 Hi you guys my name is Brittany and welcome back to my YouTube channel. You guys in today's video I am going to be giving you an in-depth view of amazing Africa from Amber O'Neill Johnston the Heritage Pack that we did for our history and geography study for our school year. So I'm so excited you guys to give you this final review and just let you know how we enjoy this amazing Africa unit study. So let's go ahead and get right on into it. So if any of you guys are new here to my channel again my name is Brittany. I am a homeschooling mom to three girls ages 10 4 and 2 and I am wrapping up my second year of homeschooling or technically I have finished my second year of homeschooling you guys. So I'm so excited that I am just trucking along this homeschooling journey. I really have been enjoying it and I cannot wait to share with you guys this amazing Africa review. So I made an initial video when I decided to go ahead and do this amazing Africa Heritage Pack from Amber O'Neill Johnston and I just made an initial review showing some of the picture books and the study. But in today's video I'm going to give you an overview and our final thoughts on using this literature based geography slash history study for our homeschooling year. So I have some notes in my phone you guys because I don't want to forget anything. So first and foremost this literature study is called Amazing Africa. It is very affordable. I believe this literature study is like is it $12. I'm not too sure I'm going to put the price right here but it's really really affordable. It comes in PDF. So when you get this literature guide you are pretty much getting your full on 36 week plan on how you are going to be going over all of the countries within Africa. So it focuses on 19 main countries through picture books. However you are going to touch on all of the countries all of the countries within Africa all the 55 countries within Africa you're going to touch on using the reference book that she listed below. So in total we have read 26 picture books. We've read two chapter books and it has three main books that you're going to be rotating along with your picture books. So this is a really full on literature Charlotte Mason type of study and I really really enjoyed it. So I'm going to show you guys the main books that we used and I think these books right here you absolutely need to do this study. At least I wouldn't recommend checking these ones out from the library because you're going to be using them just throughout the unit. So the first two are the two chapter books or read alouds. You can actually choose between reading one of these. I actually was kind of ambitious and my daughter just wanted to read both of them. So this is Anna Hibiscus and this one is number one car spotter and these two books goes along these two African children's just how they live what they eat. These were both just really funny and lighthearted stories and I really really love them. They were easy reads. They have pictures inside of these books. So they're really really cute. Number one car spotter I think was my daughter's favorite just because it was just so funny. She really really enjoyed that one. So these are the two chapter books or the read alouds that goes along with the pack. Along with that the main reference book you will be using is Africa Amazing Africa Country by Country and this book right here just goes over all the 55 countries within Africa. This is your main reference book. This is how you are going to get all your information about each of the countries you are going to be studying. However when you go through each week of the curriculum you're only going to be focusing on one of the 19 countries through your picture book. So this reference book you will be using throughout the course however you just have like a main focus within that week on whichever main country you will be going through. Hopefully this doesn't isn't confusing but um yeah so that's kind of like how it goes. So we have our read alouds. We have our reference book and then we have some more books that you go throughout each day using which is Africa is not a country. It's another main one Ashanti Tazulu and also you have the option to use this Draw Africa map right now. We actually didn't use this one which I'm so surprised. This one actually goes on step by step in drawing the continent of Africa. We actually just utilized the free print off that she has of an Africa map. So as we complete and we study each country within Africa we're able to like the color in that country label it. And this is where you get your geography study in. So I really really enjoyed this one even though we didn't use it. We did reference this one a lot. So you can just print off the free map that she has included within her PDF or the link in her PDF or you can use this book Draw Africa. But this one I would say is optional in the pack. So these right here are not all but some of the picture books that we read within the unit study. Again it's a total of 26 picture books. However I will let you know a lot of these picture books you are able to type in on YouTube and you will find someone that's reading aloud most of these picture books. I was able to utilize my library for the picture books that I didn't purchase. However I'm gonna go back and purchase the rest of the picture books with this Africa unit because I know for sure I want to do this unit again with my younger kiddos. We had so much fun and I'm gonna go ahead you guys and just highlight our favorite books because it would take me forever to go over all 26 picture books that we read. So I asked my daughter what was her top five picture books that we read and she told me so I'm gonna share those ones with you guys. Okay you guys the first one of our favorite books was One Plastic Bag and this goes over the story of Isha too and her impact that she made on her community by starting to recycle all of the plastic bags that she's seen. By her starting to recycle the plastic bags that she's seen she was able to provide jobs and opportunities for other women to be able to make money in her community and also she was able to really make a true impact in Gambia. So this was a great story. One plastic bag we also followed this one up with a documentary. Deep in the Sahara was a great book about a young girl who was excited to be able to wear her first hijab hijab. I believe that's how you pronounce it and it just goes along her story as she is following all of the women in her community and she's trying to figure out how she wants her hijab to be and this was a beautiful told story. I love the pictures. I love the diversity and I really love just the image that of self-awareness of empowerment, women empowerment. This was a really beautifully told story and this was one of the first stories that we read. Brielle really enjoyed this one. So we love this story deep in the Sahara. Another story we enjoyed was the perfect orange which was like a folktale from Ethiopia. This goes over a folktale about I believe is Tashai. That's her name and she gives a beautiful gift of a perfect orange to the king and the hyena. He brings a gift to the king and it just is a really cute folktale. I'm not going to give you away any of the rest of it. The illustrations was beautiful and we really enjoyed this one when we went over Ethiopia. Bringing rain to Kapiti Plain was one of Brielle's absolute favorites. She