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Gold Rush Activities

Homeschool History Study Resources

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Our Gold Rush activities were kicked off by reading 'By the Great Horn Spoon' by Sid Fleischman (my book review here). This was a great way to get a feel for the era. The children got very interested in this, so we spent quite a bit of time on it. I have outlined my resource suggestions first, then my homeschool unit studies ideas:

Gold Rush Resources

Gold Fever: Tales from the California Gold Rush by Rosalyn Schanzer was really useful in our studies. This is a lovely picture book using real quotes from the time. It also has a good map at the back showing the routes taken to California by land and sea. We referred to it quite a lot during our reading of By the Great Horn Spoon.

Chang's Paper Pony is another good fiction book on the era. Little Chang is a Chinese immigrant, living in a California gold-mining town.

California Gold Rush map - There are two maps available on the Calgoldrush site - one of sea routes and one of land routes. This actually, is a very informative site and well worth a look around. They also have a gold rush timeline of events (under the resources section). There is also some good information on this site.

Gold Rush Video - there is a good video about how they would have panned for gold on YouTube.

Gold Rush Comics - Graphic Histories has a downloadable comic book.

Rudiments of Wisdom has some interesting facts about gold in a cartoon format.

Lapbooks and Study Guides - Three downloadable guides are:

The California Gold Rush Lapbooking Unit.

A Guide for using By the Great Horn spoon in the classroom.

Gold Rush Thematic Unit.

Gold Rush Crafts - Crayola have a good panning for gold pop-up picture idea. We also enjoyed the Story of the California Gold Rush Coloring Book

Home School Ideas

Our discussion topics included

Jouneys taken by the miners

Economics – the interesting thing about the time was that gold was plentiful, but food and water was scarce.

Environmental impact – all that prospecting marred the landscape

Life of a miner

I think most of these topics are covered by the fiction books recommended, and the website links above.

For gold rush activities, try panning for gold using gold coins in sand. We just used a kitchen sieve. We also used this project for one of our cooking home school meals. We had a cowboy meal of sausages, beans and rice. If you are doing this in the summer, then it would be nice to cook over an open fire

We found this project really interesting, covering a wide range of subjects. It spawned a whole project about the history of mining (coming soon).

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