Knowledge@Kindle - Historical Fiction 1900s (FREEBIE)

The Support Group You've almost made it through!  Whether you are already on summer break, pushing through another month, or in year-round homeschooling, another school year is just about to go on the books!  Congratulations! Congratulations Graduates Class of 2018! Kindle History Corner Historical Fiction 1900s I love using literature in history, and I love using historical fiction as well.  The kids enjoy the stories, and then we can test their knowledge of the time period by discussing which items in the book are based on true history. My girls especially love the American Girl novels.  American Girl lapbooks got my girls started doing lapbooks, and we have spent many happy hours on them over the years! 1904 1914 1934 1944

FREEBIE This week's FREEBIE is a biography of a REAL American Girl, Jackie Kennedy! *Disclaimer: We have not read or reviewed this book.  The link is given for informational purposes only. Every Kindle Lapbook and Lapbook Journal includes a coupon on the last page for the FREE PDF version so that you can print the pages! Click Here to Join Our Newsletter for News & Freebies!

American Girl: Meet Rebecca Lapbook

New American Girl​ Lapbook at Knowledge Box Central​!

30 Homeschool Freebies in 30 Days - More American Girl Lapbook Samples

Reading together and creating a lapbook for the American Girl series is such a wonderful mother daughter project. This Lapbook goes along with The American Girl book Meet Felicity. Create a keepsake that will last  for years to come while exploring this fascinating period of history.

All instructions are included.

Download a sample of this product here:  VIEW SAMPLE FILE

You can find the full product American Girl: Meet Felicity Lapbook here.

More American Girl lapbooks (free samples available at below links):

   Meet Josefina Lapbook coming soon!

30 Homeschool Freebies in 30 Days - American Girl Lapbook Sample

Reading together and creating a lapbook for the American Girl series is such a wonderful mother- daughter project. This Lapbook goes along with The American Girl book Meet Felicity. Create a keepsake that will last  for years to come while exploring this fascinating period of history.

All instructions are included.

This product is available in the following format: Ebook, CD, Print or Assembled

Download a FREE sample of this product here:  VIEW SAMPLE FILE

See full product here.

Happy Lapbooking!

TOS Review: Zeezok Z-Guide to the Movies for Kit Kittredge

I have read that even when you are homeschooling, you should get up in the morning and dress professionally, like a teacher in school, and set a good example for your children.  Nevertheless, I cannot resist a good homeschool pajama day every so often.  Pop in a good educational movie, light a fire in the fireplace, sip hot chocolate, and eat popcorn in our jammies.  I'm trying to do this with my kids about once a month.

Some of my girls' favorite movies are the American Girl Movies, so they were excited to have a break from their regular work to review Zeezok Publishing's Z-Guide to the Movies for Kit Kittredge: An American Girl.  My boys enjoyed it, too, but don't tell anyone!

The Z-Guides to the Movies are available for Elementary/Middle School or for High School levels, and for a number of popular movies, such as Johnny Tremain, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.  Most of the movies can be obtained from Netflix or even checked out from your local library.  We reviewed the Elementary/Middle School level.

The Z-Guide is a completely downloadable product, and it is much more than a discussion guide.  It includes ten activities, designed to be done two-per-day for a week.  The Kit Kittredge Z-Guide began with an overview of the movie and of the historical setting.  Activity 1 listed movie review questions for the children to answer while they were watching the movie.  I was impressed by how this kept their attention on the movie and improved their retention.  Activity 2 involved researching the Great Depression apart from the movie.  After all, movies are seldom a completely accurate portrayal of history!  Other activities followed, including vocabulary, a discussion of literary devices used, a newspaper story to write (because Kit wanted to be a newspaper reporter), and my favorite, a discussion of the worldview that shaped the events in the movie.  The worldview discussion teaches students to not only watch movies for entertainment, but also to understand the worldviews behind them.  According to Zeezok publishing, the hands-on activities for some of the movies include creating a treasure hunt, completing a craft, or planning and making a meal.   I plan to check out some more of these, because I have always loved unit guides that help me to include several different subjects, hands-on activities, and various learning styles in a way that will be educational and memorable for my children.