really enjoyed this. I love this book because it has like this rhyming repetition to it. It's really, really cute. It's really cute of all of the traditions and the things that this African tribe does to bring rain to Kapiti Plain and it is really, really cute. I love it. It is a cute folktale. The illustrations is really, really adorable and I enjoy this one thoroughly. Another book we loved was One Hen and One Hen went over a story of Kojo Kojo. I believe that's how you pronounce this name if I butchered it. I'm so sorry but it just talks about the impact of this One Hen that had to him and his village and I really love this one. This is based off of a true story so we followed this one up with a documentary as well. The illustrations is really, really beautiful and I really enjoyed One Hen so these are like our top five favorite books that we read within our Amazing Africa pack. So these were like I said our top five books out of the unit but we really enjoyed all of them. Amber, she really did an awesome job selecting all the literature pieces that went along with this Amazing Africa study. So this unit study is actually geared for ages one or not ages. This unit study is actually geared for grades one to three. However since my daughter was in the fourth grade I decided to add a couple of more things to bump it up and to give her more of a challenge. We could have really kept it where it was and just read in the picture books but I just wanted to just take this opportunity to really challenge her in her writing skills. So the whole year Brielle actually she worked on writing informational or expository paragraphs. So I found this you know cheapy composition book and I went to CrayolaPages.com and I printed off each of the countries that we were going to go over in depth in the unit study and Brielle had to write a paragraph about that country within Africa. She colored in the flag and it's just so crazy just looking at the growth in her writing from when she did her first country within Africa until she did her last country within Africa. It's just so amazing like seeing how well she did. She really enjoyed coloring in the flag and I really enjoyed using this as a writing opportunity. Like for South Africa Brielle she had a lot to say and it's just crazy how she went from writing one paragraph to ending off the journal writing about three paragraphs about each of these countries that she was going over. So I really enjoyed adding this exercise within it. Another thing that I added in is when we do unit studies I love for us to focus on one person. I actually got this idea from Tori from the Oglesville Han. When she does science unit studies with her kiddos she loves focusing on one person. So the person we focused on was of course Nelson Mandela and it was really really great. I didn't add this who was book until we got to South Africa because I felt like if we would have started it too early it probably wouldn't have made much sense but when we were getting closer to South Africa I pulled out this book and it was so amazing learning more about Nelson Mandela. I also utilized this fan dex right here that I got from book outlet for about I think two dollars and this right here this fan dex also goes over each country within Africa and it gives more facts. They're more in-depth facts some of the facts are hardcore truths and I definitely would say if you're going to use this fan dex with your younger kiddos just read over it before you read it because it talks about war and just a lot of things. So I just used these as a reference a lot of things I didn't always go over with Brielle but I really love the beginning of it where it talks about the population religion it gives each of the agriculture products and it just talks about just the main basic facts of each of the countries within Africa so I really loved utilizing this cheapy resource and this was really really fun to use. Another thing that I added into the unit study was we read Along Walk to Water which was perfect when we got to Sudan. This was a great read aloud so we started off our school year reading this one and it was amazing because once we got to Sudan we were like wrapping up Along Walk to Water and it was just a beautiful addition to it. So those were just some ways that I just added in a little extra for Brielle because she is an upper elementary and I kind of expected more of her. I definitely will say this unit study even though she classifies it as grades one two three I definitely will say that you can really use this for all of elementary because even as an upper elementary student they really have fun just reading like all of these picture books. I mean I enjoyed it and if you want to add in or beef it up you can definitely assign your kiddos like some writing assignments that's a definitely a way for you to use this unit as a family study. She also includes some video options when we're going over each of the countries. She does suggest in her pack when you first read it to just preview the videos just to make sure it's not any information that you don't want your kiddos to know or any videos you don't want them to see just pre-watch them. I actually didn't run across any videos that I felt uncomfortable with Brielle seeing because again she's older however if you do have a younger kiddo you might not want them to see all of the videos so do preview the videos but their videos that she has is just a suggestion it's not it won't make or break the unit. Sometimes we didn't watch the videos we just stuck to reading the picture books and reading all the reference books that she had. So overall you guys I really enjoyed this unit. I really enjoyed like all the thought and the effort that Amber put in her selection of all of these books. I mean the guide it looks so simple but as you get started reading all of these beautiful literature pieces it really just adds like a Charlotte Mason richness to your homeschool. This unit study has gotten me like in love with literature based learning and hopefully I can like carry this on in our homeschool because it was just so easy to pick up the picture book and just read it. A lot of the times the picture books we would read like after our morning basket and it was just really really great great times. I just thoroughly enjoyed it. So this amazing Africa pack I would definitely recommend it to anyone to do. She does have other Africa packs. We are actually going to be doing her heart and soul pack next year where we are going to be going over the main book heart and soul and then we're going to be reading some of the other books that she has selected and curated for that particular unit. That unit is for grades four through six which is going to be perfect for a burial. So yes you guys definitely check out Amber. I'm going to leave a link down below to her website so you can check out her blog check out all the other things she has on her website you guys. She has like book recommendations. She has like so much she has so much information and personal experience. She really pours her heart into her blog and I definitely would recommend anyone to read it. So you guys I hopefully hopefully you enjoy watching today's video. Hopefully this kind of gives you a more inside in-depth view of this amazing Africa pack and um yeah as always you guys thank you so much for watching today's video and I look forward to seeing everybody in my next one. Bye