After our Earliest Americans Unit Study we took a little bit of time to work on various individual topics of the kids and finish up some other threads of study. Everything ticked along OK, and we always seem to have this period of time without a unit study in the new year.
And wow! Are we all thrilled to get back into a unit study! It’s like we don’t know what we’re missing until we bring it back!
As has been the case for quite a few of our unit studies, our “spine” is from CoreKnowledge.org/Amplify CKLA. Colonial America is covered in unit 10 of 3rd grade. Often I only cover the content and comprehension aspects of the lessons. This time the language skills included the unit focus on the five parts of re-telling a story, finding the main idea in non-fiction text, and non-fiction research/writing. These are all perfect for us – we’ll be changing the narrative re-telling work up a little: rather than just re-telling the fiction narratives in their own words, they’ll be writing journal entries as though they were there. My oldest is about to take state testing where she’ll have to respond to non-fiction texts. Continued practice in teasing out main ideas and supporting details can only help her here, and I can scaffold the work slightly for my 2nd grader. We will not be covering any of the grammar/morphology work covered in these lessons.
I have us scheduled to cover 2-3 CKLA lessons per week for about 7 weeks. I’m also pulling in a lot of other hands on activities. We’ll examine primary source evidence to determine what happened in Roanoke and Salem, we’ll spend a day discovering if we could survive in Jamestown, geometry with mob cap making, and I have a day of Colonial America science experiments planned.
Accessible throughout our unit study will be plenty of reference books from our library. There will also be quilting activities, knot tying work, a project inspiration board, plus map and timeline work. The map and timeline worksheets are free resources from The Clever Teacher. For the first time I’ll be assigning both kids historical fiction readings in addition to our read alouds. I think we have plenty to be doing, and my oldest has expressed interest in learning about the Pilgrims and the Salem Witch Trials a few times, so I think we’ll have a lot of fun.
Check out our book/resource list for this unit, plus updated wrap up posts as we complete activities:
– Would You Survive in Jamestown?
– Colonial Science Day