Revolutionary War Unit Study

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August 5, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 7 Comments

We learned about the Revolutionary War with Books, Notebooking,and Movies.

We plan to make some trips soon!

History Series:
American Revolutionary War
Civil War
World War I
World War II
The Gulf Wars

The military has always been a part of my life. My father is retired Army. My grandfather retired from the Navy. My husband is in the Air Force. I’ve never known a time where the men in my family didn’t go to work without a uniform or I couldn’t go to the commissary. Also, we’ve been at war in the Persian Gulf since I was a kid. It’s a scary world. We are proud to serve.

War is not glamorous, no matter what the movies portray. Long ago, it was a very personal thing to kill a man in battle with bayonets and swords and guns. Now we do it with rockets and bombs from faraway on computer screens and it’s very impersonal.

Revolutionary War

American death toll was about 25,700. Historians estimate 7,200 Americans were killed in battle and approximately 8,500 wounded. About 10,000 others died in military camps from disease or exposure. Another 8,500 died in prison. Another 1,400 MIA. The soldiers received little to no pay during service and most came out of the war penniless.
British military deaths were about 10,000.
Congress was granted power of taxation in 1788 and paid off most of the war debt by the early 1800’s. Britain’s economy was strained. France was nearly bankrupt, which was a catalyst for their own revolution in 1789.

American military forces

The American colonies had no army or navy. Our fighting forces consisted of militia units who were white men from age 16-60.
American leaders such as George Washington along with foreign war veterans: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben fought long and hard to beat the disciplined English army and navy.
Congress established the Continental Navy in 1775. Captain John Paul Jones raided the coast of England in 1778. He allegedly coined the phrase, “I have not begun to fight.”

Travel

We went to Savannah on our honeymoon. Fort James Jackson is a restored 19th-century fort located on the Savannah River, two miles east of the city of Savannah in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is a National Historic Landmark and the oldest standing brick fort in Georgia.

Resources

Unit study
U.S. History unit from Mom’s Mustard Seeds
Ultimate Guide to early U.S. History
American Revolution Unit Study
Lots of history lapbooks and notebooking pages
July 4th crafts
Johnny Tremain and Scholastic reading guide and unit study from Homeschool Helper (also a great resource for free printables here)
Pledge of Allegiance notebooking
American History resources and printables from Adventures in Mommydom (it’s pretty amazing!)
Homeschool Share lapbook
Notebooking Nook Unit
Unit and Activities from 123Homeschool4Me
The Homeschool Mom resources
Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool Plus resources
Earth Mama Lesson Plans
Lapbook by Jimmie’s Collage
Productive Homeschooling $

Resources for U.S. history and Government

Movies

Use discretion. Everyone has different standards.

Trivia

Books

How can you support our military and veterans?

Pray. Check out this ministry site.
Contribute to the Wounded Warrior Project.
List of military charity organizations.

How we do history…

You might also like: Raising Readers and How We Study History

We use Tapestry of Grace for our main history studies.

My girls especially love the living books and literature selections. They have a government supplement that is wonderful for high school. Four learning levels means the whole family learns together. Each unit has Internet links to relevant sites (most I’ve never heard of). The Revolutionary War begins at the end of Year 2 (from Byzantium to the New World) and the beginnings of our new nation is in the first unit of Year 3 (from Napoleon to Teddy Roosevelt).

For elementary kids, we like the spine book Story of the World! Year 3 which covers 1600-1850. It’s listed as a core text in Tapestry of Grace.

Follow Jennifer Lambert’s board US History on Pinterest.

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ProSchool Membership - Productive Homeschooling

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Middle School Art and Music

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May 7, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 4 Comments

Middle school is tough.

Art and music in middle school is really tough.

I like to teach art and music along with history from year 1 and we cycle through every 4 years, digging deeper each cycle.

This unit was our 3rd time through for my eldest.

How I teach art and music:

Listening
Fundamentals, Theory, Vocabulary
History
Practicing and/or Performing

We listened to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony.

It was part of our classical history studies with Tapestry of Grace Year 2 and the book was on the girls’ list of reading, but we read it together as a family and was delighted and then I found the whole symphony on YouTube. It is magnificent.

Liz finally broke out her acrylics and painted this as she listened:

She loves abstract art.

I love her representation of the musicians’ candles. She explained which parts of her painting meant which emotion from the symphony.

Brilliant.

We often create and complete notebooking pages with music and art.

