As I explained in my 1st Quarter History post, we are combining All American History with the Time Travelers series this year. That quarter was all about exploration and after an overview week covering ship life and navigation that was solely taken from Homeschool in the Woods’ New World Explorers it was fairly easy to match up the explorers from each resource. This quarter I combined Unit 2: The Period of Colonization from AAH with Colonial Life from HitW.
I’ll confessed I was stumped for a long time. AAH lessons deal with specific facts on each colony with the last two lessons covering life in the colonies. Colonial Life gives the “you are there” aspects by focusing on family life, education, arts, recreation, etc. and covers all 13 colonies in the first lesson. When I tried to fit the pieces together in a weekly schedule I could never get all the pieces to fit—some weeks looked so bare and others were packed beyond our capacity to get through it all. So we took everything on a day to day basis, when we finished one lesson we’d move onto the next. On the rare days that we were using both resources I often had Schnickelfritz read one or just summarized any additional information from the other. A few lessons took more than one day to complete (like the Virginia & Massachusetts Colonies). In other cases, I divided up the chapters that covered multiple colonies to give each colony its own day (this meant reading the chapter out of order to get the background, event, and impact of each colony). With breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas we still managed to get this quarter done in about 9 weeks. We don’t do the craft projects in the Colonial Life unit study – my son’s just not that into them, so we didn’t need the weekly scheduled Project Days. Nor did we worry about the Wrap Up celebration. We do make the lapbook/mini book pieces for review along with the Student Workbook for AAH.
I began with some overview from Colonial Life including the lessons of Faith in the Colonies. Since All American History makes a point of knowing the reason for colonization (money or religion) I wanted my Schnickelfritz to have a good foundation in what the differences in Christian sects were. So here is the order of our lessons with their source.
CL | Les. 1 American Colonies Begin |
CL | Les. 2 The Colonial Home Pt. 1 |
CL | Les 3 The Colonial Home Pt. 2 |
CL | Les. 4 The Colonial Home Pt. 3 |
CL | Les. 14 Villages & Cities |
CL | Les. 11 Faith in the Colonies Pt. 1 |
CL | Les. 12 Faith in the Colonies Pt. 2 (I saved the section on the Great Awakening until later) |
AAH | The Virginia Colony (this took several days) |
AAH | The Massachusetts Colony (this took several days) |
AAH | The New Hampshire Colony |
AAH | The Rhode Island Colony |
AAH | The Connecticut Colony |
AAH | The New York Colony |
AAH | The New Jersey Colony |
AAH | The Delaware Colony |
AAH | The Pennsylvania Colony |
AAH | The Maryland Colony |
AAH | The North Carolina Colony |
AAH | The South Carolina Colony |
AAH | The Georgia Colony |
CL | Les. 22 Plantations & Slavery |
CL | Les. 8 Family Life (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 15) this took several days |
CL | Les. 9 Colonial School (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 15) |
CL | Les 6 Colonial Clothing (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 15) |
CL | Les. 7 Colonial (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 15) |
CL | Les 16. Health & Medicine (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 15) |
CL | Les. 13 Colonial Pleasures 7 Pastimes (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 16) |
CL | Les. 17 Colonial Artisans Pt. 1 (along with the appropriate section from AAH Les 16) |
CL | Les. 18 Colonial Artisans Pt. 2 |
CL | Les. 21 Crime & Punishment |
AAH | Lesson 16 sections on Government,Economics & Transportation |
AAH | Lesson 16 section on Religion (as well as the CL Les. 12 section on the Great Awakening we skipped before) |
We read Colonial Life Lesson 19 on holidays, specifically Christmas Traditions on Christmas Eve, but it was our only school for the week.
Now on to Quarter 3 and The Period of Revolution….
3 comments:
I like your approach. Have fun with History this year!
What ages is this geared towards? I used something similar but added the Dear AMerica books as well as lots of video and gobs of texts books. Ultimately it ended up being a LOT to organize and apparently too much for my children to take in permanently.
You didn't say which resource you were refering to so I'll list both. Colonial Life (and the whole Time Travelers series) is recommended for grades 3-8. All American History is recommended for grades 5-8 but there are additional suggested reading & activities to make it appropriate for high schoolers. There is also a JrAAH version available for grages 1-4.
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