American Girl class- Kaya Week 1

Our homeschool co-op here is giving me a time and space to offer an American Girl class. I am excited to learn more about history, geography and crafts with 15 girls! We will begin our class with Kaya, who is the "first" American girl, since she is Native American from the Nez Perce tribe. Her story takes place in 1764, and that is the first girl in the history timeline for the American Girls. After we spend 6 weeks on Kaya, we will spend 6 weeks talking about Felicity, and her period of history.

Here are some pictures from our first class this week. A lot of ideas came from my homeschooling online friend Jamin. You can find out about her classes here.

It was a busy hour and I only took four pictures since I was so busy- but it was very fun! We discussed the first book in the Kaya series, called Meet Kaya. After I asked them some questions and we discussed the book, we made two fun crafts!

Some of the girls after they finished their "totem poles"...

Girls working on their Geography notebooks and totem poles...

Girls chatting and working on their "dream catchers"...

Girls working on their "dream catchers".

The directions for the totem poles are here: http://familycrafts.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=familycrafts&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dltk-kids.com%2Fcanada%2Fmtotem.html

Info on totem poles: http://www.native-languages.org/totem.htm (I forgot to read this!)

The directions for the dream catchers are here: http://www.dream-catchers.org/make-dream-catchers-kids.php

Info page about dream catchers: http://www.dream-catchers.org/

We had cranberry fritters for snack, the recipe is here: http://www.recipegoldmine.com/worldnativeam/cranberry-fritters.html
They tasted really good!

What a fun day! I am looking forward to next week talking about Kaya's Escape (book 2) and doing more crafts/ snack!