Homeschooling History and the Power of Interest

As a kid (and even now as an adult) I loved history and learning about how people lived so long ago. I could hardly wait to explore history with my own children once we decided to homeschool. I loved the idea behind the Story of the World Series; teaching history chronologically in the four year cycle just made so much sense to me. So we began 1st grade with Story of the World: Ancients. I wanted to bring this awesome subject to life for the boys, so I went all out with the activities and crafts, trying to make it an immersive experience. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm and perfectionism took over before we were a third of the way though the book. If I couldn't do it the way I wanted to, I didn't do it at all. There was always something I needed to find or buy or print out that wasn't ready when I needed it. In the craziness of trying to figure out our first year of homeschooling and then becoming so sick with my pregnancy with Lady Bug and then moving to a different state, it got dropped.

Story of the World: Ancient Times: Chapter 9

Last week we finished reviewing all the chapters of Story of the World Vol. 1 that we did two years ago. This week we started on new material; sort of. See, when we last did ancient India, we only did about half of the chapter. We did the brick experiment the first time around, which was cool, but not something I wanted to repeat at this time. There wasn't much else in the activity guide, so inspired by the memory of Colonel Brandon whispering in Margret Dashwood's ear, "the air is filled with SPICES!" I did some quick Googling and then went off schedule.

The Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and More: Review

Oops! I found another draft that never got published! If you follow Sceleratus Classical Academy on facebook then you saw the pictures when we were doing this and were probably wondering where the post went. What happened is that we never finished the whole book, so I forgot to finish the post. Here it is now.

This thanksgiving we were actually home! So when the Scholastic Dollar Days sale was going on last time I picked up the eBook version of Easy Make & Learn Projects: The Pilgrims, the Mayflower & More: 15 Fun-to-Create Reproducible Models That Make the Time of the Pilgrims Come to Life. I usually prefer having hard copies of workbooks and things, but with the amount of scanning I would have had to do for this I am very glad I got the e-version. Also, with my scanner things get re-sized and then all the parts would not have been on the same, exact scale. I would never have paid the full Amazon price for it, but I'm delighted to have gotten this for only $1. They have sales quiet frequently, and I share the info whenever I hear about it. (If you're going to be traveling for Thanksgiving check out the Thanksgiving in the Car lesson plan I made for my holiday series at Sandbox to Socrates.)

There are a lot of paper models in this book. My boys aren't up to the amount of coloring and cutting required to finish all of the projects in a week, but that is what I wanted to do so I did quite a bit of the coloring and cutting before starting the lessons. I used these models along side the books Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation and Samuel Eaton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Boy, but there is enough information and teaching suggestions in the book that you do not "need" anything else to use the models.

I split the models into 5 days:

Day 1

Day 1: How they got there, and why: Exchanging Worlds Trifold Diorama: (double sided new world vs old world), Moving Mayflower Map, and Peek Inside Mayflower

For the trifold, Early Bird colored the "Old World" side and Builder Boy colored the "New World." That way we only had to make one and there wasn't too much coloring for them. On the moving map they each colored "their" continent. The Mayflower was left mostly uncolored except for the flag.

Day 2

Day 2: How they lived: Pilgrim Town and Wampanoag Village

I pre-colored the map parts and left the buildings and people for the boys to color. Early Bird did the Wampanoag village and Builder Boy colored the Pilgrim town. This took much longer than I expected even with the pre-colring I did.
 I thought we would also do the gardens this day but half way through the two villages I realized how unrealistic that was for us. They did have a lot of fun comparing and contrasting the two villages, so it was worth it. Mostly.

And that's all that we actually finished. The following is what I had planned.

Day 3: Food and how they cooked it: Pilgrim Vegetable Patch / Wampanoag Garden, Hunt for Food Match-Up / Trap a Fish, and What's Cooking Double Diorama (shows Pilgrims cooking and Wampanoag cooking)Same division of the vegetable patch/garden, though I did do some pre-coloring for them there as well so they wouldn't feel so overwhelmed, since they are rarely required to do anything like this.

Day 4 (Thanksgiving Day): Harvest Feast Fun-Fact Scroll

Day 5: How they dressed: Wampanoag Basket by Numbers, and Who wore what? (Pilgrim / Wampanoag wardrobes, Wampanoag pouch)

The models are all still up, three months later. The boys like to play with their fingers as people in the villages. They still remember a lot from what we talked about. Next Thanksgiving we will finish the models the week before Thanksgiving. That was my biggest mistake; thinking we could get it all done the week of Thanksgiving. But it was definitely worth it, and we'll be finishing it in November.

I definitely recommend this if you can get it during the Dollar Days sales. And if you have kids who enjoy coloring.

History of the Olynpics...in a song!

By BBC's Horrible Histories; enjoy!

