History

Our study of Native Americans was, of course, not comprehensive, but it was pretty broad. We went to one of our local libraries and just picked up a book on every tribe that we could find. Then we figured out that there was one particular series that we liked best, so we got the rest in that series on interlibrary loan. This the series called A First Americans Book by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a book about Indians from our area of the world, so we purchased If You Lived With Indians of the Northwest Coast. That was a great little book. We enjoyed so much learning about Northwest Indians and enjoyed looking at photos on the internet of totem poles too.

As usual, the kids made lapbooks about the things they learned. This is the first time that my little preschooler has made a lapbook to go along with what the others were studying. He’s growing up so fast. So here’s his first. His favorite elements were the eagle that had wings that he could flap and the dot-to-dot dream catcher.

(These lapbooks are all in slideshows. If you mouse over them in the bottom quarter, you will see the thumbnails and click on the first one to start them over, if you weren’t able to see the whole set.)

JD Boy designed and drew the stuff on his cover. There is a totem pole for the Northwest Indians and a tipi for the Plains Indians. He also made a lot of the elements inside his lapbook completely by himself: the tipi, the shield and he changed around how the birch bark canoe was supposed to work. He narrated to me what he wanted written about each group of Indians inside the appropriate mini books. Other elements were either taken from pictures from the internet, Dover coloring books and the book History Pockets, Native Americans.

Zippy has become quite a writer. She loves to write. She did lots of writing in this lapbook. She designed most of her mini books, using pictures that she found on the internet and then wrote on the inside about the different Indian tribes and traditions. For her cover she cut out the back cover of one of our Dover coloring books.

I hope my kids learned a lot from this unit. I was surprised at how much I learned about the North American Indians. I was often saddened by how they were treated in some of the stories that we read. We had plenty of opportunity to discuss the difference between Christians and real Christians while reading how the Native Americans were treated.

Whew! We spent so long studying about the Thirteen Colonies and Colonial life. We started this study when I was pregnant, and it kind of came to a hault when I was so sick. But we finally finished it. We decided that we wanted to finish it with a Colonial meal, then we realized that we were awfully close to Thanksgiving, so the kids agreed that that would make for a great Colonial meal. It did! We had a great feast–vegetarian style!

The kids dressed up in their Colonial clothes for the event. They’ve had so much fun with these clothes. It’s a little sad that they are going to grow out of them. The cousins that were here for Thanksgiving, also dressed up in Pilgrim and Indian costumes. What fun!

Now for what we’ve studied for the last long while on the subject. We read some really good books on the Thirteen Colonies. We continued to enjoy This Country of Ours. We really do enjoy that book. The kids enjoy listening to the audiobook version while they work on their lapbooks. We also enjoyed some other books about different people and experiences of the Colonial time period. Some of our favorites were Roger Williams by Mark Ammerman, Tattered Sails (this one for it’s illustrations rather than the writing), Old Silver Leg Takes Over (Kids loved that book!), The Carving Tree (about Roanoake). We read several others, but these were the ones that we really, really enjoyed.

Of course, we did lapbooks on Colonial America too. Here are some pictures.

Lapbook covers by Zippy and JD Boy respectively

I’m finally getting our Thanksgiving Lapbooks posted on here. Thanksgiving came at the right time this year! We had just finished studying Jamestown so studying about the Pilgrims was the next chronological thing.

The books we read on this subject were Squanto And The Miracle Of Thanksgiving, Stories of the Pilgrims, The Thanksgiving Story and we continued reading This Country of Ours.

The books we got most of our printouts from for our lapbooks were History Pockets, Life in Plymouth Colony and Easy Make and Learn Projects: The Pilgrims, the Mayflower and More. We got one printout from daniellesplace.com and we used some of the timeline figures from Amy Pak. We also used some stickers that we picked up at Michael’s in the scrapbook section.

Here is Zippy and her Thanksgiving Lapbook:

Be sure to check out her whole set of pictures on Flickr as she has some really neat pop-ups in this lapbook that she did a really great job on. You can see her set by clicking here.

Now here is John Deere Boy and his Thanksgiving Lapbook:

We hope that you will be able to take the time to see his pictures, at least his interactive map on Flickr. You can do that by clicking here.  He is very fortunate to have had his lapbook displayed on the Thanksgiving Lapbook lens on Squidoo by Jimmie.

And because I know somebody is dying to know what his shirt says, since it shows out from under his lapbook, I will tell you. It says: "When it comes to education, there’s no school like home." We got it at our homeschool convention last summer.