Check out these great Haydn notebooking pages.

Famous Artists & Picture Study Notebooking Pages

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Teaching an Artist

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February 8, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 5 Comments

We discovered these Katie books at a consignment shop and have been lucky to collect quite a few in the series. Of course, my Katie loves them! They are delightful books that follow the imaginative adventures of Katie into the world of art and historical places.

Every day, Katie asks if we can do art first.

Every day, I tell her we have to do math and reading and history and science first.

Currently, Katie’s other favorite thing is Song School Spanish. Review coming up soon!

Art is her favorite subject! I use this as an incentive to get her to cooperate with the other subjects. We try to incorporate arts and crafts into everything we do for her since she loves it so much.

Here’s a picture Katie drew the other day with markers of my cherry limeade drink. Even though the straw is floating, I was impressed by the 3D lid.

We got Katie and Tori a guitar for Christmas. They’d been begging and we’re going through the lessons on Schoolhouse Teachers. Katie is also teaching herself to play piano. We use the KinderBach app and My First Piano Adventure. I am amazed at her musical ability. She’s always singing or humming.

Little brother Alex wants to do everything his sisters do. Here, Katie and Alex are painting with watercolors. These two don’t often get along.

Alex also joined his sisters here with their Harmony Fine Arts lesson. They drew Giotto angels with chalk pastels.

Everything Katie does, she does it with style. Vacuuming is so much easier when you’re wearing a princess dress!

Katie is our free spirit. She thinks outside the box. She excels at everything she does. She can already read chapter books and she’s not even 6 yet. She soaks up knowledge. I pray that she grows up and does radical and amazing things for God.

She is a delightful child and brings us so much joy.

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New Year Homeschool Goals

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January 3, 2013 By Jennifer Lambert 4 Comments

It’s back to work. Here are our new year school goals.

We worked on a nursery rhyme unit with our Tapestry of Grace studies this week. We practiced rhyming and picking out the main character in the poems. These notebooking pages come with the TOG lower grammar printable pack. I have a Mother Goose book that my uncle gave me when I was 3 and the girls loved seeing his inscription on the title page to me.

We started some new copywork to go along with our Hero Tales Bible study. The girls love the missionary stories so far. We read the story each morning and the girls recite our character trait and verse. They copy the message and they draw something meaningful from the story. They love the drawing element.

We’re on lesson 21 of All About Reading, Level 2. They’re coming right along. Almost fluent readers! Tori likes the hands on stuff more than Kate. And she needs the lessons more. Kate is almost bored, but it’s good review.

Kate is putting story cards in chronological order.

Our January poem. I made this on Publisher. Kate already has it memorized. She recited it for me today! She remembers it from last year. I guess I should find a new one, but I love this one. I plan to make a Montessori poetry basket to go with our snow unit this month. Stay tuned!

Mama’s favorite: Katie reading the Tacky the Penguin books while she waits on Tori and Mama to transition to the next thing.

Happy New Year!

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Chalk Pastel Scrub Jays

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October 22, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

We’re studying Leonardo da Vinci in history these next few weeks. Here is one of our texts for Tapestry of Grace Year 2. It’s a biography and it has activities for us to do too! We’re enjoying reading it together. It is very helpful for Katie, a kinesthetic learner to understand Leonardo with a book like this! Tori is a visual learner and loves doing activities too. It helps her remember what we’ve read when she sees her projects completed. Katie has no trouble with narration, but this helps Tori, who stumbles over narration exercises.

We chose to draw a scrub jay since they are prolific in our yard and quite pretty and blue. We looked him up on The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website. Perfect picture to copy!

This was a new and messy project! We kept paper towels handy.

The girls were tickled to learn a new word: scumble. It means to rub the chalk and smear it to make it look softer.

Very pleased with herself! Tori is our perfectionist and this gave her a boost of confidence!

I like the outline in black. Obviously, I need to acquire more pastels if we’re sharing.

My attempt at drawing. I will tell you: I need to do this more often with my girls. It was a bonding experience. It was so relaxing and meditative to sit there and draw. I loved doing this with the girls.

Next time, I will encourage Liz and Alex to join us. I really need to get more pastels then!

We love the pastel art lessons here.

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Medieval Feast

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October 17, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert 3 Comments

We didn’t do so well on unit celebrations for our Tapestry of Grace studies last year.

It was all new to us and honestly, I just didn’t plan them.

We planned a medieval feast as our first history unit celebration this year.

