The Lewis and Clark Expedition is an exciting time in America's history, and this unit study by Catherine Jaime will help your students dive into what the expedition was and all they accomplished. This unit study, titled Lewis and Clark Expedition Unit Study, is contained in a softback book that can be copied for some activities. Included in the study is the book York Proceeded On. You can purchase the book separately, as it cannot be copied from the study book.

Mrs. Jaime intended the unit study to serve as a springboard for learning about the different people, places, tribes, or other parts of the expedition that interest the students. If you complete the materials included in the unit study, you will have learned a good bit about the expedition and the involved people. However, it is easy to add a few more books to help understand the people and events. This makes the study so flexible that it can work for young students, perhaps as young as 1st or 2nd grade, and go all the way up through high school, adding in supplemental materials and activities to help synthesize the materials studied and learned.

Included in the printed unit study are the teaching materials and the activity materials, along with a copy of the historical fiction piece, York Proceeded On. The teaching information has a written description of how the teaching of the unit study could go, followed by information on the Louisiana Purchase, the commanders, the men, equipping the expedition, journals that were kept, Sacagawea, Indian contacts, and an annotated timeline of the trip. The activities include a board game, a timeline game, supplying the expedition, a lapbook, a series of timeline events to illustrate, and York Proceeded On.

It was easy to use this unit study to touch on the interesting and informative parts of the expedition. We read the timeline in conjunction with the illustrating activity. We did the supplying an expedition activity and then used the pages for Adventures Along the Way to talk about events that could affect whether you did a good job supplying yourselves. We read the information included and then played a game. We supplemented along the way with books checked out from the library. We read York Proceeded On together, and we discussed the themes of the book, including slavery -being required to participate in an expedition like this, how it would have felt to leave your family behind-, and about how vital York was to the journey, all of which was why the author included this book with the unit study.

Lewis and Clark Expedition Unit Study and York Proceeded On are simple to use and bring a hands-on aspect to the expedition study. If you are looking for a no-prep book, this unit study is not that. You will need to read through the book and make some copies to get started. You will need to decide how to incorporate each part and activity into your study as they are not in a predetermined order. That being said, this is an excellent study that is highly flexible and adaptable to your students and their interests. It is the open door through which you can bring your students to follow the footsteps of Lewis, Clark, and the Corps of Discovery.

-Product review by Lori Hooten, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, May 2021