Pioneers Unit Study for Homeschooling Families

A Pioneers Unit Study for all ages of learners to learn about America’s history of the brave families who settled the Western frontier in the 19th century.

In this Homeschool Pioneers Unit Study, your kids will learn about:

• how sod houses and log cabins are built
• animals of the prairie
• using math to design a quilt
• folktales of greenhorns and droughts
• what it took to settle a homestead
• practical life skills, such as making taffy, soap, and yarn
• and much more!

This Pioneers Unit Study is designed to be done together, as a family, with your children of all ages and covers all subjects except daily math.

This unit study about the pioneers as they settled into their new homes in the West should take around one to two weeks to complete.

If you are looking for a unit study about pioneers as they traveled West on one of the Trails, such as the Oregon Trail or the Santa Fe Trail, check out our huge Oregon Trail Unit Study.

Use this Table of Contents if you’d like to quickly skip down to a certain section.

Some links in this post may be affiliate links. This means that if you click on them, I may make a tiny commission, at no extra cost to you.

Pioneers Unit Study: English Language Arts

Read Aloud Living Picture Books

A Pioneer ABC by Mary Alice Downie This book has some unusual pioneer vocabulary words (and amazing illustrations!). Also on Open Library.

Dandelions by Eve Bunting A bittersweet story of a family building a new life on the prairie in their sod house.

Going West by Jean Van Leeuwen A journal of a family traveling by covered wagon to a new life out west. Also on Open Library. Another great book by the same author is Papa and the Pioneer Quilt, which is sadly OOP, but you may be able to find a copy at your local library.

A Little Prairie House by Laura Ingalls Wilder A picture book version of Laura’s book, Little House on the Prairie.

Prairie Willow by Maxine Trottier A pioneer family plants a willow tree that lives for many generations. Also on Open Library.

Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner This Reading Rainbow selection describes how soddies (houses made of sod/grass/dirt) were built on the prairie.

Independent Readers

In order from beginning reader to high school

Prairie School (I Can Read Level 4) by Avi Noah’s aunt comes to live at his family’s Colorado homestead to “give him some schooling”.

Cora Frear: Brave Kids (Ready for Chapters) by Susan E Goodman Cora helps to put out a prairie fire.

Prairie School by Lois Lenski (from the author of Strawberry Girl) This story is about a student and teacher who were stuck in the South Dakota prairie school during a terrible blizzard and is based upon letters from students. Note: the student in this story has a harsh family life, but it’s a glimpse into what real life was often like.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder The timeless book that we all fell in love with as children.

Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink This story is based upon the author’s grandmother’s childhood in the 1860s in Wisconsin. Caddie is quite a character and if your kids liked Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, they will love this one.

The Pioneers Go West (Landmark Books) by George R. Stewart This story is full of adventure and your boys will especially like it. It’s OOP, but used copies are easy to find, or grab the audiobook at Open Library.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather is a great selection for your strong readers that are college bound.

Family Read Aloud

If your family has already read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, I recommend reading the Sarah, Plain and Tall series by Patricia MacLachlan.

Or, if you could read one of the biographies of Mrs. Wilder’s life, Pioneer Girl: The Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson (who is considered an authority on Mrs. Wilder) or Laura Ingalls Wilder: Young Pioneer (Childhood of Young Americans series) by Beatric Gromley.

If you only have teens in your house, consider the audiobook version of O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

All of the books for this unit are in the Pioneers Idea List in my Amazon affiliate store (the cost to you is the same and I may make a tiny commission to help offset the cost of running the website), to make it easier for you to find the right books.

Folktale

If your kids are already familiar with other pioneer and frontiersman tall tales such as Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett, teach them about the Swedish American Cloud Buster, Febold Feboldson in this video from Crew W, or listen to this audio book, Febold Feboldson the Fix-it Farmer, and this audiobook, Febold Feboldson.

Another fun American folklore story from the Great Plains (Kansas) is The Greenhorn and the Mule Egg.

For Native American folktales, look up one of the many trickster tales from the Plains Indians about Iktomi (a coyote). Paul Goble has a bunch of OOP books about this trickster, like this one, Iktomi and the Ducks.

Another fun variation on the well-known folktale, Chicken Little, is Prairie Chicken Little by Jackie M. Hopkins

Poetry

Early Elementary: Read To Make A Prairie by Emily Dickinson. A printable copy of this poem is in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle.

Upper Elementary: Read The Sod House on the Claim by Susannah Williams. A printable copy of this poem is in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle.

Middle and High School Students: Read Pioneers! O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman. A printable copy of this poem is in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle. Discuss how Whitman must have felt about manifest destiny and westward expansion. (Hint: In this poem, Whitman is like a cheerleader for the pioneers who are turning the wilderness into towns. He seems very much in favor of Westward Expansion and manifest destiny.)

