This has been our unit week. We studied sound and the Underground Railroad. Above are our many sound experiments, which came from books in our local library. We also did some cool work on Brain Pop that had some free educational movies about winter. For the Underground Railroad, we read a biography about Harriet Tubman and a history of slavery called North Star, which was almost too in depth. We didn't finish all of it, but the kids could recall in detail some of the stories of slaves escaping to freedom. We looked at quilt codes that the slaves would use to send secret messages about escape using a quilt hanging on the clothesline. Tera and Daniel did an exercise where they had to find secret places in our house to hide 10 slaves pretending they were abolitionists. I checked out an American Girl cookbook from the time of the Civil War. Tera saw sausage and gravy with biscuits recipes and started drooling. So on Thursday, Tera and Daniel helped make biscuits and gravy for lunch. Later that day, Tera and I made a pretzel recipe she found in her personal devotion book. When I do a unit study, sometimes I worry that the kids won't grasp vocabulary and use that vocabulary to answer questions about what we are studying. This time they did very well, but I attribute this to the great amount of reading aloud we did and the sometimes repetitious nature of the stories. It really cements it in the kid's brain. I really wasn't looking forward to this unit for some reason, but they did a lot of work this week and had great fun. Daniel is hooked on making the domino trains. He has been working on them for the past 3 days, ever since we used dominoes to explain how sound waves work. Now, we are waiting for the snow.
Underground Railroad Sites:
http://www.teachersfirst.com/share/ugrr/ozella.html
http://www.waynet.org/levicoffin/quiz/default.htm
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/99/railroad/j3.html