The House on Maple Street

This was a great book to add to my History of Communities Problems of the Past Lesson. It explains how we started in the America's and the changes that have occurred that have also caused issues.

This is an excellent book that tells the story of how our communities emerged from native lands to farms to towns. With a nice story, that is respectful to all, it illustrates the change so that children can easily understand our American history. It leaves plenty open to discuss and does not impart any particular ideology to the reader.

Great

Interesting that the two editorial reviews on the Amazon page are condescending. This was a favorite children's book in our house when our three kids were young, and we still talk about it. It's haunting in the best sense, makes you realize the world you live is a context of human dramas not just in our own time, but through the generations and very close to home. And it therefore gives us a sense of how poor life is without an imaginative and sympathetic sense of the human past, and by extension the present as future past: we feel our own immersion in the labyrinth of history. And hope that children (and childlike minds of all ages) finding our remains centuries hence will want to imagine our lives too. It conveys this sense to kids without preaching, very honestly, in simple language, and with a true poetic feel. It's a formative book. And the illustrations are perfect. The editorial reviewer who complained about their so-called murkiness and wooden figures must have gotten up on the wrong side of bed that day. I notice he was an English professor, which I find depressing: sharpened critical sense without much sensibility. I hope he has woken up since...

This is a timeless story that helps children realize the connection between past and present.

This book is recommended in the Common Core Guidelines for Third Grade. I am going to use it as a supplement activity for social studies in support of our Communities Unit.

I purchased this for our Preservation Society. It is an excellent introduction to the history of a place for young children.

I really like how this book puts the passage of time into real life. It is well written, the pictures are great and it was everything I expected it to be! I used this book to help teach my social studies unit on the early settlers.