Building a Nation 1785-1815

There are many different titles we could have chosen, but in broad strokes this period represents the creation of the American republic and its emergence on the world stage.  European history is booming, quite literally, during this period with the Napoleonic Wars.  Politics in early United States history are equally tumultuous.  The Articles of Confederation fail, and the new nation is called upon to draw up a new Constitution, put down a tax rebellion, decide what national defense is necessary, all while expanding trade and influence on the high seas.  We fight a ‘Quasi-War’ against our revolutionary ally, France, engage multiple Barbary States against piracy, and ultimately fight another war against Great Britain.

In November, we will leave the American Revolution behind and begin looking at the years that followed. First looking at how the Articles of Confederation failed and why the Constitutional convention became necessary.   We will take an in-depth look at the Bill of Rights and the protections they offer both then and now.  The next week we will spend some time focused on the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. We will dig into some of what was going on with various Native American tribes and then wrap up the month with the Carolina Gold Rush and an introduction to Lewis and Clark.

This is a time when borders and boundaries were changing frequently. The original 13 colonies become states, the nation adds two additional states and two huge territories (the Northwest and Louisiana purchase).  The changing borders and national expansion can be confusing and I recommend finding a map resource to help show those changes.  There are a variety of maps and programs that can be used. One program I like is Map Trek by Knowledge Quest. You can get a free sample here.

There are so many great art lessons in our American History Chalk Pastel Course to tie into this month that I am having trouble deciding which ones we want to cover. There is one specific to the war of 1812, The Constitution, Lewis and Clark, and several others that would tie in nicely. This is a great problem to have and knowing my kids they will want to do them all.  They enjoy them even when they are not ‘assigned work.’

There are many good books that we are looking at using with this block of history. My son loves the Rush Revere series and will also be reading the book Six Frigates which was written to an adult audience but has a great deal of good information about naval history and early American politics.  My daughter is going to start with Little House by Boston Bay to get an idea of life during the War of 1812 from the prospective of a young girl. She is much more interested in what was going on in people’s lives than the battles and details of the war.  We will probably use Sacagawea as our family read aloud this month.  In addition the children will use and I will read aloud parts of several books about the Constitution and the Bill of Right and we’ll review the primary source documents, but probably stop short of memorizing the preamble. We will continue studying selected chapters from America’s Story Volume 1 by Master Books.  Many more great books are included on the list of resources found in our free resource library. If you have not already done so, please sign up at the bottom of this post to get access to all of those resources.

We have a busy month with family events planned and preparing for the holiday season, so our field trips are going to be shorter and closer to home this month. We will visit the Stanley Home and New Bern Academy, connected with Tryon Palace and participate in a Native American webcast from the North Carolina Museum of History. We will also be looking back at pictures and memories from a trip a couple years ago to Washington D.C. where we saw many things that connect to the creation of this nation including visiting the archives and seeing the documents first hand. For those able to do more field trips this month there are many great ones listed in our resource list.

On the digital front, we will be watching a few more episodes of Liberty’s Kids and an old classic, Schoolhouse Rock which has some very catchy songs to help children remember information about the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and How a Bill Becomes a Law among others.

I’ve found some recipes that look quite tasty from this time period and we are excited to try them. My son will be looking into the rations from the War of 1812 and comparing them to the Revolutionary War as well as comparing the rations of various armies during the war. This may become a recurring theme as we work our way up through history. After all, ‘An Army marches on it’s stomach’ (and so do many eleven year old boys).

A couple additional resources that may be of interest are the current sale on Discovery Education Streaming Plus at the Buyers co-op. This is a great collection of educational programming. They also have a sale on Jim Hodges Audio CDs right now. He has several different collections that would work well with early American history.

If you would like to join us on this journey through US History, join our mailing list and get access to our free library. Each month I’ll post a list of resources and ideas for the time period we are going to cover the next month. You can learn more in our post Our Journey Through History.  Colonial and Revolutionary resources are currently posted.

When you sign up for our free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

Resource Library

This post may contain affiliate or referral links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

Don’t forget Tuesday 10/31 is the final day for this sale!  There are only a few more days left to take advantage of the great sale at Schoolhouse Teachers! With this sale you can have the curriculum you need for all of your children for  about $10 per month and you can try it for $5 for your first month.  They have everything from core classes, to art, music, and other great electives.

History was certainly tasty this week! Using the list of rations that were supposed to be issued to a Revolutionary War soldier, my eldest son cooked us a great lunch. We had corn bread, peas with salt pork, Rice sweetened a bit with molasses, and root beer (I thought hard cyder (period spelling) was taking it a bit too far so we improvised) to wash it all down. While we know that unfortunately they often didn’t have all of these things due to shortages it was a neat experience for them to learn about the foods that they were supposed to have. We also talked about the fact that while it was very yummy for lunch, if we had to eat those foods everyday we would get tired of them.  We also had a good discussion about the fact that location and season would have played an important role in what was available. There was one list of rations approved by congress but we know the reality varied a great deal based on where the troops were located. Some had more flour, some more rice or corn. Some had easy access to fish, while others had more salt pork or beef. I have uploaded a list and explanation of the rations into our free resource library.

