March 5, 2009 - Panning for Gold Activity -- a Great End to American Story 1
We're officially finished with our Winter Promise American Story 1 curriculum! It was a great journey from PreColumbian times up to Westward Expansion. The Wild West and the Gold Rush really captured Sprite's attention, and we decided to do our panning for gold a bit early.
This activity kit is actually part of the American Story 2 curriculum; obviously there is some overlap in the historical periods. But why wait? Dad, being from California, had some experience panning for gold, so he instructed Sprite in the basics.
Here's the fools gold.
And here are silver, gold, and hematite chips. Panning for gold is quite a bit harder than it seems, especially when the reward is so very tiny. For a fun living book set during the Gold Rush I recommend By the Great Horn Spoon. The plot is full of twists and turns, and it ends with a great feel-good family message.
The new Winter Promise catalog is available for PDF download (or you can request a print copy), so if you're in the market for a literature based curriculum, give it a look over. I chronicled our study and all the extras we added here at WP AS1 Extras.
And it's that time of year when curricula providers issue their new catalogs, so if you want more "wish books", this link with Catalogs for Homeschoolers is still up to date. If your favorite catalog is not listed there, please suggest it, and I'll add it.
I told you that the Wild West and the Gold Rush really captured Sprite's attention. This is how she was dressed one day this week!
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March 30, 2008 - My Thoughts on Winter Promise
Since we began using and blogging Winter Promise, I've gotten a lot of questions via comments and email about this fairly new curriculum. I decided to go ahead and compile my thoughts onto a lens: Winter Promise versus Sonlight. I share my own observations about how these two excellent curricula are both different and similar. I'm not an "expert" curricula reviewer, but I'm a mom who has used both, so I felt it may help others for me to post my opinions. And (teeheehee) I can forward people to that webpage rather than retyping my answers over and over.
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March 7, 2008 - What to do With Crafts?
So what can we do with 3-D projects like this? Well, to be honest, they get thrown away! But not before documenting them with photos. Then the photos are uploaded to Flickr where they can be kept safe forever. And we also blog them for a record. And as if that were not enough, I sometimes print out photos and add them to our notebook.
For example the WP notebook page for the Pueblo Indians was mostly text, with just a plain graphic. Not much for Sprite to do. And not at all engaging. So I printed out the photos of her 3-D project and let her select the most important paragraphs from the notebooking page. She designed this layout and came up with a much more engaging notebook page.
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March 5, 2008 - Winter Promise Crafts
I love dioramas. They are so fun! And so realistic.
The leather medicine pouch was a discounted craft I found at Hobby Lobby. It fit in with our American Indian study perfectly!
A dear seamstress made this Indian costume for Sprite when we were in America. She is loving it! Here she is, posing before our USA map, a necessity for this curriculum!
Gold "coins" (beads) in her medicine pouch.
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March 5, 2008 - Lapbooking and Notebooking Combination
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