Vocabulary

There are 3 levels of vocabulary words for Early Elementary, Upper Elementary, and Middle to High School. You will find the printable Pioneers Vocabulary Cards in the Free Resource Library and in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle. Your students may want to use this Pioneer Girl site to look up many of these terms.

Grammar & Copywork

Elementary

Laura was homeschooled by her mom when they didn’t live close enough to a town with a schoolhouse. She knew how to read before she first attended school at Barry Corner School in Pepin County, Wisconsin when she was only four years old.

Laura and her sisters probably learned to read and write using the McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader. You can find digital versions of the 1870 versions on Project Gutenberg, if your kids would like to see what they looked like.

Here’s a sample of the grammatical instruction from the McGuffey 3rd Reader about punctuation.

The Comma (,), Semicolon (;), and Colon (:) mark grammatical division in a sentence; as,

God is good; for He gives us all things.

Be wise to-day, my child: ‘t is madness to defer.

McGuffey 3rd Eclectic Reader, public domain

Have your children write a couple of sentences or a paragraph using all three of these punctuation marks: comma, semicolon, and a colon.

All Levels

Copywork and narration are a real-life way to work on grammar skills. Use the Pioneers Narration and the Pioneers Copywork Printables in the Free Resource Library or from the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle that has four levels of narration work.

For the narration pages, select the passage that best matches your child’s writing and spelling abilities. Then, read the passage to your student all the way through first. Then read it again, 2 or 3 words at a time, giving them time to write it down. Tell them to do their best, but not to get “caught up” in making sure it’s all spelled correctly while they are writing. They can go back when they are done to fix any spelling if they want.

When they are done, give them the original page (that you read off of) and let them “check” it and fix any spelling or punctuation mistakes. Talk to them about any spelling or punctuation rules that they used, just to help cement it in their brains. It’s really important for them to check it, not you. It seems to give them ownership of it and makes them remember the correction.

Use the Pioneers Copywork Worksheets to practice grammar and handwriting. There are 6 pages in 3 different levels for early elementary, upper elementary, and middle/high school and each comes in both print and cursive.

Spelling

You can either use the vocabulary words as your spelling words, or use your own words. Your students will enjoy practicing spelling their words on their school “slate” just like Laura and Mary did. You can easily find small wooden framed chalkboards at dollar stores and craft stores.

Writing

Early Learners

Your pre- and beginning readers can create an early literacy book with the Pioneers Reader printable book (found in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle), which uses the text from McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader Lessons 1 and 2.

Elementary

This assignment doubles as a “literary analysis”. Using what they learned from reading either the Little House books, or the Sarah, Plain and Tall books, have your students write a letter to a relative who still lives “Back East” (maybe in an East Coast city like Boston or New York City) to tell them about your new homestead on the prairie and what daily life is like there. As a bonus, have them draw a picture of what their house looks like (is it a log cabin or a sod house?) to include in their letter. Use the Pioneer Journal/Vintage Paper printables found in the Free Resource Library (and the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle).

Middle and High School

One of my favorite quotes by Mrs. Wilder is hanging up in my kitchen. Do you think the “real things” have changed since she wrote this 100 years ago?

Laura Wilder wrote articles for the farmer magazines, Farmer’s Week and Missouri Ruralist (which is still in publication, and which my family has subscribed to for the past 20+ years) as a way to supplement their homestead income from 1911 to 1924.

Many of her articles described new farming techniques, but many were also opinion pieces on how to be successful, not only at farming, but at life in general.

Have your middle and high school students write an opinion paper that describes the qualities they think a person needs to have in order to be a successful homesteader. They can either write it as though it were 100 years ago, or in today’s world. (Or they can write what, if any differences in character are needed between the two different time frames.)

Pioneers Unit Study: STEAM

Science: Prairie Dogs and the Prairie Habitat

Learn about Prairie Dogs and read one or more of these books (listed in order of difficulty):

One Day in the Prairie (Trophy Chapter Book) by Jean George Craighead

A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet by Claudia McGehee This OOP book is also on Open Library.

P is for Prairie Dog by Anthony Fredericks

Prairie Food Chains by Rebecca Pettigrew. This book is also on Hoopla.

America’s Prairies and Grasslands by Marianne D. Wallace This book is also on Open Library

The Lewis and Clark Unit Study also discusses prairie dogs–they even sent one as a gift to the President of the United States!

