::: sweetheart and american girl/prairie primer/where the brook and river meet :::

Last night, I started reading The American Girl series to Sweetheart. We're starting with Meet Felicity. This was what I used as our primary history jumping point when Bard was in elementary school. I have a lot of materials that were made available by the company before they were purchased by Mattel. They really had an excellent program for teaching young girls history, and I think they fostered a great amount of historical fiction and interest in history that seems very popular today. They did away with many of the programs and incentives they'd originally implemented, but I'm sure a lot of the stuff is still available through eBay or Abebooks or whatever. Now, however, the emphasis seems to be on the dolls. Too bad. It really was a great thing.

I also hope to start using the Little House books. There is now a Prairie Primer, which I'm not sure I'll use but will look into. I had, at one time, hoped to write a curriculum based on the Little House books. There's such a wealth of historical information and jumping-off points in those books!

While looking for the Prairie Primer, I see there is also a study on the victorian era called Where the Brook and River Meet. This may be something I look into for Bard. My problem is that EVERYTHING looks good, and I have things now that I have never used, probably never will. :-/ I have great aspirations and I get very hopeful thinking about the wonderful things I could do with my children. Yet, here I am typing about them. To do them, I often end up frustrated...

Believe it or not, Cadron Creek, which publishes the two above mentioned resources, also publishes Further Up and Further In.

From the website:

Step through the wardrobe into an exciting study in the land of Narnia. Further Up and Further In will take you through the seven Narnian adventures as well as the more down to earth (or out of this world, whichever perspective you
prefer) sbjects of Bible study, English/literature, history/social studies, science, geography, cooking, and art. Further Up and Further In has 28 units. This study will take about a year with each unit lasting about one week. The extra eight weeks allowed in the study will be spent on activities that require
additional time to complete or on supplemental activities that the instructor will determine. This curriculum is so rich in ideas to explore that it will truly take a year to complete!

I think I may be in trouble...