It coincided with Elizabeth’s 12th birthday. She said it was the best birthday ever. Points for mama!

We had a great unit about the middle ages, learning about knights and castles. Tori got to try archery. We read lots of books.

Thank you, Costco, for the awesome knight and princess costumes!

Alex tried on his costume and immediately wanted it off. Yeah, I can’t imagine eating in shining armor either.

Mercy, no dressing these two alike anymore! I can barely tell them apart!

I had this costume from a party years ago and now Liz can wear it. My, she’s getting tall!

Here’s a copy of our Medieval Feast Menu I made. You can download a copy too!

Here’s the best picture I could get of the table.

We set it with our fancy stuff! We don’t have any pewter plates and I wasn’t using bread trenchers!

The flowers were for Liz’s birthday.

We kinda dug into the “subtlety” after lunch. It was her birthday cake!

We checked this book out from the library. It had lovely examples of medieval menus and recipes galore! We especially loved the copies of actual recipes in Old English and art depicting cooks during the period.

We had cream of vegetable soup.

Tori and Katie loved this and asked for thirds and fourths!

Cedar plank grilled salmon filets.

We put brown sugar on top and they were delicious!

Roasted herb chicken.

We used Jamie Oliver’s recipe. It is delectable!

Creamed spinach.

This is Aaron’s mom’s recipe. Liz and I love it, the others, not so much. But it has BACON!

Recipe: chop bacon and fry it up with some chopped onion. After that’s cooked, add chopped garlic and fresh spinach and turn off the heat. Fold it in until wilted. Splash lemon juice and sprinkle a tiny bit of nutmeg. Drizzle a couple T cream or half and half and stir. Serve immediately.

Alex wanted to be like Mama and Daddy and have his grape juice in a big glass!

We’re excited to start our Renaissance history studies! Already working on what we can do for our unit study in 9 weeks. This one will be hard to beat!

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Salt Dough Maps

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August 11, 2012 By Jennifer Lambert Leave a Comment

Fun Dyed Salt Dough Maps for Geography

We made lovely maps of landforms for geography study.

We used the book Geography from A to Z for reference. The toothpicks were for labels.

Always fun to let them get them their hands dirty mixing the flour, salt, and water! Sticky!

Fun sensory play.

I separated the dough into three sections and dyed them yellow for desert, blue for water, and green for land.

Alex liked using play dough tools.

Kate was very particular placing her land and water dough.

Tori loved the hands on activity!

Liz liked rolling out her dough.

We placed toothpicks in parts of the wet dough maps.

After the maps dried, we glued handwritten flags to the toothpicks, labeling the land formations.

It will dry and harden overnight. You can add painted details!

How do you make geography fun?

Also see this salt dough map of the Nile River Delta. Check out no-bake cookie dough maps and chocolate chip cookie maps.

Salt Dough

Ingredients

1 cup AP flour
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup warm water
food coloring optional

Instructions

Mix ingredients together with a wooden spoon or plastic spatula or by hand.
Divide into thirds. Add yellow to 1/3 (desert), blue to 1/3 (water), and green to 1/3 (grass) to make land maps.
It will harden so keep in a zip bag in fridge until ready to use.

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Salt Dough Maps

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April 9, 2011 By Jennifer Lambert 2 Comments

We finally took the plunge and bought Tapestry of Grace, Year 1. We love it! We love how it integrates all subjects and is Biblically based. Elizabeth cannot argue with the assignments list that I print out for her. She gets to help make decisions about what we read, write about, and projects.

Here is Elizabeth making a salt dough map of The Nile River Delta. (Please excuse the kitchen…)

The completed map. She painted it and added props!

She’s finishing up Singapore math 5B and Latina Christiana II.We will soon continue with Singapore 6 and Apologia Science.

We’re transitioning into {gasp!} what society calls Middle School.For me, that means I need to rev up on the writing. High school is just around the corner!

Hello, I was an English teacher in my past life! Praise the Lord that she’s such an advanced reader and has no trouble with spelling or grammar. (She’s just like me and my mom and finds errors in grammar and spelling everywhere…how horrified we are by the atrocious lack of consideration others have for good grammar! It is painful to us.)

Elizabeth has shown quite a jump in maturity these past couple weeks. I am grateful for that, for now I am contemplating military school I’m so stressed out.

Also see this salt dough map of the Nile River Delta. Check out no-bake cookie dough maps and chocolate chip cookie maps.

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