We are still chugging along with our state studies! This spring, we continued with a few more states: North and South Dakota, Texas, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, and Oregon. We’re just missing a few of the western states now! Here is the Historical Fiction United States bookstack!
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I Survived…
This book series is wonderful, especially on audiobook. The readings are dramatic and the books aren’t too long. The author often adds historical information and photographs at the end of her books, too.
- (Alaska) I Survived the Great Alaska Earthquake, 1964
- (Dakota Territory) I Survived the Children’s Blizzard, 1888
- (Washington) I Survived the Wellington Avalanche, 1910
- (Washington) I Survived the Eruption of Mount St. Helens, 1980
- (Montana) I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967
- (Hawaii) I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor, 1941
Sweet Home Alaska
I’ve already blogged about diverse prairie stories set in Dakota Territory to read alongside the “Little House on the Prairie” series. To add to that sense of pioneer adventure is the chapter book, “Sweet Home Alaska.”
In it, we learned about FDR’s New Deal that gave settlers land if they moved west to Alaska! The spunky protagonist compares herself to Laura Ingalls and even grows a milk-fed pumpkin like Almanzo in the third book of the Little House series, “Farmer Boy.”
Find the list of Alaska picture and chapter books that really immersed us in that beautiful state!
Hawaii
We read many picture books about Hawaii, some of which were from my “Discover Japan: A Book A Day” country study. The Last Princess is a sobering biography by Diane Stanley about the life of Princess Ka’iulani. In it, we learned about how the United States took Hawaii as a territory in 1898.
We continued learning about Hawaii’s history in the 1900s with I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor. Discussed towards the end of the story, we further dived into the subsequent incarceration of Japanese Americans. I read through a large stack of picture books that explored that topic… that’ll have to be it’s own blog post!
- High Tide in Hawaii
- The Last Princess
- I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor (listed above)
- The World At War, 1944, Magic Tree House Super Edition
Sasquatch Stories: Historical Fiction United States
All of these stories about Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, are set in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
We initially read Big Foot and Little Foot when I bought a year of Julie Bogart’s Bravewriter Darts to teach grammar. This was one of the monthly units. (Here’s my refer-a-friend link that gives you $10 off Brave Writer products!)
I didn’t expect Big Foot and Little Foot to be quite so short; it is for the younger end of the recommended age for the Bravewriter Dart (for ages 8-10). My 7 and 9-year olds latched on to the easy chapter book format and asked me to check out the whole series. It’s so great when that happens! Check out this blog post for all the Big Foot and Little Foot titles and other books for Emerging Readers.
Read this post for more recommendations on pre-chapter and short chapter books!
Then, we went on a Sasquatch tangent and read a few other Sasquatch stories while studying the states of the Pacific Northwest.
Sasquatch and the Muckleshoot is part of the Unicorn Rescue Society books. Honestly, I enjoyed a couple others from the series but this one did not rise to my expectations. I had high hopes because the Author’s Note said it was written in collaboration with Joseph Bruchac. It was just too silly for me and didn’t have enough content. My kids still enjoyed this one, though!
Another book that I read several years ago was The Bigfoot Files. The mother is a cryptozoologist looking for Bigfoot but her lifestyle and habits put a strain on her 12-year old daughter who doesn’t understand why they have to live so differently. It is during one of their trips to find Bigfoot that the daughter begins to see things differently…
The Desert Biome
We learned about Texas and Arizona mostly through picture books, but these two chapter books gave us a good sense of the desert region of the United States:
Once Upon A Camel is about a camel caravan in Texas. The storyline jumps between the camel’s past in Turkiye and the present in the deserts of western Texas. We really enjoyed the illustrations.
Brighty of the Grand Canyon is a classic by Marguerite Henry. Follow Brighty the burro’s adventures in the Grand Canyon where there is the mystery of a murder afoot!