Language Arts: American Tall Tales

For the first six week block of our homeschool, we studied various American folk tales and tall tales, using Blossom and Root's language arts curriculum. 

These are the main books we used:
American Tall Tales, by Mary Pope Osborn
Thunder Rose, by Jerdine Nolen

We focused on Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Pecos Bill, Thunder Rose, Davy Crockett, and Johnny Appleseed. We checked out whatever other books our library had about these particular characters, so that we could compare different stories about them. 

A large component of our language arts curriculum is narration, the practice of telling back the story in your own words, a central tenet of the Charlotte Mason philosophy. We also retold some of the stories (sometimes with our own twist) using items from our storytelling basket.  Below, the girls made up a story with a giant owl, a la Paul Bunyan and Babe the Ox.

We also created some "tall tale" photo stories, using pictures from magazines.

We had a lot of interesting conversations about the characters of this unit. In recent years, we've read quite a few folk tales from around the world, and we noticed that American folk tales have a distinct flavor. The girls didn't quite understand the characters who were constantly looking for a fight, wrestling bears, chasing coyotes, and so on. But they really enjoyed the more humorous tales of Paul Bunyan making huge batches of pea soup in lakes, and other similar stories.