I love Belinda’s description of her curriculum, “A Literature-Based history featuring African-American presence and contribution”.
It is exactly what I was looking for and I have really enjoyed getting another point of view on the history of America.
My boys are on week 9 of the Intermediate Level Volume one book.
It is geared towards more middle school aged kids and I have her highschool curriculum as well but after looking at it I decided(although I loved it) that my boys were not ready for the content yet.
But I am really looking forward to them doing it in another two years.
Because this is geared for a lower grade then the boys, I have needed to add a lot more reading to it.
One of the things I loved about her curriculum was starting with the first people to come to America.
I added as many books as I could on native american history and was happy to find this list on books by native american authors.
I also struggled a bit with keeping track of what they were doing from the curriculum and came up with these spreadsheets that I can easily see.
I think I will grade them based on completion.
They have one sheet for the reading and one for the activities.
She recommends The History of US books to go along with her curriculum.
I was not sure about them based on reviews so I got Masterbooks “America’s Story 1” to try also but my boys ended up liking the History of US a lot better and it covered the history of America before Columbus a lot more. Especially the first book “The First Americans”.
I am also trying to use her Primary Level with my three girls.
They do better with projects and documentaries than sitting for reading but I finally worked out how to get more reading done this month.
Before this month I just got every kids book I could on Native American folklore and culture for them to look at and read.
Although we have not done them on the same schedule as suggested, we did make two of the projects she has in her curriculum.
Tipi’s and corn husk dolls.
The tipi’s we made because of this book “Storm Maker’s Tipi”. It was a nice easy craft that they enjoyed.
I actually did the corn husk dolls because of another book I got “A Kid’s Guide to Native American History“.
It is a really interesting resource but I have not used it as much as I have wanted to yet.
So far we are really enjoying her recommended reading!
The sites we have attempted like this before were VERY difficult to get a trailer to so I was not sure what to expect but this site was easy to get to!
We had dropped the trailer at Blue River and decided to drive to the other area I wanted to camp at without a trailer.
The road and site were perfect!
The Wildlife Refuge itself was a bit run down but was really interesting.
We left right after our walk around the springs and headed to a spot called Blue River.