Our next country in our Around the World Homeschool curriculum was the United States. We took two weeks to do it, but also combined it with learning about US Native Peoples.
Books:
I'm not going to list out our spines every week, but I thought I'd share some of our other books.
USA Books:
Explore America's National Parks (only skimmed through)
If America Were a Village (I summarized for him as we went through quickly)
Explore America's Wildlife (only skimmed through and then used for his animal profile)
Scrambled States of America Talent Show (favorite)
Scrambled States of America (huge favorite)
We are Still Here! (a little over my 5 year old's head, better for an older learner)
We read about the American Black Bear from The Wild Life of Animals
Activities:
US mazes from Around the World Mazes
We read a little about landforms from Beginning Geography
He did his magnetic US map
Another US map puzzle that he has loved for years.
We did the redwood tree puzzle from his Plant Anatomy Puzzle set.
I made a sensory bin using star shaped pasta. I threw in some landmarks and star buttons, so it was super simple. Archer still finds them entertaining and Juniper loves them, so it was a win win.
Recipe:
We kind of skipped the recipe for the US portion of the unit, but we did make fry bread (using the recipe from the book Fry Bread). It was interesting to compare to the Bannock Bread we had from when we studied Canada. I think the whole family liked this version better.
Read Aloud:
We did two read-alouds this unit. We started with Coyote Tales, which just had two coyote folk tales. Honestly, I don't think Archer had much of an opinion on them either way. Then we read JoJo Makoons and the Used To Be Best Friend. I'm very torn on this book. I liked that it was about a little girl who lived on a reservation and her Native American heritage was a huge part of her life. I loved that it included Ojibwe words and pronunciation. However, I kind of didn't like JoJo. She's a little mean, without necessarily meaning to be, but she also doesn't really learn from it.
Games:
Sequence States and Capitals. He enjoyed playing the game, but then also enjoyed sorting the cards.
Scrambled States of America has been a favorite for a while. We tend to play non-competitively.
For his logic puzzles he played Smart Farmer and Color Code.
Art:
For the United States portion of the unit, we did this star art. I had him draw a line from a center dot to various points around the paper. Then he was supposed to color a different pattern in each wedge. We glued a star over top of the center (in retrospect, I should have had him make the star on cardstock so the marker didn't show through as much).
For the Native American portion of the unit we learned about dream catchers and made one out of a paper plate. We watched this video from Mallory at Tribal Trade to learn about them and this video from One Little Project to make them.
Videos:
We could have probably watched more, but we just didn't watch all that many this unit.
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