Civil War Study

We just finished our 3-week Civil War study with Tapestry of Grace. I thought I'd share some of the things we used and some projects we did during this study.

Mapping of the Civil War battles. Rather than have individual maps of the battles, we did one large map. I enlarged a Knowledge Quest map at Kinko's and glued it to some foam core board. We have made small flags (glued to toothpicks) to mark battle locations. The back of the flages are noted with the name of the battle site and the date. The flag shows which side won the battle.

You probably notice that my Confederate flags don't look like what most consider the flag to be. While searching for images to use, I came across this article. (Yes, it's a wikipedia article, but I found it confirmed here.) I had never heard this before, so I found it very interesting. I chose to use the first flag (with 13 stars) of the Confederacy and not change it, just for the sake of ease in reading the map.



(The kids are pointing to the white flag I made that marks the location of Lee's surrender to Grant.)

Our read-aloud was Across Five Aprils. When I decided I wanted to add some discussion of this book, I went looking and found a free study guide. We did not do any of the assignments, but I did use the questions for discussion purposes. I had never read this book before and it is excellent.

Another project was creating a wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth. While looking for examples to show the kids, I came across an online wanted poster generator. We had so much fun with it that we used it for our project.


We then got silly.


We enjoyed our Civil War study and we all learned something. It's a brutal, ugly part of our country's history, but it's important that we know about it so we can better understand where we are now.

I still have a few things I would like to do, but I haven't posted in so long that I wanted to go head and share these. If we get around to them, I'll post them later.