Homeschool Discoveries

When I made my spreadsheet of books for our US History studies this year,  I originally stuck A Pioneer Sampler by Barbara Greenwood in the “activities and crafts” category.  So when it arrived from the library a bit after we started our most recent history unit (focusing on the pioneers from 1815-1860), I just put it in the book basket and didn’t look at it very closely.

As our unit progressed I finally took the time to look at it.  I discovered that A Pioneer Sampler does have some crafts and activities in it, but it has quite a bit of other content besides that.

A Pioneer Sampler follows the life of a fictional pioneer family (The Robertsons) on a backwoods farm in 1840.  Each of the nineteen chapters in this fairly lengthy book (240 pages) tells a short story – a vignette if you will — about the life of the Robertson family over the course of the year.   Following each story are one or more short informational sections discussing everything from weaving fabric to making fires to getting lost in the woods.   Intermixed with these factual sections are directions for trying some of these activities at home — like growing a potato plant, making butter or painting with stencils.

In some ways this book made a great read aloud for a unit on the pioneers.  Short chapters broken down into sections make it easy to read a portion each day.  Since we started this book late in our unit, we felt a bit rushed to try and finish it all.    By the time we were about three-fourths of the way through the book, Miss M and I mutually decided not to finish it as a read-aloud.  We had already moved on to our next history topic, and we have too many other interesting books beckoning to us from the book basket.  We’ll hang on to it for a bit in case Miss M wants to read a little bit more on her own.

As interesting and thorough as this book is about pioneer life, I did feel it was a bit redundant for us.  Between the many book basket fiction and non-fiction selections we had for our pioneers unit and our previous reading about pioneer families (including the Little House on the Prairie Series, the Little House on Rocky Ridge series, Caddie Woodlawn, and Bound for Oregon, a book we recently read) I think I had already picked up many of the tidbits of information this book was presenting.

I would probably recommend A Pioneer Sampler for readers less familiar with 19th century pioneer life who don’t plan on reading an extensive list of books on this topic.  You could read this book and call the general topic of pioneer living pretty well covered.   An independent reader who is highly interested in pioneer times might also find this an interesting read.  I’m sure it’s within Miss M’s ability to read on her own if she finds herself interested and motivated to do so.

I’m linking up with Read Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!

Yesterday and today I’m catching up on recapping our US History studies.  We finished studying the Revolutionary war back in November, but I just wrote about that yesterday.  We just finished our unit on the post-Revolutionary war years in mid-January, so it’s still a bit fresher in my my mind.   🙂

This unit in our American history studies covered the years from 1783-1815.  There are several major topics in this time period, including the forming of our nation’s government, the writing of the constitution, the Louisiana purchase, the explorations of Lewis and Clark and the War of 1812.

As in our earlier units we used a book by the Maestros (A New Nation) to give us an overview of this time period.  I also read aloud Year of the Horseless Carriage 1801 by Genevieve Foster.  You can read my thoughts on that book here.  While some of it was overlap with A New Nation, most of it was pretty complementary.

Not including Christmas break, we spent six weeks on this unit.   This was the first unit for which I actually under-estimated the time it would take us.  When I did my planning for the year I thought there would not be very many topics to cover and I only planned four weeks.

Longer Read-Alouds (Linked to blog posts about these books):

Carry on Mr. Bowditch

Justin Morgan Had a Horse

Bears on Hemlock Mountain (not really all that long, but read aloud to all the kids)

Sarah Witcher’s Story

Naya Nuki

Longer Fiction Books Miss M read independently:

The “Caroline” American Girl books — Caroline is the newest historical American Girl, and she lives during the time of the War of 1812.  Miss M got the first book in the Caroline series for Christmas, and read all six books in the series of her own volition over Christmas break.

The Cabin Faced West by Jean Fritz — I think this was Miss M’s favorite of her assigned fiction reading for this time period.

Away Goes Sally and its sequel Five Bushel Farm by Elizabeth Coatsworth — Miss liked these well enough…but not enough to ask me to get her the remaining books in the series (I think there are three more books about Sally) for her to read on her own

The Story of Eli Whitney by Jean Lee Latham — I thought Miss M would like this because she generally likes stories about inventors…but this one, not so much.  It was a challenge for her to get through this assigned reading.  While I normally don’t really push her to read things she doesn’t care for, I do it every now and then just because I think it’s a good discipline for her to learn for the future.