You can find all of Zeezok's Z-Guides to the Movies at Zeezok Publishing, or click here.  Prices vary, with many of them running around $12.99.  Check Zeezok's price list for individual titles.

TOS Crew members reviewed Z-Guides for a number of different movies, so to see what they each have to say, click here.

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Zeezok's Z-Guide to the Movies for Kit Kittredge in exchange for a fair review.  No other compensation was given, and all opinions are my own.

Doll Dresses

Practice, practice, practice.  Practice makes perfect.  Oh, how I remember those long hours of practice doing various activities when I was younger, and how I couldn't wait until I could actually apply what I'd been learning.  You know, when you practice piano scales for hours on end, and how you long to play a real song.  Not "Farmer Tom Plays the Scales" or "Up and Down the Keyboard We Go," but a REAL song, one that will impress your friends.  One they play on the radio.  I remember in junior high school when my friend, Jenny, first broke out of playing classical music for her piano teacher, and learned to play the "Flashdance" theme on the piano.  We were all so inspired!!  (OK, I'm dating myself!)


Well, my kids are the same way with instrument practice and with other activities, like sewing.  So, now the sewing lessons are paying off.  My daughter made her first doll dress for her American Girl doll.  (Actually, I think this one is an "Our Generation" doll from Target, but we like them just as well!)

For this dress, she used a kit from Wal-mart that her brother bought her for Christmas.  They also carry these kits in fabric stores.  The pieces are pre-drawn on the fabric.  You cut them out and follow the instructions to sew them together.  This was supposed to be a nightgown.  It has long sleeves and elastic in the neck, so these were a challenge for a beginning seamstress, but she did a fabulous job.  She decided she wanted to use this as a dress rather than a nightgown, so she added the buttons for interest and designed the hat.  She hasn't hemmed the dress yet.  She explained to me that she tried the dress on the doll to see how it fit, and the doll loved the dress so much that she wouldn't let her take it off to hem it!  Hemming must be boring to my children, because my son also has not hemmed his Jedi robe yet.  They seem to think these projects are "finished" enough, and they just want to use them!

Before sewing these pieces together, I had my daughter trace them onto paper so that she has the pattern for future use.  She has already cut them out of another type of fabric as well, and has another dress just about ready to sew together.

Here are some more patterns we will be working on in the near future:

Some free, not-too-difficult patterns from http://www.susankramer.com/dollclothespatterns.html.

And we just found this TREASURE!!!  The actual American Girl Doll historical outfit patterns that AG used to sell but has discontinued.  Some collectors got together and scanned them in, and now you can download them all for FREE.  These are, of course, more difficult, but my daughter can't wait to try her hand at them!

http://www.agplaythings.com/AG%20Patterns/DollDressPatterns.html.

In the meantime, she is filling our house with throw pillows, which are easy and FUN to sew!  Both of these pink pillow covers and the little stuffed dog, if you can see it there in her hand, came in the kit with the nightgown.  She sewed and stuffed the small pillow and the stuffed dog.  The large pillow was designed to be a blanket for the doll, but she decided to stuff it and make a pillow for herself to match her doll's.

American Girl Lapbooks: Kirsten & Kaya

My girls have been charging right through the American Girl history program, and I completely forgot to post the last couple of lapbooks they made.  After Felicity from Colonial Virginia and Josefina from 1820s New Mexico (then part of Mexico), we moved on to Kirsten, the pioneer girl from the 1800s.  We also began reading the "Little House" books by Laura Ingalls Wilder - those were my favorites growing up!!  Here is the Kirsten lapbook (they each made one but they were very similar):

We went back and picked up Kaya, whose books were actually set in 1864, ten years before Felicity, in the western part of the country, but which were written much later and had not been included in the "Portraits of American Girlhood" study.  We used the unit as an opportunity to tie together all the different things we had learned about various Native American tribes.

If you would like to use the American Girl books as a history curriculum, see Portraits of American Girlhood.

You can find the templates used in the above lapbooks at Homeschool Share.

Hand-made!

