Ohio River Valley Pioneers and Johnny Appleseed

Lesson--Ohio River Valley Pioneers with Flatboat Travel

We used our salt dough maps from the Wilderness Road lessons to talk about how people settled the Ohio River valley area and flatboat travel by pioneers down the Ohio.

We read Unit 8 of American Pioneers and Patriots including the introduction to that unit. The introduction gives context for Native American reaction to the settlers and is really important to begin in my opinion.

Activities
We made a flatboat today using the activity in this link (scroll down to the make a flatboat PDF at the bottom).

The next day we visited a local pioneer village from this time period. Here is a sort of clickable tour. There may be nice virtual options online; I didn't look much since we have local options.

Lessons--Johnny Appleseed and Art (texture in art)
This lesson set took multiple days here. I'm sure the time used could vary.

There are lots of apple related crafts and activities here.

Day 1
I read The American Story The Lord's Been Good to Me and we talked about the legends or tall tales that surround Johnny Appleseed (a Core Knowledge Objective). We also watched this silly song. Most of the library books I previewed incorporated plenty of Appleseed legend and could be used for this lesson. There are lots of online video or audio stories (some linked later) that could be an alternative to The American Story or another book as well.

Activities:
I did the toilet paper craft from this link because it emphasizes his religious faith and some of the legends surrounding him even in his lifetime.

We also made baked apples today.

Day 2

I read First Biographies Johnny Appleseed because I found it more accurate than the other library books I previewed.

As specified in the Core Knowledge art objectives we discussed the texture in the Young Hare painting by Albrecht Durer. This link includes artist information as well as the painting.

Activity
We did the apple tree print picture craft from this link. The paint in this craft has a texture to it. I could have done apple prints instead. On the back we added a listing of the positive characteristics of Johnny Appleseed.

Day 3

We watched this about the life of Johnny Appleseed. An alternative is this audio about Johnny Appleseed. I would have used a book had I found one I liked. This has some legends presented as fact which I used to reinforce the concepts outlined in Core Knowledge. I used this information to guide our discussion.

We viewed this Native American Pomo Basket.

For our follow up activity today we glued small red yarn pieces onto an apple shape so our apple had texture we could feel like that basket we viewed. On the back of the apple the boys listed some of the legends/inaccuracies passed down.

Here are some apple games I didn’t ultimately use. Here is an animation we didn't use (not accurate but cute).