Better Than I Expected.

We are studying the Civil War in kind of a mini-unit. For us, that means a week or so. We've watched The Red Badge of Courage. We watched part of the PBS series on the war, but it didn't hold the kid's interest. We watched a documentary about The Monitor, which was very cool. We went to the Frasier Historical Arms Museum and saw Civil War weapons and saw a dramatization by a woman acting as Clara Barton, who did an excellent job. We've read biographies of some of the leaders during the war, such as Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln. (We visited Abe's birthplace last year.) We went to a Women of the Civil War museum, which was very informative and fun. We learned about women joining the army to be with their husbands and to get a pension and acting as spies during the war. We read the Magic Treehouse Book, Civil War on Sunday. I printed out maps of the union and confederate states and we talked about the Mason Dixon line. We talked about Civil War 'firsts' including the submarine and the machine gun. (cool stuff). My boys acted out a battle in the living room and my daughter dressed herself as Abraham Lincoln (she wouldn't let me take pictures, darn it) and read the Gettysburg address. We got most of the ideas from the KONOS volume 3 and I have to say, I think it went pretty well, as it usually does when I trust the curriculum and just go with it.