Nature Treasure Hunts with Kids

There are lots of ways to make hiking more enticing to kids. I have one friend who ran ahead and hid little toys along the trail for her young daughter to find as she walked. There's always the alphabet game or rainbow game: find something that starts with every letter, or in every color, in order, as you walk along the trail. 

We have a really great program in our area (central Vermont and New Hampshire) called Valley Quests that has largely done this job for us. Valley Quests are simply walks or hikes in the area made into treasure hunts. There is a quest box at the end-- the top of the mountain or whatever the destination is-- containing a log book to sign your name and write a message if you desire, a tidbit of information about the site, and a handmade stamp with an ink pad so you can make a stamp and remember you were there.  (You could stamp on anything; we own one of the Quest books so we've taken to collecting all our stamps in the back of that.) Along the way there are clues to mark your journey: a huge burl on the side of a tree, an old stone wall, a distant view of a particular mountain from a certain spot.

I have absolutely loved them. There isn't any actual treasure to collect, besides the stamp and the satisfaction of finding the box, which is sometimes pretty tricky! But just having the clues to read and the thrill of being the first to spot this or that landmark is motivating and fun. 

Countless times when I have had time to "kill" with one kid while waiting to pick the other up from an activity, I've gone to the Valley Quest site, where you can search by town, and checked out what quests might be in the vicinity. I am continually impressed that we find special little spots we never knew about this way, even though my husband and I have lived in this area for twenty years.

Where's M?

I feel it is important to note that in general I do not love scavenger-hunt-type things; give a group of kids (or their chaperones!) a scavenger hunt to do on a museum field trip, for example, and you can guarantee they will race through the museum frantically checking things off while being blind to anything and everything not on The List. Scavenger hunts can falsely prescribe what's important and turn off any natural learning or interest. Stepping off my soap box now... Somehow Valley Quests feel different; they introduce us to new natural places, and they make us actually slow down on a walk and really look at all the details around us. Since these quests take place in nature, quite often things have changed a bit since the quest author wrote the clue and now the young sapling is a full-grown tree or the rotting log is fully covered in moss. A "birch with bark so white" took us a long time because it had lost all its bark since the clue had been written. But it's neat to look and look and look and only adds to the excitement when we figure those things out too. 

Finally found it!

Collecting the stamp

Found it!

They aren't all big hikes either-- lots of them are quite short indeed. We've even done a Civil-War-themed cemetery quest, as well as a quest to the tiniest park that we never would have noticed otherwise in downtown Lebanon, NH.

Civil-War-themed cemetery quest

Quest to a tiny downtown park

Our love of Quests inspired my kids and I to make one of our own this year. It was a process, but pretty straight-forward, because the Valley Quest site lays out the steps and materials needed very clearly. We had several fun outings, choosing to do our research on especially nice days, as we tried to settle on a location for our Quest. There was some debate about where it should be-- we didn't want it to be too intense or long of a hike so as not to scare some people away from doing it. We wanted it to be relatively convenient for us to check in on from time to time. We wanted it to be a special spot, with a defined destination, not just a random walk. We wanted it to be in the woods, not in a busy or residential area where it would get accidentally spotted or messed with. Eventually we came to agreement. 

And then we walked it some more. We all brought along clipboards or notebooks and jotted down ideas for fun landmarks and clues. Back at home, we synthesized them into an order. In a few separate sittings, we word-smithed a bit, deciding not to stress ourselves out with rhyming (many Quests we'd done, but not all, seemed to rhyme). We also decided to draw a rough, not-to-scale map to go with it-- my son took this on. We decided to make it a riddle Quest, with blanks to fill in as you go and then some letters to unscramble at the end because my daughter had really enjoyed a Quest of that type we'd done before. Finally, we did a little basic research about the Appalachian Trail and wrote up a paragraph about it to include in our box, because our Quest happens to be located along it. 

Hard at work

Finally, we were down to a really fun art project: carving a rubber stamp. Each Quest has its own unique stamp. We had some different ideas about what our stamp should be. In the end, we had such fun carving the stamps and liked them all so much that we decided to put all three in our finished box and let Questers themselves decide which they wanted to use.       