Book Basket:

Our book basket of picture book fiction and and non-fiction was a bit lighter for this unit than for some previous units.  My US History Year One spreadsheet lists a number of the titles — at least the ones I planned on getting ahead of time.  🙂  I also found a number of picture books for this time period on the shelves at the library — including more titles about the constitution, our country’s early presidents, and the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Unfortunately I didn’t write down all these titles! One that stands out among the titles I found on the shelf at the library is Unite or Die: How 13 States Became a Nation by Jacqueline Jules, illustrated by Jef Czekaj.   The story of the problems faced as a new government was formed after the Revolutionary War is framed as group of kids putting on a play about the states (dressed in state-shaped costumes!).  A little bit of humor goes a long way to make the details of this topic more interesting.  🙂

I managed to get way behind in my quest to “recap” each unit of our American History studies this year.  My last recap was published on October 25th! We’ve finished two more units since that time and will finish yet another within a couple weeks.  I’m still going to post these recaps though…if only for my own use later when we cycle back around to American History in four years.  🙂

We spent about six weeks on our study of the Revolutionary War.  This was two weeks less than what I had originally planned, and since our previous units took less time than expected, this continued to put us ahead of schedule for our history studies for the year.

Our key text that gave us an overview of the Revolutionary War was “Liberty or Death” by the Maestros.  I’ve mentioned this series of picture books in a variety of other posts.  We loved these books and wish the author would write more to continue the story of American History beyond 1815 when the last book ends. I also read most of “If You Were There in 1776” by Barbara Brenner aloud.  It’s a very interesting book about daily life during that time period.

Longer Fiction Read-Alouds (links to blog posts about these books):

Toliver’s Secret

Ben and Me

A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia

Sophia’s War

Longer Fiction Miss M read independently:

“Felicity” American Girl books (Felicity is one of Miss M’s favorite American Girl characters)

Hannah of Fairfield, and its sequels Hanna’s Helping Hands and Hannah’s Winter of Hope — these are short chapter books set in the Revolutionary time period

The Secret Soldier — a book we found at our neighborhood Little Free Library about a woman who pretends to be a man so she can fight in the Revolutionary War

Book Basket:

We filled our history library basket (well, it’s really a crate!) absolutely full with about 30 picture book fiction and non-fiction titles.  I read a few aloud to Miss M and the boys, but Miss M read many of them independently.   There’s a somewhat complete list in my updated US History Year 1 spreadsheet.  A problem with doing this recap close two months after the fact is that I can’t remember a lot of details about which picture books we really liked!

Other Stuff: 

Miss M showed less interest as the school year went on in crafty projects related to history, so I haven’t pushed it.  We’re also not doing much written work this year — just oral narrations or discussions of books we’re reading.  And I’m really okay with that for 3rd grade history.  Next time around Miss M will be in middle school — a perfect time for additional written projects!

We did start watching episodes of the TV show “Liberty’s Kids”.  This animated series does a great job telling about major events of the Revolutionary War through the eyes of a few fictional characters.   The entire series is available to watch on YouTube, or as the saying goes, “check your local listings” — one station available to us over-the-air (we don’t have cable) is showing two episodes per week and we have been recording them.  We’ve continued to slowly watch the episodes well after we finished up with this time period in our history studies.  There are 40 episodes, and we have sometimes gone weeks without even watching one…so we’re only up to about episode 20.

Inventions and inventors are often a topic of interest for our family, so I was intrigued when I ran across The Year of the Horseless Carriage 1801 by Genevieve Foster.   In this book Foster weaves together a narrative of  early 19th century progress and invention with threads of world history that were occurring at the same time.

The “horseless carriage” in this case is essentially a stem engine on wheels — more of a precursor to the locomotive than the automobile (the device more commonly referred to as a horseless carriage).  Richard Trevithick is an English engineer with plenty of ideas about how to use the steam engine to make a useful vehicle.  He may have been a little ahead of his time,  but his ideas paved the way for more modern locomotives.  At about the same time American inventor Robert Fulton wondered what would happen if he put a steam engine in a boat, and had a bit more long term success from his endeavors.

While telling the stories of Trevithick, Fulton and others that collaborated with them, Foster also tells the stories of a few major socio-political events of the first two decades of the 19th century — including Napoleon, Lewis and Clark and the War of 1812. She also weaves Beethoven into her story — I hadn’t exactly realized he was contemporary to this time period.  An interesting note here is that apparently Beethoven greatly admired Napoleon at one point and originally dedicated his 3rd symphony to him — but rescinded the dedication after it became apparent that Napoleon was turning into a cruel tyrant.

I read this book aloud to Miss M and Mr. E.  They enjoyed it enough to typically ask me for more after I read a few pages.  🙂  Some of the material in this book was repetitive for us since we were also reading A New Nation by Betsy Maestro at the same time.  I skipped a few pages and paragraphs here and there to make sure the kids didn’t get too bored with the repetition.

Overall, we all enjoyed Foster’s very engaging narrative style.  She is really telling a story with history.  Because we were reading other books about the same time period as well, I might have enjoyed a book just about the inventors and inventions written in the same style a bit more — but especially for anyone looking for just a brief introduction to this time period (1801 to 1821), this book is a good choice. At only 92 pages (which include quite a few nice black and white illustrations drawn by the author), it didn’t really take us too many sittings to read this book.

I’ve checked out a few other of Foster’s books from our library, but those were a bit longer both in page length and amount of time covered — I’ll be keeping those in mind for the future when the kids are a bit older.