I'm not one of those crafty people who has time to make all my kids' clothes or enter a lot of craft fairs.  In fact, I do not sew.  But my favorite items and my favorite gifts are the hand-made ones.  As the kids get older, they are learning to do more and more of their own projects.

The girls made matching ponchos for themselves and their dolls:

And if you want to get a boy interested in sewing, download a pattern for a Jedi Robe!

For the ponchos, we got a kit to make a knotted blanket at Wal-mart.  They have them at fabric stores, too, I think, or you can use two scrap pieces of fleece.  The kit we got had a large hot pink piece of fleece with a "gymnastics" theme, and a solid, lighter pink piece of fleece for the back.  I cut each piece in half and gave one half of each piece to each of the girls.  They then cut fringe on the two short ends of their rectangles (you may want to pin the pieces together to hold them in place while you cut and tie the pieces).  They tied the fringes from the top piece and bottom piece together, and we cut a hole through both pieces in the center for their heads.  For the doll ponchos, we only used the top (hot pink) piece.  We cut small squares, cut holes in the center for the dolls' heads, and cut small fringes and knotted them on the edges.

If I can find the link for the Jedi robe pattern (which my husband downloaded quite some time ago), I will post it.

Happy crafting!

Josefina Lapbooks

Here are the Josefina Lapbooks.  Once again, my son chose to do the Mexican-American War rather than a Josefina theme, and his lapbook was not nearly as ornate as his sisters'.  I realized, however, that when I said he wasn't "into" the project yesterday, I had short-changed him.  It is true that he is not nearly as concerned about presentation as his sisters are.  That is a lesson we will have to learn another day, as he does need to learn that presentation is important before he goes to college, writes a resume, and gets a job.  This assignment, however, was a history assignment, not an art assignment, and I did not specify that they needed to be concerned about presentation or that their grade would have anything to do with visual presentation.  I said that we were doing this project as an alternative to the frequent written report, and that I wanted them to show what they had learned about the period in history.  So his project was within acceptable parameters.   As I watched the kids work on this second lapbook, I realized that he was doing far more research than his sisters, and he learned a lot of information that we had not covered in class.  While the girls took things we learned in class, and mainly things just from the "Josefina" books, and looked up a few items, they basically took what they already knew and started working on making a perfect-looking lapbook.  They said the more "flappy" things it had in it, the better!  They also learned the required material, worked hard on their lapbooks, and certainly deserve an "A."  Meanwhile, my son spent the entire morning that they were working on cutting and pasting to research more information about his topic.  He enjoys finding trivia that his audience would not know to include in his report.  He learned a great deal.  True, he can be a minimalist and did the least amount of work he could get away with on the actual cutting-and-pasting project.  He's not the only 10 to 12-year-old boy who is a minimalist when it comes to schoolwork!!  But when the kids stood up to deliver their oral presentations, he was a wealth of information, gave an excellent speech, and was able to answer the others' questions.  He definitely deserves an "A" as well.  In another project, we will talk about the importance of visual aids in getting and keeping your audience's attention, and I will encourage him to spend more time actually perfecting his visual aid.  What it all comes down to, though, is that children all have different interests, different personalities, and different strengths and weaknesses.  Being able to know them well and to have so much time working with them one-on-one on these things is part of the beauty of homeschooling.

American Girl Lapbooks

Wow!  I have been wanting to get this project done for a long time, and we finally did it!  We studied Felicity (and Colonial Days in general) 2 years ago in homeschool, but the interest was renewed recently as we went to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia for the homeschool days last month.  The kids loved it!  It gave us a good chance to review that part of early American history and to make these fabulous "Felicity" lapbooks that I had since found templates for on the Internet.  The templates and ideas are available at http://www.homeschoolshare.com/American_Girl_Lapbook.php.  If you have a girl who loves the American Girl characters and you'd like to use them to spruce up your history studies, take a look at Portraits of American Girlhood.  You can usually find the American Girl books at the library and will not need to purchase anything else.  I use these alongside Beautiful Feet's American History through Literature.

My son was clearly not into this assignment (which he did on Colonial Williamsburg rather than Felicity specifically).  No worries.  When we do a lapbook on the NASA Space Program, his will be immaculate!

Noteable Scraps