We submitted our Quest to Vital Communities, the organization that manages them, and they accepted it and posted it to their site. Find it here! 

In our finished plastic Quest box we placed: a small notebook to be a log book, a pencil, a manual pencil sharpener, our stamps, an ink pad, and our card of information about the area. 

It was fun to work on a joint project together, and doing so was a reminder that, with my kids almost five years apart and with different temperaments, it can be pretty challenging to work on a joint project together and meet everybody's needs and wishes! But we did it. Like any big, long-term project, there's a sense of satisfaction when all the pieces come together in the end. (And when we visited our box in the woods recently, after first placing it there about a month ago, it was a reward to find that three people had already visited and signed the log book.) 

We're pretty proud of our Quest and if you ever find yourself in the "Upper Valley" (the Connecticut River Valley area of central Vermont and New Hampshire) with a little extra time on your hands, you might want to check it out. Find our own full Quest here!  

Do you have any programs like Valley Quest in your area, or do you do anything like this to make walks more enticing for your kids?  

Rodgers and Hammerstein Unit Studies for Kids

This past summer, some old friends invited my daughter and I to join them to see Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella at the North Shore Music Theatre. We did and it was excellent. After that weekend, we realized more than we had before how big a deal musical theater is for our girl. She couldn't stop talking about the costumes, especially Cinderella's and the fairy godmother's rags that transformed into gorgeous ball gowns when they spun around right before our eyes. Then there was the fascination with the way the show portrayed aspects of the story, like the prop "horses" lit up with Christmas lights taking Cinderella to the ball. And there were some plot twists we weren't expecting, like the fact that after a second ball Cinderella intentionally leaves a shoe behind. And most of all, the music. We were Rodgers & Hammerstein newbies before that show and were immediately enchanted by the wonderful songs. Within a couple of weeks M had them all memorized, belting them out throughout the day, humming them constantly, getting them stuck in all of our heads. 

Added up, the experience really lit something in her that honestly has stayed alive ever since. It made us want to get her out in the world to see plays and musicals whenever possible, ...AND it inspired one of the most fun things we've been up to this school year: unit studies on Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals! 

Rodgers and Hammerstein Musical Theater Unit Studies for Kids

 

We started with a Cinderella study, then about a month later we moved onto The Sound of Music, and after that State Fair, and finally The King and I. With each one, we began with simply watching the movie, then moved on to check out different versions, do related activities, go on field trips when possible, and end with some sort of special culminating project. These unit studies have been a high point in her week. Here are the fun activities and lessons we've done that you might want to try with any musical-loving kids in your life. I listed them in roughly the order we did them. 

Unit Study: Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella

• The Show: We watched Cinderella live at the North Shore Musical Theatre. It really made an impression! 

• The Songs: We listened to Spotify playlists of R&H Cinderella songs in the car, both the Julie Andrews version and Broadway versions, over and over...and over and over... There are so many great songs, from "In My Own Little Corner" to "Impossible/It's Possible" to "Lovely Night" and more.

• Singing: I Googled lyrics to many of the songs, by M's request, and printed them out for her so she could sing along whenever she wanted and learn the trickier parts. (She also discovered for me that if I let her hold my phone, she could read the lyrics at the bottom of the Spotify screen for the song being played.)

• Other R&H Cinderella Productions: There are so many Cinderella films out there, and we watched two other R&H ones we loved:
• The 1957 version of R&H's Cinderella on YouTube, which we were delighted to find since it doesn't appear to be available anywhere else to stream. It's black and white, was broadcast live on TV in 1957, when it received the biggest television audience for anything up till that point, and stars Julie Andrews. The YouTube video includes a modern introduction by Julie Andrews, and is definitely worth watching. 

• We also watched the version with Brandy as Cinderella, which features Whitney Houston as fairy godmother (M's self-declared "favorite fairy godmother") singing "There's Music in You," which is a R&H song pulled out of old files of theirs and unique to this movie. This one has a diverse cast, and the set and props are peppy and colorful. 

