So I backed up in our Native American Culture studies. I hadn't covered them as thoroughly as I wanted to, or done as many of the projects as I wanted to. I went all the way back to the Southeast region. We reread the chapter, and I created a vocabulary activity to go with it and had the boys do that and glue it into our notebooks.
Then for a fun activity we made birch-bark canoes. We cut them out of paper and "sewed" up the sides using yarn, but talked about how the Native Americans used animal sinew. Then we melted wax and smeared it to the bottom. I was supposed to use paraffin wax, but I didn't have any on hand, and the thought of dragging five children to Wal-mart for wax made me want to rip my eyeballs out. So instead I just burned a candle during quiet time, and used the pooled wax to smear on the bottom of the boats. It worked, except that we didn't have enough wax to go around, so the entirety of the boats didn't get covered, which means they didn't float as well as the might have otherwise.
BUT, this didn't end up being a bad thing, because we talked about it. Why the boats sank when the water touched the paper, but not the wax. What else might have been done to keep the boats level and floating, etc. So all in all it turned out to be a nice stroll into the scientific method. Sort of. :) The kids were happy, that's all that really matters.
A few days later, we made beads out of clay like the Seminoles. We read about how Seminole women wear so many beaded necklaces that you can't see their necks at all. When the beads dry, we will paint them and string them into bracelets, or maybe necklaces if there are enough beads.
Lincoln is also reading the book Soft Rain by Cornelia Cornelissen, which is about a Cherokee girl who has to walk the Trail of Tears with her family. He's not super thrilled about it, because it isn't "his kind of book", but oh well. :) It's not along, and it goes with our unit.
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