbooks for most subject areas for pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. A subscription to their TeacherFileBox is a fantastic way to access almost everything they publish in a selective fashion--from more than 600 books with over 80,000 pages of activities. This collection includes popular series such as the History Pockets, Daily 6-Trait Writing, and Daily Geography.
There’s a huge amount of content to sort through, so Evan-Moor provides search tools to make it easy to find what you need in several different ways—by title, keyword, grade level, subject, or standards.
For example, I typed “human body” in the search bar at the top. (I first typed it without parentheses and the search brought up resources with the words human and body that did not always relate to the human body. Putting quotes around the term got the correct results. Next, I used the grade level selection tool to choose third grade to whittle my selection down to five options. I selected one that covered four of the human body systems with five activity pages. I created a “third grade” folder with a subfolder labeled “human body,” and then saved the five pages in that folder. But I was thinking in terms of spending a semester on the topic, and I knew there had to be more on the human body. So I went back and expanded my grade level options to include 2 to 4. This turned out to be important. Products for grade ranges, such as 1 to 3, would only come up when I chose more than one grade level, even if not the exact same grade range. With the expanded search, I got a huge number of resources. From those I saved the “Human Body Puzzle,” “Skeletal and Muscular Systems,” “The Five Senses” (one of several options on the topic), a series of activities set up as a learning center, “A Good Night’s Sleep” on the importance of sleep, and a creative writing prompt related to the human body. This combination of resources provides instructional information, worksheets to complete, interactive activities, cut-and-paste activities (such as creating a large body shape, then gluing on a skeleton and other body systems), games, a crossword puzzle, and coloring. Most of the resources I selected will be used for more than one session, so there should be plenty here for a semester. I was able to find these and put them into my Human Body folder in about an hour while simultaneously figuring out how the system works.
I realized how simple this might be for other topics, so I also created a fourth-grade folder on Ancient Civilizations. I knew I wanted to include the History Pockets books on Egypt, Greece, and Rome for grades four through six, and I could select those from the title menu. I also selected just a few lessons on other ancient civilizations from History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations for first through third grade. That’s a lot to get through, but if I need more, I can add activities from the Literature Pockets series that relate to ancient civilizations, or others like the hieroglyphic alphabet puzzle from Daily Higher-Order Thinking, Grade 4 or one from Skill Sharpeners: Geography, Grade 4 that explores how older civilizations obtained water for their settlements. This folder took very little time to create.
Using TeacherFileBox allows you to preview all of these resources to find exactly what you need. No guessing whether that book you ordered has what you want. And the variety of resources for the core subjects that are available means that you can theoretically create complete courses for all but math and phonics/beginning reading. Even if TeacherFileBox has plenty of coverage for a topic, you might still want to add literature (novels, historical fiction, biographies), non-fiction books, websites, and field trips alongside all of the workbooks for a better mix of activities.
If you want some guidance selecting resources, look under the "Homeschool Tips" tab. For each subject area, there are a "curriculum guide" and several videos. The two-page curriculum guides (PDFs) suggest which resources to use for various grade levels and how to pair them up. The videos show in more detail how to use each of the recommended resources.
Print or Project
You can easily print out both teacher and student pages, or you might want to use the “project” feature to show lessons on a screen. The project feature really surprised me. Students can use tools within TeacherFileBox to write, type, or color directly on the pages, then print them with their changes. (Typed answers sometimes misalign with the questions or blank spaces, but this should not be a big deal.) My initial thought was that I would most likely print out all of the pages I planned to use for the next few months and have them ready to go. But the project feature works so well that now I think I would use it at least some of the time since students are likely to enjoy having the various tools for inputting their answers on screens rather than handwriting them.
Weak points
The search and save tools do an excellent job of helping users locate what they need, but they’re not perfect. I already mentioned that selecting only one grade level will not bring up all the results that might interest you, although it seems like it should. It would also help if after users have created a search, such as the one for “human body,” and added a resource to a folder, the program would return them to their search results rather than making them start over.
The program includes a built-in scheduler, so you can plan to use pages on certain days, and they will be readily available when you need them. However, the scheduler has only rudimentary tools, and I found it too cumbersome and lacking the fine-tuning I needed.
Summary
TeacherFileBox is one of those gems I come across every so often, that I know most homeschoolers don’t know about. It provides a wealth of resources from which to pick and choose, and it can save homeschoolers from having to purchase complete books when they want to use only selected pages. You can check it out with a 14-day free trial!