• Online Lessons: We found the Musical Theatre Project online and enjoyed the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella unit lessons there (a legacy left there from Covid quarantine days). The lessons were brief and to the point and full of good energy. We learned a dance to "A Lovely Night," saw brief videos about Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and discussed Cinderella's character traits, among other things.

• Read Aloud: There are so many picture book versions of Cinderella, from all over the world, and we read a LOT of them. This gave us a chance to discuss a lot of things-- similarities, differences, themes, authors' choices-- in a kid-friendly way. I made sure we discussed early on what a "rags to riches" story is, and also what a "fairy tale," by definition, is. I was a little worried that by spending all this time on Cinderella that I would be teaching her to value love at first sight or salvation in the form of rescue by a handsome prince! But what was neat was the more we learned and the more stories we read, we started to see more and more the deeper, admirable aspects of this timeless tale-- like the feeling of wishing for something deeply. And Cinderella has a lot of special traits beyond her beauty: she is hopeful, kind, resilient, optimistic (hardly ever letting those mean step sisters really get her down), and in most versions she shows forgiveness in the end, despite all her hardship.    

• Cinderella with a Modern Twist: Since we were becoming such experts in how this tale has been told in different places at different times in different ways, we watched one other movie version of Cinderella that was not Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was a modern version, starring Camila Cabello and featuring Idina Menzel as the stepmother. In it, Cinderella dreams of being a dress designer. This film is a musical, with characters singing a great variety of popular music, from "You Gotta Be" to "Let's Get Loud." My favorites are Cinderella singing "Million to One" as she dreams, and the stepmother and stepsisters singing "Material Girl." This version is so fast-paced and energetic, and just surprising, that's it's really very enjoyable. 

• Culminating Project: Write your own Cinderella: And as a grand finale, my daughter wrote her own Cinderella story. First we listed the features that so many of the stories had: magic, a mean step family, a hard-working main character, a fairy godmother person (or animal in many cases), a happy ending, and so on. Then M chose which aspects she wanted to include in hers. She was inspired to make the fairy godmother in her version a unicorn, who takes Cinderella (who she renamed with her own name) across a rainbow to the ball. She voice typed the story in Google Docs, we printed it off as a booklet in Word, and she illustrated it with stickers and stamps and stencils!

Cinderella story planning sheet

Voice-typing: a break from the physical effort of writing to let the creativity flow :) 

M's own Cinderella story

Unit Study: Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music

• The Show: We watched The Sound of Music on Disney Plus.

• Singing the Songs: M was immediately consumed by the story and all the songs; it's so sweet and fun, it would be hard not to be. Again we listened to the soundtrack on Spotify a lot and I printed out lyrics to various songs for her, from "Edelweiss" to "I Have Confidence."

• Field Trip: We heard stories about the real Maria and the rest of the real von Trapp family on a history tour at the Trapp Family Lodge, which happens to be within easy driving distance from us. While we were there, M and I treated ourselves to lunch out, where we sampled schnitzel-- which is one of Maria's "Favorite Things" in the song of that name.   

Sampling schnitzel

These hills at the Trapp Family Lodge in VT are reminiscent of the Alps...

von Trapp family tree, at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, VT

• Baking: Continuing with the food theme, we experienced another of the "Favorite Things" for ourselves by baking our own "crisp apple strudel."

"Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels..."

• Online Articles: We enjoyed looking at the old family photos in this Mental Floss article, and particularly two videos: one of Maria von Trapp teaching Julie Andrews the right way to yodel (really cute and funny) and another of an interview with an elderly Maria von Trapp. 

• Other R&H Sound of Music Production: We couldn't resist checking out a 2018 made-for-TV version of The Sound of Music starring Carrie Underwood, but (in my opinion) it was a very weak replica and overall pretty underwhelming, so I don't really recommend it... 

• Violin: My daughter plays violin, so we added "Do Re Mi" to her repertoire with this video.

• Dancing: We tried to dance the Landler, the Austrian folk dance featured in the film, with this YouTube tutorial.

