In honor of Columbus Day, I thought I would share something about explorers, but not at all about Columbus! {smile}

We have been reading and studying and talking and learning about Jamestown and early Virginia colonization and woodland Indians for several weeks now. It started this summer when we started reading Blood on the River together as a family read-aloud. I had been collecting Jamestown resources for most of the spring and fall to put together one of our mini unit studies. You know, stalking Amazon for price drops, haunting the local thrift stores at lunch time, and hitting up some of my  local friends since we’re living smack dab in the middle of the action location!

Then the school year started and they each had to choose characters for their American Heritage Speeches–the Ladybug choose Pocahontas and the Cowboy chose Captain John Smith. So we kept reading!

The Ladybug has actually been very interested in Pocahontas for about two years now, so we already had several books about her on our shelves–and they inevitably include John Smith!

You’ll notice that our list has a mix of resource types, including fiction and non-fiction, self-read or read-aloud, picture/photo-based books, movies, workbooks or worksheets, and coloring books or coloring sheets. I also like to use the web to find pictures, diagrams, maps, and historical markers or sites that we won’t be able to visit in person. Pinterest has been a huge help to me here. I started a Studying Jamestown and Virginia History board just to keep all the information we found! Our kiddos love technology as much as any other kid their age, but we’re pretty careful about it–and we just don’t have time for a lot of screen time! I find that using Pinterest to set up a pre-screened Board of resources for them is a great way to give them productive computer time.

{BTW: I include a lot of commentary in my resource lists. It makes for a long post, but I just think it’s valuable to you, the reader, to know something about the resource I’m sharing and how we used it.}

Movies

• First Landing, The Voyage from England to Jamestown. We enjoyed this movie for Family Movie Night one week. It’s the story of the actual voyage across the water and actual landing at Cape Henry and Jamestown, with very little after that. It’s told with a focus on Robert Hunt, the pastor that traveled with the colonists. It’s completely factual and followed the story in all our books and was enjoyable as well as completely family friendly. (And it was filmed at Historic St. Luke’s Church, right here in little ol’ Smithfield!)
• Godspeed to Jamestown.
• The New World, Nightmare at Jamestown. The forensic science is very interesting, but it was a little heavy for the kiddos. The focus is on everything bad that happened and while it’s all factual, 50 minutes of cannibalism and plague is a little mature for our age group to absorb right now.
• Pocahontas. Yes, the Disney movie.  A little off-base, but provided a nice, relaxing counterpoint to Nightmare at Jamestown. {smile} Also sparked a great discussion about the differences between the movie and the “real” story.

Coloring Books and Pages

This was a little tricky because there’s not a lot out there that I found specific to Jamestown. But, as always, Dover publications are amazing!!

• Life in Colonial America (Seen in pic above. I got this one for the Cowboy.)
• Woodland Indians (Seen in pic below. I got this one for the Ladybug.)
• Exploration of North America
• Early American Life Printables (Thank you, Pinterest!)
• On-line Pilgrim Coloring Pages (I just printed the ship pictures for us.)

Books

Wow, there’s a ton of books out there about this topic! As I mentioned, I was able to find a lot at our thrift stores and from some local friends because this topic is popular in this area. But there are so many more I would have liked to bring home!

If I had to get just two resources to encompass all things Virginia Indian and colonization these would be them (and you’ll notice that they are both published by Sterling)…

• Jamestown: The Perilous Adventure.  I love this Sterling Point history series of books! I think they are the perfect backbone to any unit study. They are factual and based on primary source accounts, but they are also written in smooth narrative so they are easy for the family to enjoy as a read-aloud. Even last year at only 4, Speedracer had no trouble following these stories with everyone else, although they do introduce some great vocabulary words! We’ve already read The Stout-Hearted Seven, Stampede for Gold, and Frontier Colonel (which we got used from Amazon for $1.00!)

• Pocahontas: A Life in Two Worlds. This book was a brand-new-to-us non-fiction series and I thought it was great! It was physically small, but contained tons and tons of information about nearly every aspect of life for the Indians and the English in that time period. If I have a complaint, it would be that there was so much information presented in sidebars I got a little distracted from the main text. But the Ladybug (who is a reluctant reader!) loved all the graphics and visuals and dived right in. I thought the price was excellent for something that will definitely suit their reference needs through middle school or more and we put the rest of this series on our Amazon wish list!

Jamestown Books

• Jamestown, Graphic History. This is a new-to-us series of graphic, non-fiction books using a comic book format to tell history. The boys loved it immediately. It was true to the historic accounts as well.
• Surviving Jamestown. Eh. Sort of a combination of Blood on the River and Jamestown the Perilous Adventure. I would buy the other two first, but I don’t regret picking this one up a a library sale for $0.10. It is formatted and reads easily at an independent 4th grade level.
• Blood on the River. Great historic fiction, well-based on factual events. The kids loved this as an introduction–they need to make this into a movie!
• 1607, A New Look at Jamestown. Lovely coffee table book full of modern photos. The kids enjoyed the pictures as a substitute for actually getting to visit Jamestown (although we promised we would take them this fall!), but I’m glad we got this one from a friend. I think most of this information you could easily find on the web–even though it may not be formatted as nicely.

Pocahontas Books

Remember I said the Ladybug has liked Pocahontas for a while? We’ve been collecting these over a year or more now.

• Pocahontas, Young Peacemaker. I adore the Childhood of Famous Americans series. All of these are good books and we have 6 others at home too. (I buy them wherever I find them!) This was an easy, narrative read, based on factual accounts with a little fictional embellishment to make it readable.
• The Captive Princess. The Daughters of Faith series is one I have recommended before. (You can–and we did!–get the whole series on Kindle for a steal!) It’s historic fiction that does a great job highlighting the faith journey of the main characters. It’s got some advanced vocabulary, but it’s fairly short and the Ladybug and I enjoyed it together in just a few evenings.
• Pocahontas. This one was a little above the Ladybug right now, but I enjoyed it. I think it would be interesting for a book-worm 6th or 7th grader.
• Pocahontas, An American Princess (Level 4 Reader). Great illustrated overview to warm up a beginning or reluctant reader or introduce the topic before diving in to the details.
• The True Story of Pocahontas (Level 3 Reader). Again, great illustrated overview for beginning independent readers, but felt a little shallow. (Of course, we’re like Pocahontas experts now, so…)
• The Double Life of Pocahontas. The text itself was age-appropriate for our 4th grader, but a little too fictional for us after all the other reading we did and a little too much romanticizing about the two cultures. I prefer the more emotionally neutral stories above for our age group and purpose.

 

Captain John Smith Books

Turns out these were hard to find! We got the majority of our information from general Jamestown books or Pocahontas books. It also turns out that John Smith was a bit of a questionable character!

• Captain John Smith, Foothold in the New World. This was one of the few books we bought outright and I’m glad we did. We had a hard time finding anything redeeming about the man at first (basically he was a mercenary and couldn’t seem to get along with anyone other than the ladies!) and this book was a great help in putting his character in perspective for us. This is an excellent series, actually, and we put the whole series on our Amazon wish list!
• The Journals of Captain John Smith. Interesting primary account. We used this to cross-reference a few things, but not as a main reading text. The fact that it exists was more interesting to the kiddos than actually reading it after about two pages. The old English was a bit overwhelming. But nothing substitutes for teaching our kids to search for and use primary sources!

 

If you have other resources you’d highly recommend, let me know. I’d love to add them to my Board!

Happy Columbus Day!