I've created plans for the 13 colonies which will begin very soon I hope.
I've been sick and then had laryngitis for well over a week. Thankfully my boys love audio books and stories and so we had an extremely literature rich couple of weeks despite my lack of voice!
It's worth noting for those with a weak library system that for almost all the core knowledge literature selections I've been able to find online versions of the stories. Almost always I can find text and often illustrations as well. Often I can find nicely done audio or video versions. We did the core knowledge objectives for many fairy tales while I've been sick and I was able to find audio versions at sites like kiddierecords.com for nearly all for example. If a search was particularly hard I'll try to post what I found as we do the lessons. I used this link for Issun-boshi as it was all I found but most had multiple choices.
When I finally got my voice back we covered Beatrix Potter stories as specified in the Core Knowledge curriculum. However, I wanted to post because I have a book The True Story of Peter Rabbit that worked so nicely with these lessons. It recounts the story of Beatrix Potter's letter to Noel Moore which later became the Peter Rabbit story. This was neat because Noel realizes Miss Potter modeled Peter after him. This further emphasized that she gave human characteristics to animals (a core knowledge objective) and, even better, why and who she might have had in mind for the character! The afterward told more about the resulting books and Noel Moore and the book includes picture reproductions of the original letters as well.
We talked about the Salk vaccine (Noel Moore had polio) for polio and vaccines generally. This allowed us to talk about the smallpox vaccine and eradication as well which ties it to some of our current history in terms of diseases of the time.