• Yodeling: We read a great, short National Geographic article about the origins of yodeling in Switzerland with video demonstration by a native, and then we tried it out ourselves with this simple how-to video on yodeling. I'm not sure we were catching on properly, but we had a lot of laughs making some very strange noises while trying. 

• Culminating Project: Rewrite "My Favorite Things": For a final project, I had M write her own version of "My Favorite Things." It's the type of song that's just asking to be rewritten, and everyone's version will come out uniquely. (If I still had an elementary school classroom, I would be doing this project with my whole class!) I had M just brainstorm a bunch of little things in life that make her happy, and she came up with everything from her favorite Disney characters to twirly dresses to big square marshmallows from a local bakery. For the stanza about when she's "feeling sad" she came up with dogs jumping on her and her parents saying no. :) We checked out this simple rewrite example, and used this lesson plan to guide us, particularly using the big idea of focusing on the stress pattern of the syllables. Getting her ideas to fit a certain number of syllables, not to mention placing emphasis on parts of words that wouldn't normally have the emphasis in order to match the stress pattern, was a moderate challenge for a musical 7-year-old, and I think her song turned out amazing-- it's a keepsake for sure. 

M's version of "My Favorite Things"

Unit Study: Rodgers & Hammerstein's State Fair 

• The Show: We watched the 1945 version of State Fair on Amazon Prime. (I don't recommend the 1962 version, available on YouTube, for young kids.) Both my kids enjoyed the comedic elements and it was a simple, though dated, story of the Frake family of Iowa heading to the state fair for the weekend. Mr. Frake is wrapped up in the well being of his prize pig, Mrs. Frake with her award-winning mince meat, while teenage (?) children Margy and Wayne wander around the fair and each has a romantic adventure (that remains chaste in this 1945 version). 

• The Songs: There are a few fun songs, from "Our State Fair" to "It's a Grand Night for Singing" to "Ioway." Per usual, we listened to the soundtrack and printed off lyrics for my daughter to sing along in the car to her heart's content.    

• State Fair Culture: To get a sense of the culture of the Iowa State Fair, we watched a few short PBS videos about it. 

• Learning about the Setting: Occasionally when we are studying a certain place in the world, or about to go on a trip, we check out the Smithsonian Channel's Aerial America series. There is an episode for every state. The episodes are less than an hour, and consist of fly-over footage of a place with voiceover narrating interesting facts and history. We watched Aerial America: Iowa and got lots of views of all those farm fields, and even some of the state fair. 

• Comparing Stage and Screen: We watched a few clips from other stage and screen productions of State Fair. It's always interested to compare the actors, the sets, the costumes, and more with my daughter.  

• Culminating Project: Cooking: We found this old article about a prize-winning mince meat at the Iowa State Fair in the 70s. And we used this recipe to give it a try. I don't think it was anybody's favorite (is it dinner? is it dessert?) but it was fun to try, as the mince meat scenes in the movie are some of the funniest moments.

Had to try out mince meat pie

Unit Study: Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I 

• The Show: We watched the 1956 movie, starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. I had never seen this movie myself it was impressed with it. It has compelling characters and so many interesting aspects to discuss. It is a story based on a novel, which was based on the memoirs of a real person, Anna Leonowens. 
• A bit about the facts and history: Anna took a job teaching the children and wives of King Mongkut of Siam in 1862. (I thought the polygamy aspect might be weird for a kid, but it wasn't a focus in the movie, and I just told her that in many Asian cultures at that time it was common for the king to have more than one wife and she accepted that.) It was a time when nearly every country in Southeast Asia was becoming a colony of a European power. King Mongkut was strategic in handling this, bending to certain pressures but managing to maintain Siam's independence-- and apparently Thailand is the only Southeast nation that has never been colonized. He was progressive in some ways, interested in western developments in science and technology, while he was very traditional in others. Anna was an educated woman, a widow, an experienced traveler, and later part of the suffragette movement. The story takes place at the time of the American Civil War, and in part of the film the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin is portrayed through a Siamese ballet. 