Your students can use the Prairie Dogs Notebooking Pages or the Prairie Dog Facts Flip Book from our sister site, Homeschool Helper Online, to show what they’ve learned about this keystone species of the prairie. (These printables are included in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle)

Technology

The pioneers started their homesteads with just the tools they brought with them. They might have had a butter churn, a cast iron dutch oven, or even a metal iron wood stove, for cooking; they probably had a plow and a scythe for the fields and farming. Which means that everything had to be done by hand.

Ask your kids, “What do you think your life would be like without the ‘tools and technology’ that make life much easier?”

Preschool

Use the Pioneers Technology Worksheet to mark which items the pioneers would have used.

For a fun hands-on project, let your younger kids pretend to wash clothes by hand. Give them a tub of warm water with a tiny bar of soap and maybe some doll clothes, or a younger siblings outfit. After they wash and rinse it, let them use clothespins to hang it to dry. (If you don’t have a place outside to hang it up, try hanging in on a clothes hanger (with the clothespins) and letting it drip dry in the shower.)

Elementary

Pioneers didn’t have electricity or batteries. Try to spend an entire day without using electricity or anything that takes batteries. Talk to your kids about how different it is from their regular days. Did they realize how much they depended on power for their daily activities? Have them write down a list of the things they couldn’t do that they normally do during a typical day.

Middle and High School

The Ingalls family left their homestead in Kansas because Pa Ingalls had built on land that still belonged to the Native Americans. Maybe if he’d had GPS and better information from government officials, that wouldn’t have happened!

For an interesting hands-on project this week, see if your tweens and teens can navigate around their town without the help of GPS or Google Maps (my oldest relied much too heavily on her phone to get around our town after she got her driver’s license, so I made sure to have the next one give me directions (without using a phone) as I drove before she got her license.

Or, alternatively, get an old school paper road map from your state (your local license bureau should have free ones), and have them plot out directions to get to an out-of-town friend or family member’s home.

Engineering

Once the pioneers arrived at their destination, they had to build a house in which to live. There were very few trees in many locations, especially on the prairie, so that limited the number of log cabins which were built. Unless they had enough money to purchase a house kit with pre-sawn boards from the Sears catalog right away, they had to build and live in a sod house, or “soddie” until they had the means to build a stick or frame house.

Read Sod Houses on the Great Plains by Glen Rounds (also available on Open Library)

Look at the pictures of sod houses on Notes from the Frontier.

Watch one or more of these videos showing what sod houses were like.

• How the sod “bricks” held together
• A 123-year old sod house
• Building a sod house with “today’s tools” and this is the finished house
• Life in a Sod House
• Learn how a pioneer engineered and built his sod house so well, that his daughter is still living in it in 2012

Let your kids use rectangular Duplos or Legos to build a sod house. Some sod houses were more like dug-outs build into the side of a hill. Can they construct one like that?

Arts

Practical Arts

Select one of these recipes to make a fun treat. Listed in order of difficulty.

Make butter in a jar with the directions from our sister site, Homeschool Helper Online

My great-grandmother lived in a sod house on the prairie as a girl. She often made Swedish rusks for her family.

Try making some corn dodgers, which is like a fried hush puppy.

If you have a sweet tooth and lots of muscles, make pulled taffy candy.

Cure a fresh ham or fresh pork belly (bacon). My kids have cured fresh hams several times over the years through 4-H and it’s really quite easy if you have a shed or somewhere to hang the ham over the winter. We always buy our fresh (or green) hams from our local state university. Curing your own bacon is much easier and faster; we used our smoker to finish it, but you can also finish it in your oven.

Applied Arts and Crafts

Make a graham cracker log cabin or a pretzel log cabin and then eat it! This fancier pretzel log cabin has a fun jelly bean stone fireplace.

Both of my sons absolutely loved making woven pot holders for everyone in the extended family. I have no idea why it was so appealing, but it really was! You can make your own “loom” with a wooden square and a bunch of nails, but these metal looms work really well and will last for generations! You’ll also need some cotton loops (I recommend using only 100% cotton ones as the others tend to unravel).

Would your kids like to have a doll like Mary and Laura had? Create a corn husk doll with corn husks (did you know you can buy these at the grocery store?), some string and a tiny scrap of felt or fabric. Or make this no-sew pioneer rag doll instead.

The pioneers couldn’t go to the store anything they needed something, they often had to make it out of what they had, or do without. Learn how to make walnut shell ink and to write with a feather quill pen with this activity from Little House on the Prairie’s official site.

Your older kids may want to try their hand a basket-weaving. I recommend using a beginner’s kit like this one, or this one.

Math

Have you ever thought about how much math (and geometry) goes into the making of a quilt? Quilting is a combination of math and art, along with a lot of patience and perseverance to complete the project.

