Lewis and Clark

We spent the last two weeks beginning our westward journey with Lewis and Clark. We had jumped ahead the previous week and looked at the War of 1812 because that seemed to fit better with our study of the Revolution we had just finished and this seems to fit better with the Oregon Trail and such that we are beginning now.

All the links you find in this blog post can be found on the Links to All Things Free for Homeschoolers blog, specifically on the American History page.

Exploring the fauna and flora of the West and our local park

In this collection there is a to-scale map of a section of our local park (bottom left). We took a 10 meter measuring tape with us to the park. You could use your yard, but we live in a big city. My daughter did some drawings of some of the flora at the park (the tree on the right). My son drew a bird and wrote a description of it (top left). The colorful printout is from the 25-page book my daughter made about the different plants found out West, especially if they were edible and how they could be used. At our local park she picked dandelions and cooked them for dinner for us. Hey, anything tastes good with enough butter and salt, right? She was really interested in learning about the plants, so I gave her two full school days to work on that book. The rest she did in her free time.

mapping stops along the trail

Each day we read about a stop along their trail and part of their journal entries for that stop. Then the kids marked the stop on their map (they each chose a different type of map to use) and on the backs they wrote something about that point on their trail. (I took the picture before we had finished doing this. We just did one stop a day. Using this site.)

My daughter made pretend journal entries like she was on there. She purposely spelled things crazy, like Lewis.

We also explored several websites and played some online games. My four-year-old liked playing the games for the lower elementary kids. We also watched the video on Sacagawea.  What’s below I copied from the Links blog. L means like 5-8 year olds and M is 9-12.  (U is teenagers)

Read-Aloud Overview of Their Journey L/M

Video about Sacagawea less than 5 minutes  On TeacherTube

Pictures and Info M   for younger students L   Both are about what they found along the way (National Geographic)

Online Game M  Reads like a choose your own adventure book–you choose on each page what to do and then Lewis and Clark agree or disagree with you (National Geographic)

Online Game L  Short games along the way as you learn about the animals, plants and places out West

My oldest son made this flatboat craft (we just used construction paper) and my daughter made this weaving craft (we just used regular paper and glued it into an envelope pocket.) We did this once we got out to Nez Perce territory.

Activities for studying these indigenous groups  (scroll down) –from the Links blog

And all the while we worked on this lapbook from dynamic2moms.com.