• Discussion Topics: The tension, debates, and friendship the movie portrays between an intelligent, progressive yet traditional monarch, and the modern western woman who arrives at the palace and speaks her mind from the first moment is possibly the best thing about the movie. There were so many interesting topics and themes that we discussed in an age-appropriate way (and a number of them we could have done even more with if my daughter had been older), including:
• What is slavery? What was Uncle Tom's Cabin (mentioned, and portrayed through a ballet scene in the movie) about? What was the Civil War about?
• How can the world feel different depending on one's perspective? (There is a great scene showing the world map with a predominant Siam in the middle of it that the prince/heir knows, contrasted with the "real" world map Anna presents when she is teaching, and there is also a moment when she teaches the children about snow and they don't believe her.)
• The idea of women's roles
• Should things be done in a traditional way, or a new, "scientific" way?
• Power-- what should a good king, or other leader, be like?

• Singing the Songs: This movie has great music and my daughter loved singing the songs as she does every time she watches a new musical, in this case everything from the sweet "Getting to Know You" to the optimistic "Whistle a Happy Tune" to the sweeping-across-the-stage polka "Shall we Dance." 

• Analyzing the Songs: We took the time to read and analyze some King and I lyrics as well, such as the song "A Puzzlement" which is a solo sung by the king. I asked M what the song was really about and the emotions of the character singing it, and we discussed what certain lines meant.

• Comparing Stage and Screen: We checked out some video clips and photos from various productions of The King and I. 

• Other R&H King and I Production: We also watched a 1999 animated, kiddie version of The King and I, which added a plot twist or two and was fun to see for comparison's sake. 

• Lessons: I found an excellent Lincoln Center teacher's guide for The King and I. Some of it was aimed at older kids so I picked and chose activities that worked for us. For my 7-year-old, I particularly loved these parts of it:
• An introduction the the American Musical (page 10 of the guide)
• The first six minutes of this intro to Broadway: The American Musical series, narrated (of course) by Julie Andrews
• An activity to help us analyze the song "A Puzzlement" sung by the king in the movie (page 10 - 11)
• The history, which I summarized above, about the real people and place that this movie was based on (page 12 - 19)
• Learning about the "Book Musical," which Rodgers and Hammerstein first created with Oklahoma (a movie I decided not to watch with my 7-year-old because of the content and amount of innuendo, by the way) and the musical theatre building blocks: music, dance, and theater. We also here learned the names of some of the many jobs involved in making a Broadway show, from choreographer to lyricist to designers, composers, and orchestrators. (page 22 - 26)

• Culminating Project: Musicalize a Favorite Book: The Musical Moments writing activity, described in brief on page 27 of the Lincoln Center guide, inspired our culminating project for The King and I (and really for all the musicals we've studied): a song-writing mini unit. 
• First, we reviewed a bunch of musical numbers M already knew, having her name which characters sing them, what type of song they are, how the character is feeling/what they want in the song, and what important moment in the plot or "turning point" it occurs at. We used these examples: 
• "The Schuyler Sisters" from Hamilton
• "Part of your World" from The Little Mermaid
• "I Just Can't Wait to be King" from The Lion King
• "The Next Right Thing" from Frozen 2
• "I Have Confidence" from The Sound of Music
• "My Own Little Corner" from Cinderella
• "When will my Life Begin?" from Tangled
• After this review, we chose a story we wanted to try to imagine as a musical. We could have used any (non-musical) movie or even perhaps a picture book, but it was a good opportunity to spend some time with some wonderful chapter books we had recently read together, so I had her choose from among these three: 
• Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary
• Clementine by Sara Pennypacker
• Gooseberry Park by Cynthia Rylant
• Then I had her list a few moments from the book that she thought would be good to musicalize (i.e. important moments in the plot, or times that show what characters want or strong emotions. The moment could consist of interactions between characters or be just a moment of the character thinking to herself).  
• For each of the moments, she had to decide: which characters would sing it? What type of song would it be (fast, slow, funny, serious, etc.)? Would there be dancing with it, and if so what type (ballet, hip hop, etc.)? 
• Finally, she chose one moment and wrote a song to go with it! 
• If you were so inclined, or for older students, you could write it from scratch, like a poem, but for our purposes I had M choose a song she knew and change the words.  I was ready to offer as resources for this song lists from the Disney and other musicals she knew. But as it turned out, she had an amazing ability to pull a song out of the air that she felt had a beat or tone that matched her book moment she wanted to musicalize. I printed out the song as it was, and then next to the original lines she wrote her own new words. 
• Together we wrote a song to go with Beezus and Ramona-- a song about how Ramona is always getting into mischief without really intending to, and how her family helps her figure a way out of it somehow, that we imagined being sung by her sister Beezus, to the tune of "Whistle a Happy Tune" (a song from The King and I). 
• Then, more independently, M wrote a song for Gooseberry Park about Kona the dog's icy adventure across town to find and rescue his squirrel friends. She almost instantly thought of "Rhythm Nation" which she knows from the Camila Cabello modern Cinderella movie and wrote great lines such as "A ve-ry, ve-ry, ve-ry big risk!" in place of "Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm nation!"....and "I have to find you right no-o-o-ow" in place of "We are a part of the rhythm nation." 