Many pioneers just used leftover (or “upcycled”) fabrics, instead of going to the store to purchase fabric for a quilt like many modern-day quilters do, but they still needed to know if they had enough fabric for a certain design.

The math for this unit study is all about quilting–it’s really a thing and it’s called “quilt math” Use the 5 differentiated levels of instructions in the Quilt Math post (included in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle).

Pioneers Unit Study: History & More

History: Biography

Read one of the following books and use the notebooking pages in the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle to write about that person’s life. (The notebooking pages are also available on our sister site: Laura Ingalls Wilder and Aunt Clara Brown

Aunt Clara Brown

Aunt Clara Brown: Official Pioneer (On My Own Biography) by Linda Lowery The beginning chapter book tells about a former slave who goes to Colorado in search of her lost daughter and ends up helping hundreds of people.

One More Valley, One More Hill: The Story of Aunt Clara Brown (Landmark Books) by Linda Lowery. Clara Brown was dubbed the “Angel of the Rockies” because she helped so many people, using her profits from her business to buy freedom for slaves. Also available on Open Library

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Pioneer Girl: The Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder by William Anderson, who is considered the foremost biographer of Mrs. Wilder.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Storybook Life (Heroes of History) by Janet and Geoff Benge

History

A Pioneer Sampler: The Daily Life of a Pioneer Family in 1840 by Barbara Greenwood is an amazing resource filled with information and activities about a family’s work throughout the year on a homestead in the 19th century. If you only buy one book for this unit, make it this book; it is very much worth it!

If there is one in your area, plan a trip to an 1800s living museum or farm, like this one near Des Moines Iowa.

Geography

Find the locations where the Ingalls and Wilder families lived and mark those towns on the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Travels Map in the Free Resource Library or from the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle.

Bible

After Laura passed away, her personal Bible was found to contain a hand-written list of verses to look up in difficult times. Under “When very weary” she had written Romans 8, verses 31 to 39. Her family would have read the King James Version. Get a copy of the LIW When Very Weary Bible Verses in the Free Resource Library or from the Pioneers Unit Study Bundle to use as copywork or for memorization.

Music

Early Learners

Learn the words and actions to this fun song, Oats and Beans, and Barley Grow. Or listen to this original version, Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow.

Older Kids

In Little House on the Prairie, Laura’s father, Charles often played the fiddle for his family. Listen to this example of how a fiddle is played differently from a violin.

My kids also enjoyed listening to the album, Pa’s Fiddle: The Music of America, which we found at our local library. There’s also a PBS special by the same name, but I could only find the trailer for it online.

Fine Motor, Gross Motor, and Sensory Awareness

Laura loved to string pretty glass beads for her baby sister. If your kids are beyond the stage of putting beads in their noses and ears, let them have some embroidery floss and clear pony beads to string into necklaces and bracelet for some excellent fine motor practice.

This Thimble game was very popular in the 1800s and your preschoolers and kindergartners will want to play it over and over. It’s called Hunt the Thimble, but you can use any small object instead of a thimble if you’d like. Get the directions for three ways to play.

Your elementary kiddos will enjoy learning one about this popular game from pioneer times that uses fine motor skills: Cat’s Cradle. You’ll need a 40 inch string or piece of yarn. Learn how to play with only one person or with two.

Marbles were also very popular with pioneer children and are great for fine motor practice. Here are the simple rules for playing marbles.

Hopscotch is another game that was popular with children in the 1800s. Don’t remember exactly how to play? Use these instructions.

Even More Ideas for Your Pioneers Unit Study

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Companion: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide by Annette Whipple has fun activities, guides, and lessons for each chapter of the Little House books. This book is also on Hoopla

The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories by Barbara Walker

Log Cabin Sticker Activity Book (Dover Little Activity Books) by Marty Noble

Western Pioneers Coloring Book (Dover American History Coloring Books) by Peter F Copeland

Learn about the pioneers struggles on the Oregon Trail as they left everything behind to begin a new life in the West

Use the movies in the Westward Expansion section of this Movie List for Teens to teach about the pioneers.

Your preschool to elementary ages kids will love these Unit Studies based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books from our sister site, Homeschool Helper Online.

Let your kids experience a day in the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder: make butter; taste test veggies; cut out paper dolls; bake bread (easy); and much more in this Little House unit study

In this Sugar Snow Unit Study your kids will learn all about the maple syrup (sugarmaking) process, maple tree identification, and much more.

More Family-Style Unit Study Ideas

Be sure to follow my Pinterest board US History: Westward Expansion for more great hands-on activities and ideas for your Pioneers Unit Study!

And most importantly, pin this post so you can refer back to it during your Pioneers Unit Study.