U.S. geography, part 2

Last winter Dallin studied U.S. geography, focusing on the eastern half of the United States.  Even though we had a fabulously fun block, this time around I really wanted to do something different, only I couldn't figure out what that something should be.  Finally, toward the end of my summer planning, I had the opportunity to listen to these amazing lectures by master Waldorf teacher Eugene Schwartz: http://millennialchild.com/catalog6.html.

I was able to hear individual lectures on specific topics for only $20 apiece, and the one on North American geography was exactly what I needed.  I came out of it knowing exactly how I would organize this block.  Schwartz suggests focusing on your child's temperament.  Dallin is a choleric who loves adventure and "man-against-the-mountain" kinds of stories, so I decided to focus our block on the theme of journeys.

I looked at six epic journeys that captured the essence of each geographic region I wanted to cover, and this is what I came up with:

Great Plains:  19th century cattle drives

Southwest: Coronado's search for the lost Seven Cities of Cibola

Pacific Northwest:  Lewis and Clark

California:  Gold Rush of 1849

Alaska:  Serum Run/Iditarod

Hawaii:  Pele's mythical journey from Tahiti to the Hawaiian Islands

Even though the focus here is not on history, Schwartz said that historical events could be used as long as the focus is still on the land.  We didn't get into the historical reasons for these journeys, as that will come in later grades, we just used each story as a jumping off point to talk about the land and what man has done with the land.

Eugene Schwartz said that geography should be the most dramatic subject we teach.  That thought really stuck with me!  This is not dry, boring stuff.

Of course, map-making was part of this block.  Mine on top, Dallin's below.

I also got a good deal of painting practice in, and Dallin did some very nice paintings as well.

Mine--Southwest.

Dallin's.

My painting of a California mountain and valley scene.  (Not exactly happy with the middle of it...it looks more like a lake than a valley.)

Dallin did trees with a river and mountains in the background.  

Mine: Pele at work...

Dallin's volcano painting.

(I found that Google Images is a good source for painting ideas.  I downloaded the most beautiful and striking photos I could find of these various areas, and we painted from them.  My California painting idea came from a Waldorf board on pinterest, I believe they were paintings from a Waldorf school somewhere.)

 

Preston wouldn't miss painting time for anything!  (Notice we spend a lot of school days in our PJ's.  I've gotten tired of fighting to get everyone dressed.)

 

One of our writing projects.  I thought this was such a fabulous idea; Dallin was not as crazy about it.  When we learned about Lewis and Clark, I found journal excerpts in which they capture their feelings about seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time.  I had Dallin copy these as copywork.  The coolest thing of all was that this summer, we visited the exact places that Lewis and Clark themselves were when they wrote these words!  So I thought it would be neat to have Dallin write about what he saw and felt when he saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time in the very place Lewis and Clark saw it.  He did the assignment, but he didn't think it was quite as cool as I did.  In his book, I included a photo of him at Cannon Beach, Oregon, where Lewis and Clark's company built a saltworks.

Another thing we did was called Scrounge Poetry and comes from the BraveWriter writing curriculum.  This was a collaborative project.  We'd been collecting words of all kinds, which we cut out of magazines.  Then, I let Dallin look online, and we found a bunch of cool photos of Alaska.  I had him choose one.  He chose a photo of dozens of bears feeding in a river during the salmon run.  Then we took the words we'd collected and chose some of them to put together to make a poem about the picture.  The rule was that you had to use those words, you could not add words, except maybe a small word here and there.  I didn't make Dallin re-copy this poem (because it was both of our work, not just his, and he was pretty grumpy about having to re-copy at that point), but I did illustrate and write it on the board:

extreme place

maple crawl-ins

proud footing

wild crowd, little uncertainty

Here's Dallin on a typical day working on his math.

And of course, part of the fun of homeschooling is the relationships that are built between siblings--these two boys are the best of friends!

Novels Dallin read (or will soon be reading--we got behind!):

Little Britches: Father and I were Ranchers by Ralph Moody

Bear Dance and Ghost Canoe by Will Hobbs

Gentle Ben and The Wolf Dog by Walt Morey

Naya Nuki: Shoshoni Girl Who Ran by Kenneth Thomasma

The Great Serum Race: Blazing the Iditarod Trail by Debbie S. Miller (picture book)

Will Hobbs has written many adventure stories focusing on different parts of the United States, all of them involve Native American Themes.  Bear Dance takes place in the mountains of southern Colorado, Ghost Canoe takes place along the coast of Washington state.

Naya Nuki is based on a true story and is about a young Indian girl who is capture by another tribe and forced into slavery.  She escapes and walks over 1000 miles back to her homeland.  This was a great book because it focuses on how she pays attention to the land in order to find her way.  She was kidnapped at the same time as Sacagawea, tying it into our discussion of Lewis and Clark.  It is set in North Dakota and Montana.

Gentle Ben and The Wolf Dog are animal adventures set in Alaska.

Little Britches is a father-son story about a family who moves from New England to the Colorado prairie in the early 20th century.