Hi! Future Ticia 2025 here, I’m taking this absolutely ancient post about our original North Carolina Unit and updating it and then combining it with our new North Carolina Unit from when we learned about the state in high school for our geography lessons when we did a mad dash through United States Geography to remind the kids of all we learned about the world. So, you’ll get a chance to see what this unit looked like when the kids were in kindergarten and first grade, and then how we did this in high school.
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North Carolina Unit resources
Okay, this entire section is completely added in by Future Ticia 2025, because way back when I wrote this in 2011 I used this super awesome feature that Amazon had that they took away, and past Ticia never changed this, because it was too much work. Well, now that is coming back to bite me, so let me fix that.
First, let me find you some resources on the internet:
Okay, now on to finding some videos for you. It’s been a bit since I’ve looked up any United States geography videos on there, and maybe I’ll be lucky and there are new people making them. Let’s see what I find…
Deep dramatic sigh, it looks like we are not so lucky. Everyone take your D6 of psychic damage from Homeschool Pop, and yes I have increased the damage from the video.
But wait, everyone heal D6 because Pirate Captain Jay has a video for us about North Carolina, so be prepared to be amused by pirate-filled trivia. This makes total sense with all of the pirates that were known to act around this state during the height of the pirate era.
There are now a disturbingly large number of AI-generated videos for kids. Ick.
Okay, moving on to the less depressing topic of children’s books.
Superman is currently taking a children’s literature course, and so I’m having fun talking with him about the books he has to read for his class. When he came home this past weekend for Easter, we talked about the 6 books he had to read and write a blog post about.
Side point, it’s interesting how times have changed. When I took children’s literature, I had to read 50 picture books and write a notecard on each book. He has to read 6 picture books in different genres and write a blog post on each one.
Times change.
North Carolina Unit: booklist
I never took pictures of these books. I may go check them out again, and then get a picture at some point, not this week. Right now, my dog is recovering from surgery, and I’m trying to make sure she doesn’t split her stitches open. She is trying her hardest to do so.
- An island scrapbook– this is a cool look into life on a barrier island, but it is out of print, so keep an eye out for it at used bookstores, because WOW that price…
- The ride: the legend of Betsy Dowdy– an oral tradition of a young girl who helped spread the news of a British invasion during the American Revolution, I LOVE stories like this
- When Christmas feels like home– I love stories of how immigrant families bring bits of home to continue celebrations
- Poet: the remarkable story of George Moses Horton– Doing these units let me learn new things all the time, so I learned something new here
- Ernestine’s milky way– This wasn’t in the library when I went, so I need to read it, it looks adorable.
- My Hands Sing the Blues– another I don’t particularly remember, but that intrigues me
- As fast as words could fly– So many books I missed and now want to read
- Overground railroad– I am discovering so many books from this unit that I am not remembering
- The Flyers– this is the book I remember reading with the kids about the Wright brothers all those years ago
- Wee and the Wright Brothers– along with this one, but at the same time, you can use any book on these guys
- Freedom on the menu: the Greensboro sit-ins– I loved this book, it was such a great way to talk about how this protest was done
- Pirate attack!– Blackbeard marauded up and down the lower United States, but at the same time, he finally lost his life in North Carolina. Way back when my kids were little, the library had a book called something like Blackbeard’s Last Stand, and it had him dying dramatically in the end, complete with his dead body floating in the water. I was reminded why you really should pre-read books.
Okay, now on to the notebooking pages.
But I have to stop and make dinner. So, I’ll be back tomorrow.
I decided to finish this tonight, or at least make a bit of progress right now.
Our old North Carolina notebook
As you can see, North Carolina was not heavy on printable activities. Actually, it wasn’t super busy this time through; most of the books I found were checked out of the library and didn’t straggle in for a while. These are the things in our notebook (all of the printables are on my subscriber page, which you can get if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER):
- North Carolina state symbols
- Design our own airplane-of course a favorite activity
- waterproofing– what is the best way to waterproof your paper
If I had thought about it, I could have put a pocket in to save their protest signs…….
Of course, I don’t know that I want to encourage their protesting……….
The other activity from North Carolina I couldn’t put in was their drowning Blackbeard puppet.
Future North Carolina Unit notebooking pages
Okay, when we did this the second time around, we used our United States notebooking pages (if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER, you’ll get a coupon as part of the welcome series) and filled them out.
Now, we could totally have filled out the notebooking pages again, but I didn’t. Which is a shame, because it could have been pretty cool to see all of those pages all over again.
But I did think their motto was pretty cool.
Okay, it’s now 11:30, and I was just gonna be here a few minutes, but I needed a few minutes to decompress after a rather stressful day.
By Jan van der Crabben (Photographer) – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=305174
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