A musicalized moment from a favorite young reader chapter book, Gooseberry Park

This unit was so much fun. The best part was when M told me in the midst of the song writing at the end of it that writing time-- which normally requires serious effort on her part and some cajoling on mine-- was "so fun right now."   

A few final notes:

We spent less time overall on State Fair because (in my opinion) it just isn't the timeless, magical work of art that the others are. But we still found some topics to study and had fun with the music.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein site has a list of all their shows and a wealth of information about each one, including photos and video clips, and lists of various productions. It is a great resource worth checking out.  

This unit was a good reminder to me of everything homeschool can be: interest-based, personalized, multidisciplinary, memorable, fun, project-based, hands-on...I want to do more unit studies like this! 

I hope if you try these units you have as much fun with them as we did and that your heart, too, will be blessed with the sound of music. :) 

Curriculum Review: Core Knowledge History Units

On a recent chilly fall morning, my son and daughter and I had an "Olympic Games Day" out in our backyard. My son had brainstormed some games and equipment we could use to imitate the ancient, original Olympic games in Olympia he had read about in social studies: 

Javelin-- carved wooden spear

Discus-- bocce ball

Long jump-- see how far past a line they could each take a running leap

Races-- timed around the perimeter of our yard 

Wrestling-- because they really wanted to, although we added a few more rules beyond the two authentic ones we'd read about in Ancient Greece (which were simply: no biting and no sticking your fingers in your opponent's eyes!)

Olympic Games Day "Javelin"

We made some accommodations to each game to make it a little more fair for my 7-year-old going up against her 12-year-old brother. We even came up with a basic point system, doing a few trials of some of the activities and then tallying the points and announcing gold, silver, and bronze (for the activities I was willing to be a third participant in). Winners received gold-, silver-, or blue-wrapped chocolate coins we happened to have leftover in our candy stash. 

Needless to say, the kids loved it. But I don't get to take credit for the fun idea, as it was included as a suggested activity in my Core Knowledge Teacher Guide for the Ancient Greece and Rome unit my son is doing in history currently. 

We've been using Core Knowledge history units for several years now in our homeschool, and one of my favorite things about them is the enriching additional activities suggested along with every chapter or two, like our Olympic Games Day last week. There are a lot of things I like about this resource for teaching and learning history, though. Here's my review of the curricula. 

The Approach

The Core Knowledge Foundation, according to their web site, wants the emphasis of K-8 education to be "an enabling core of broadly shared knowledge...Such knowledge is possessed by successful adults and taken for granted by literate writers and speakers. It's the broad and diverse knowledge that makes responsible citizenship possible." It's a lofty statement, but the idea is that there are things we all need to know. The Core Knowledge Sequence, in fact, lays out ALL of those things they think kids should know from preschool through grade 8 in language arts, history, geography, mathematics, science, visual arts and music. It's an intense, and, honestly, overwhelming document. I wouldn't want to teach every subject using Core Knowledge resources because I think the kids would tire of everything being taught in the same basic structure all day; also, I have other programs and resources I love in other subject areas. But for history studies, it is our foundation and we've found it indispensable. 