We had a chance to watch a live webcast from our North Carolina Museum of History which discusses small artifacts. it shared how it didn’t take big objects like ships or cannons to give us important information. It also went through some of North Carolina’s and America’s history by sharing artifacts found with-in the museum. It was a great program and you can watch a replay of it on Youtube: Small Stuff/Big Stories.  It does appear that because of the nature of the live taping an such you need to fast forward to about the 14 minute mark to get the actual webcast to start playing.

On Wednesday we had the opportunity to attend the North Carolina State Fair and particularly the Military History program. Various groups from the North Carolina Cultural Resources department were there representing the wars in American history. Each group had a table and display set up throughout the day and this highlight of the day was a historical uniform revue. This is set up similar to a fashion show, those there from each group were called up on stage and someone described and explained their uniform. This particular revue started with a soldier dressed as one that would have come with the first English colonist to Roanoke Island and went through the Vietnam War.  My husband was participating as a historical interpreter with Tryon palace. Their group represents a Continental Line unit. Aside from him being my obvious favorite, I really enjoyed the fact that the soldier representing the Vietnam War was wearing the uniform he actually wore in the Vietnam War.  I did my best to get pictures of each group, though the sun was not being exceptionally cooperative. I have included photos of as many groups as possible in the slideshow below. I am planning to use these pictures to help the children remember as we get to those times in history this year.

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Next week we should be back to a more normal routine as our adventures at the fair are over and it’s time to settle back into the books a bit. We plan on doing another art lesson from You Are an Artist, reading some more in America’s Story Volume 1, and working on finishing up our projects. If time allows, the children want to watch a couple more episodes of Liberty’s Kids. Matthew was very interested in the rations that we looked at last week so we may be trying some other recipes this week.

When you sign up for our free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

Resource Library

Finally, don’t forget there is only a few more days left to take advantage of the great sale at Schoolhouse Teachers! With this sale you can have the curriculum you need for all of your children for  about $10 per month and you can try it for $5 for your first month.  They have everything from core classes, to art, music, and other great electives.

This post may contain affiliate or referral links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

While we learn and grow over the summer we take a long break from our formal schoolwork. This works well for our family during the busy summer season. We try to wrap up most of our studies by Memorial Day and we start back our formal schedule the day after Labor Day.  Thus we enjoyed our official first day of school this year.

We got started with our history program by spending a bit of time looking over America’s Story Volume 1 which we are using for our spine for this portion of Our Journey Through History. Then we enjoyed a chance to discuss the various ideas that we would be studying this month. The children had a chance to choose their independent projects, we enjoyed some read-aloud time, and started planning our family timeline of US History.

The kids loved looking at the pictures and timeline that were in America’s Story. We have the digital version so I put the pictures up on the TV screen so they could all look at one time without having to crowd around the computer screen. In hindsight, I will probably get the paperback version of the next volume so they can look at it on their own but putting it up on the screen worked did give them a chance to see it. I think that having it in paperback would make it easier for them to go back and use it as a reference after I had read it aloud and to see the pictures a bit closer than the TV screen allows.

For our read aloud we worked on If You Lived in Colonial Times . This was a great book that follows a question and answer format giving common inquiries and age appropriate answers. It can be read as a whole book or they can just pick the questions that are interesting to them while focusing on early colonial times in the New England area. I read about a third of the book to the children and they are planning on reading the rest of it on their own because they really enjoyed it.

We also had the chance to do one of our ‘You Are an Artist’ Chalk Pastel lessons. The children drew pilgrims and they loved it. The drawings turned out adorable and the children were proud to display them.  The lesson only took about 15 minutes and everyone had a good time. We are using the American History Video Course from ‘You Are and Artist’ this year to tie into our history.  If we finish that one up we may add the landmarks course to it as well.  If you want to learn more about their art courses check out my review.

Both children are excited about the projects that they picked. My daughter is going to be working on weaving a basket. In addition to learning this new skill for our history she will be able to enter the basket into our state fair.  My son decided on a puppet show featuring colonial children. He has been hard at work this week creating stick and paper puppets, complete with colonial toys.

Last year the children did a video about various colonial games for our North Carolina Junior Historians. If your child is interested in the games colonial children would have played,  please check out their Youtube video: Colonial Children’s Games.

Next week (assuming our impact from Hurricane Irma is not too great) we will be sharing about  field trips, some colonial cooking, and project updates. We cheated a bit on our field trip schedule and started this summer with a trip to Roanoke Island. I’ll share some pictures and information next week about the trip to Roanoke Island.

If you would like to join us on this journey through US History, join our mailing list and get access to our free library. Each month I’ll post a list of resources and ideas for the time period we are going to cover the next month. You can learn more in our post Our Journey Through History. The colonial resources are already in the free resources and October’s Revolutionary War resources should be posted sometime next week.

When you sign up for our free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

Resource Library

This post may contain affiliate or referral links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog