Anne School: Anne of Green Gables for K-2

What do you do when the kids beg you to learn about Anne of Green Gables, but it's not on your curriculum? In fact, it's not really on any First Grade curricula. Well, you make it up as you go along.

The best resource I found for this age group was a blog called One Room Schoolhouse. She had put together a K-2 unit for her grandchildren based on Anne of Green Gables. She has links to videos and other resources, which inspired several of our lessons on making friends, fashion through history, geography, and baking a cake.

I also put together a fun handwriting lesson. I printed out some images from Sullivan Entertainment and wrote out handwriting cards to go with them. I posted them around the house and we did a "Write Around the Room" using our slates to copy the words down. For my preschooler, I gave her another copy of the picture and she ran around trying to match them up. Then we played Memory with all the cards  when we were done. In fact, we've played Memory with the Anne cards nearly every day since then.

We listened to the audiobooks of the original books as we were going along, but we also used this picture book adaptation by M.C. Hellendorfer.

I would never suggest skipping the real book for a picture book, but  the picture book worked well as our normal Five in a Row book. We read the picture book almost every day and enjoyed the beautiful illustrations by Ellen Beier. We learned about Prince Edward Island and Canada for Social Studies. We acted out our favorite scenes from the book and tried to guess.We drew our dream dresses with or without puffed sleeves.

We also read several chapters from the Anne of Green Gables Treasury. This book is chock-full of information from Anne's family tree to a floor-plan of Green Gables and a timeline of her life. It has interesting chapters on fashion and schooling at the time, and recipes and crafts.

 

The girls really enjoyed making Victorian scrapbooks. Ella titled hers "Ella's Scrapbook and Buk of Olfashun stuf." I made a simple stapled book and we printed out images from The Graphics Fairy. This website has a huge amount of copyright-free vintage images organized by category. We also looked through magazines for other old-fashioned items. I also ordered the girls Anne of Green Gables coloring books from Dover publications. I didn't realize that these also included an abridged version of the book along with the coloring pages.The kids enjoyed them, but were quick to point out that it was not the real book.

For science and math, we made "Ruby tea biscuits" and "Anne's Liniment cake" from the Anne of Green Gables cookbook, (without the liniment, of course). These were all for our Anne of Green Gables tea party, but I will save that for another post.