Getting Started

When I am planning our year, I go to the Core Knowledge web site, click on Curriculum, and then Download Curriculum. You can filter by academic subject and/or grade level on the side. The page will show you all the units available that fit your search terms. I like to just select "History & Geography" and not specify a grade level so that I see all the social studies units. As the grade levels go up, the reading level of the student readers is higher, and some of the content is more complex, but a grade level or so up or down from where you child is doesn't matter at all. I select units based on what we want to study rather than on grade level, and more and more over the years I have my son (now a 7th grader) choose. I do NOT try to teach all of the units listed within a certain grade level. There is a breakneck pace mandated in the teacher guide if one were to do so to fit it all in; we like to take our time and work through the units deeply rather than trying to get through a certain number of them. 

Unit Components

The units consist of a Student Reader, a Teacher Guide, Timeline Cards, and Online Resources. A little more about each of these components is below. 

Student Reader: The Student Reader is a textbook for the unit. Some of the smaller units have just a few chapters, while the heftier ones can have around 20. Each chapter is just a few pages long and has a "Big Question" at the beginning to help students focus on the big ideas of the chapter. For a chapter called "The Golden Age of Athens" in our Ancient Greece and Rome unit, the big question was: "What were some of the cultural achievements during the Golden Age of Athens?" In the past, my son and I would discuss the Big Question after reading and discussing a chapter. This year, now that he's older, I've been having him write each Big Question and his paragraph response in a certain section of his social studies notebook. (It is a suggestion in the Teacher Guide to have students do so.) This way he has all the "answers" to the big concepts of the unit in one place to refer to or use for studying. My son is a detail guy so he tends to go off on a tangent with a lot of details about one particular part of a chapter he found interesting, so it has been challenging, but good for him, to learn that he has to first make sure he answers (and can sift out) the big ideas of the chapter. The Student Reader also has some photos, maps, and drawings that illustrate the chapter contents. Each chapter contains several key vocabulary words defined in sidebar boxes, to aid comprehension of the chapter and help boost students' vocabularies as a whole. The Student Reader is available as an actual book for purchase, or as a FREE downloaded PDF from the Core Knowledge web site. (See more about these options below under Cost.) 

Student Reader

Teacher Guide

The Teacher Guide is also available for purchase as a text or for free as a PDF download. The Teacher Guide includes the pacing guide, which I largely ignore. (We go at our own pace which is generally a bit than the 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week pace that is outlined.) It includes some general teaching suggestions and information about the unit components, and some worksheets that can be photocopied out of the back for student use (including crossword puzzles, fill-in-the-blanks, graphic organizers, and multiple-choice quizzes). There are also performance assessments at the end of each unit, suggesting larger and interdisciplinary projects to end each unit with a bang, whether by writing a story or essay, making a travel brochure, writing a poem, or making a piece of artwork. 

But the bulk of the Teacher Guide is chapter-by-chapter guidance. Every chapter, right through middle school-level units, includes pages of Guided Reading Supports for the chapter-- page-by-page commentary and questions to ask students to confirm their understanding (there are "Literal," "Evaluative," and "Inferential" questions). When my son was in 4th grade, we would read the chapters together, and I would refer to my Teacher Guide and ask all of these questions as we went. But my son is a good reader and this process made him a little antsy to just get on with it. So then we evolved to having him read an entire chapter (or two) and then I'd sit with him and go back and ask him a selection of these questions to check for understanding. Now that he's a 7th grader, we are skipping the guided reading supports; I am having him read a chapter, write his response to the Big Question on the chapter's big ideas, then I discuss with him his response to the Big Question with evidence from the text as needed. (A sample response to each Big Question is also included in the Teacher Guide.)  

