Study America Saturday is Back!

Two years ago I started posting all about Dawson's (then 9th grade) studies on American History. I had spent the previous summer creating an American History curriculum for him using the dvd series "America: The Story of Us" and some other resources. It was such a great year!

Well, this year the little kids and I are embarking on a road trip ... Road Trip USA, that is! I purchased the downloadable curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler, printed out the massive number of pages (because I needed two student workbooks), and put them in individual binders. I purchased a couple of companion books to go with our study.

As this is our major unit study for the year ... and we WILL complete the entire thing this year ... I have decided to bring back Study America Saturday and will post all about our American History and Geography lessons from the week.

We started our new school year this past Wednesday, and it worked out that we had just enough days to complete Lessons 1-6 of Road Trip: USA, which is basically the introductory material.

Can I just say that we are going to love this study? Eli said, after the second day, "This is the best unit study ever!" My kids are geography and fact freaks, so I know this is going to be great year for us.

The kids learned about the five regions of the United States and completed a worksheet showing which states go where.

Then over the course of the next couple of days we learned about the White House, the U.S. Flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Statue of Liberty. They completed mini-books that we attached to the first divided page in our notebooks.

Most of the material was review as we just did an extensive study on Citizenship at Cub Scouts (and Brynne tags along so she learns, too). But, we did dig deep into studying about the White House.

We went to the official White House website and did an interactive tour of the White House. Then we watched several videos about various aspects of it. We particularly enjoyed the one on the White House Marine sentries, the White House garden, and the beehives at the White House. We could have spent a lot more time on this site. It's really cool.

This next week we start on our journey and will be visiting Connecticut and Delaware.

Something else that may be of interest to you was shared with me by Kate of Delicious as Pie. She informed me that the History Channel has a program called History Classroom that airs on the History Channel every Monday morning at 5 a.m./ 6 central. The schedule for the shows can be found HERE.

There are also study guides to go along with each episode, which I think is majorly cool! You can bet that I will be recording these and printing off the companion materials. On those episodes that are age appropriate for my two, and relevant to our studies, I plan for us to watch them on the Fridays that we do not have Co-op (we only meet twice a month).

So that is what we studied about America this week. If you would like to share something, please leave a comment. You can even leave a link to a blog post you might have that contains information about your American History studies.