World At Our Fingertips

There are millions of free resources available but my kids have the attention span of gnats. I like to have a bunch of stuff around the house for instant answers. If they ask a question and the reply is, “Hey next time we go to the library we can look it up”, then they will have completely forgotten several times over once we hit the library. So when we see things on sale, used or free we bring them home. So we have a globe, maps, books, books, some other books and the internet on speed dial.

While we were at IKEA today we saw a book called Top 10 of the World – top 10 tallest moutains, largest deserts, etc. Picking that up got us in a geographic spirit. So when we got home we put together a floor puzzle of the USA. We named the states we drove through first and then the others they’ve been in. Then we filled in the rest.

Then we read the introducation to The First Americans: The Story of Where They Came From and Who They Became. We picked it up at the used bookstore the other day with some of our credit for clearning out our own books. We’ve never covered Native Americans, Pilgrims, Columus type stuff because at the early elementary years most sources are happy little cartoons. Just the abundance of phrases like “Colubus discovered America” drive me crazy. Smallpox and syphilis don’t make for good picture books and I don’t like the all is happy stories either, so we’ve just left it alone. I decided this year we should cover the basics. We’ve been reading Indian creation myths and other stories but no non-fiction yet.  The First Americans; starts with the line, “We begin not in 1492, but when the peopling of America first began – about 20,000 years ago, in the far north of Alaska where a land bridge once connected Norther America to Asia.” Looks right up our alley.

We pulled out a globe to show how close Alaska and Russia really are.  Then we read the intro to the book. Then one story from Stories from Native North America. Next we’re going to keep reading from The First Americans, map where different tribes live, talk about differences in clothing, housing and food and maybe do some art projects. But for now the boys are busy rescuing their sister, the princess, from the dragon even though she has superhero powers of her own. And somehow the whole thing is involving a whole lot of drawing maps . . . maps to the dragon, to the princess, and to the snack cabinet. Seriously.