We've been using Amy Pak's New World Explorers for history. It is a wonderful, activity packed, lapbooking, and notebooking study. It is layed out to be finished in five weeks, but it's going to take us a little longer. After two weeks we have completed Day 3. Hmm!

So far we have colored maps, made flags, tied knots, and eaten sailor food. Here is a picture of our salthorse and hardtack:

The salthorse was very salty. The hardtack was very hard. We tried to sell the leftover hardtack at our yard sale, but had no takers. So the children decided they needed to finish it themselves. The leftover salthorse had to be thrown away.

Hardtack

3 1/2 c. whole wheat flour

1/2 c. rye flour

4 t. salt

2-2 1/4 c. water

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix dry ingredients. Gradually knead in enough water to make a dough. It should not stick to hands or rolling pin. Roll to 1/4 inch thick . Cut into squares and prick with a fork. Place on ungreased cookie sheets and bake 20-30 minutes. Do not allow them to burn on the bottom. remove from the oven an allow to cool slightly. Turn oven to 250 degrees and put trays back in the oven. Cook one or two hours or until the bisquits are light brown.  It should be "dry as the captain's humor and hard as a bosun's fist."

One of the upcoming activities is building a ship out of a large cardboard box. I had decided we would skip that one, but providentially our hot water heater sprug a leak last week. So, for $250 we got a brand new ship with a 50 gallon hot water heater thrown in free. ;o) Doesn't God have great timing?

UPDATE: May 2008

We actually finished this study a long time ago, but I wanted to post some pictures of the completed lapbook. This study was VERY activity intense. We normally do a lot of activities, but I found the pace a little hard to keep up. We will definately keep using this series, but I think we will spread them out a bit more and use them as a supplement to a regular history text rather than as a stand alone study.  These pictures are of my 9 year old daughter's lapbook.