Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Early Oklahoma History

 We've studied some about really early Oklahoma history and now we've moved on to European exploration and control of what is now Oklahoma.  Jack researched Francisco Coronado, who was the first European explorer to enter present-day Oklahoma.  He used the Explorers Fandex and Land Ho! Fifty Glorious Years in the Age of Exploration.  (I had these both from my classroom days and definitely did not pay those prices!)  He was interested in Coronado because he and Jay watched The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which has some similarities with Coronado's explorations.

 After he did his research, he made a data disk.  I got this idea years ago from Seeing the Whole Through Social Studies and did it each year with my fifth graders.

 Coronado claimed the land for Spain, but there have been a total of 14 different flags to fly over Oklahoma.  This summer I took a workshop (by Dr. Linda Wilson of NSU) at The Apple Tree on teaching Oklahoma history and she had us try to put all 14 flags in order.  We couldn't do it, so I told Jack not to feel too bad.

After he made his best guess, he read through the descriptions (from here) and put them in the correct order.  There is also a 14 Flags Museum I'm hoping to get to in the near future.

There aren't a lot of resources out there for teaching Oklahoma history to kids, so I'll try to be good about sharing what I do find as we go!

1 comment:

Amber said...

I love it! You make OK seem so cool. :-) I really loved homeschooling in VA. Virginia state history is pretty much the same as U.S. history... easy peasy!