New World Explorers

When we decided to homeschool for 4th grade & Kindergarten, I think History and Science intimidated me the most.  I homeschooled my son for K/1st grade, so Lyndsey's Reading/Writing/Math did not scare me in the least.  4th grade did make me nervous!  Ugh, I have to teach history and science.  Anyone who knows me, knows that I did not like history and science!  I knew I had to be careful and pick a curriculum that I could "stick with" this first year and feel successful!   I found The Time Travelers  from Homeschool in the Woods to be very hands on and crafty.  The girls and I have loved it!  We just completed the first unit of six, The New World Explorers.  We have sailed through the explorers by building ships, baking with spices, learning about knots, and creating detailed maps of each sailors voyages.  We have read MANY books about Lief Erikson, Ponce deLeon, Cortez, and Columbus.  We did not get to overwhelmed with dates, but we did place a few explorers on our Record of Time timeline.  

One of our final projects was making Doubloons & Pieces of Eight for our treasure box in our lapbook.

The last 2 lessons were on Pirates.  We played a dress the pirate dice game as we talked about the Pirate Way of Life!

Then we took all our projects for the last few months and spread them out to create our lapbook!

When you open this FAT folder up, this is what you see!  We made little foldables about many of the explorers we studied.

Flip the middle section up to reveal even more! Our treasure box of doubloons and Pieces of Eight and the drawing were we learned the parts of a ship.

Flip the middle section down to find even more!  

This lapbook is packed full of months of work  FUN!