Teacher Guide

Timeline Cards

Just as the Teacher Guide and Student Reader are, the Timeline Cards are available as a free download to be printed out, or for purchase in a cardstock bundle. Most chapters have at least one timeline card. Our current Ancient Greece and Rome unit has 24 Timeline Cards total, over 17 chapters. As you progress through the chapters, you hang up these Timeline Cards in order. Each card is 8.5 x 11 and shows an image and caption representative of the chapter, along with the date. The cumulative effect of hanging them all over the course of a unit helps students keep an eye on all they've read so far and internalize each event in history along with a sense of when it happened in relation to other events around that time or concept. The Teacher Guide suggests different ways of displaying the timeline, including vertically, horizontally, and pinned to a clothesline strung across the room. We have our current timeline making its way across the top of the wall around our great room and it works.   

Timeline Cards

Cost 

All these resources are available for FREE download at the Core Knowledge web site. For our first three years of utilizing Core Knowledge units, we did exactly that, my son reading the chapters on an iPad, me looking through the Teacher Guide notes on my laptop, printing out the Timeline Cards to hang on our walls-- and it worked. It's so great these resources are all free. However, this year for the first time we decided to spend the relatively small amounts to order the real life Teacher Guides, Student Readers, and even Timeline Cards. (This is largely because of a larger goal to help my son improve his study skills like reading for key ideas, underlining or highlighting as he goes, and notetaking. I thought those things might be easier to work on in concrete form, at least for now.) The books are attractive, the Student Reader the length and width of a paperback novel, the Teacher Guide spiral bound for easy use.   

Cross-Curricular Connections 

These units are a great foundation for any given event or period of time we've studied in history. They provide the backbone but they are not all we do. I think the most impactful unit we have done so far was the one on the American Revolution when my son was in 4th grade. We worked through the big Core Knowledge unit. But meanwhile, when he had reading time during the school day I had him choose from among some books in a couple of baskets of nonfiction on the topic of the American Revolution. (We discovered some real favorites in those days, and my son continues to tell anecdotes he learned via now-beloved nonfiction author, Steve Sheinkin, from his hilarious King George: What Was His Problem?) During writing time, he wrote a couple of informational pieces on subtopics of the American Revolution, synthesizing facts and stories from across multiple sources. History became a love of his that year, and the topics and themes of the American Revolution in particular, in part because we immersed ourselves in it.  

Online Resources

Each unit includes a link on the Core Knowledge web site for online resources, which anyone has access to, whether you purchased the books or just downloaded the free versions. The Teacher Guide at the end of each chapter will recommend activities that utilize one or several of these online resources. These "extra" activities can take a whole session or more, but they are generally well worth it. 

Here's a selection of fun and enriching things we've done by way of the online resources and Teacher Guide suggestions of these units over the years:

• Played Native American games (Native Americans, Kindergarten)  
• Watched the animated movie The Prince of Egypt, which tells the story of Moses and the Exodus (Three World Religions, Grade 1) 
• Went on a virtual field trip to Versailles (French Revolution and Romanticism, Grade 6)
• Created our own illuminated manuscripts (Medieval Europe, Grade 4)
• Watched a video of Kabuki Theater, and wrote haiku (Feudal Japan, Grade 5)
• Analyzed and compared two African American spirituals (Civil War, Grade 5)
• Played a Maya math game (Maya, Aztec, and Inca Civilizzations, Grade 5)
• Made a papier-mache pinata (The Culture of Mexico, Grade 1)
• Met and fell in love with the musical Hamilton through a video of "My Shot" (The United States Constitution, Grade 4)

W's own illuminated manuscript next to some actual ones (Medieval Europe, Grade 4)

Pinata painting (Mexico Culture, Grade 1)

If used in one way, the Core Knowledge history units could be viewed as just another boring textbook. But I think it's best used as strong foundation for interdisciplinary study (doing some related reading, writing, art, etc.), and is greatly enriched by the engaging performance assessments at the end of each unit and by the online resources referenced in the units and linked online. 

I recommend these history units for homeschool or school use! Please let me know if you've tried them, or if you have any questions about implementing them. <3