Knights Unit Study

It started with Sir Cumference. I'd heard of Sir Cumference and the First Round Table (A Math Adventure) for years but my library didn't have it and I never saw it in a thrift store. When we moved I finally found it at our new library. Early Bird had been vanquishing dragons in the caves (aka my walk-in closet) for a few weeks so I thought, why not capitalize on the interest? (Yay for being able to homeschool!) So I checked out Sir Cumference, You Wouldn't Want to Be a Medieval Knight!: Armor You'd Rather Not Wear, and 100 things You Should Know About Knights & Castles and added in the story of Saint George and the Dragon found in The Children's Book of Virtues that I already had. I poked around Pinterest and the internet and printed out for free what I needed to make our first ever lapbook. Here's where I got the lapbook printables for free. I used most of the level 2 and a few of the level 3. Here's the instructions for making a lapbook that I used. I also came up with the idea to make easy and cheap, no-sew knight costumes that really sparked their imagination and active participation. We also re-watched our favorite Horrible Histories clips that involved knights, including the Knight Song and Castle Defences. The whole thing was supposed to take only a week. It lasted almost a month.

And....it's been several months since I started this blog post. I thought I had finished and posted this, but clearly I hadn't. So I'm going to let the pictures do most of the talking.

Front of the lapbook

We've never done a lapbook before and I am very happy with the one we made. I arranged and pasted all the parts ahead of time to make sure they would fit and work together. I "mounted" some of the print outs on colored paper for some color because my boys are not all that interested in coloring things.

Timeline Game-great perspective!

Back of the lapbook

They loved the dubbing ceremony. Early Bird started dubbing everyone and every thing in the house, ending with "ha-rise, sir knight!"

When Builder Boy started building castles with every toy, every where he went, and was naming the parts, I knew it stuck.

Building castles everywhere

Thanksgiving Lesson Plan

Traveling for several hours or more to Thanksgiving this year? Then do I have the lesson plan for you! Check it out at my latest addition to my holiday lesson plan series at Sandbox to Socrates!

I forgot to mention on the post that one great way to teach in the car is with audio books. I've never used them before, but if you like them and they work well for you, Jen Bardsley over at Teaching My Baby to Read blog has a bunch of good ideas for what she has termed "car-schooling."

Knight Costume DIY

Watching Early Bird "fly" around in his beloved Super Why costume that I made him last year for Halloween I realized that what I had done for that costume would also work as a knight's costume. Early Bird has spent a lot of time pretending to be a knight lately; especially now that he has Princess Lady Bug to save. So I went to the store and got two gray shirts for $3.47 each, some fleece in blue and red for $2 each, and a $5 "Warrior Kit" from the Halloween aisle that came with two small swords.

I wanted to paint a crest on the chest of the shirts so I sat down with the boys and the American Heraldry Society's website and let them design their own crests. I only insisted that they each have their birth order insignia as part of it.

To paint the crests I first cut out a paper shape to trace. I used one of my favorite Pinterest tips, to put a glue bottle cap on a paint bottle to "write" with. I traced around the paper shape with the glue cap paint, then using a brush I extended the outline some. The metallic paint that I purchased specifically for this project was much less metallic than I had hoped, and was a very thin paint that soaked through. When doing this project make sure you put paper inside the shirt to prevent bleeding through to the back.




















I let that dry for half an hour and then got to work on the inside of the crest. I made the full background and then once it was dry painted the insignia on top. This was a mistake. The paint was so thin that even after several layers (letting it dry before adding another) the background pattern still showed through. If you are going to do this, make the insignia first and then make the background pattern around it.

I free-handed the pattern. The grid being so small made it difficult to paint. If I had to do it over again I would make the checks much bigger.

Once the paint was dry I hand sewed on the capes. I used fleece so that I would not have to hem any edges. I did Early Bird's cape first, sewing the cape at the shoulder seams. I didn't quite like the way it turned out so with Builder Boy's cape I folded the edge over at the ends which ended up giving the cape a flared look.

I used just a regular stitch going one way and then doubled back to reinforce it. I did the same with Early Bird's Super Why costume and it's been going through tough boy play and the washing machine for a year now and has held up.

Early Bird's cape was only half a yard. I think it would have looked better if it had been wider, like Builder Boy's.

Still, not too bad for only about $5.50 (not including paint and sword costs.) We're wearing them while learning about knights and we'll also be using them as our Halloween costumes.

The painting job took several hours just because of the need to dry in between layers and colors. The sewing took 30-45 minutes by hand I think? I consider this to be a fairly easy and quick project. My only regret is the insignia is not clear. But the boys don't care! They love their new knight costumes. And I made sure the shirts I got were big enough that they could be worn over jackets for cold weather trick-or-treating.

History Timeline in a Folder

(Picture taken when I first made it.)

This is the folder timeline I made for our I Love America: Teachers Resource Kit curriculum. I was taking the timeline and all the papers back and forth from my house to my father-in-law's house, so it needed to be compact but still convey accurate scale. I ended up with seven pieces of paper taped together with a strip of paper at the "joints'' for reinforcement.

Each page is 50 years because most of the things that are covered in I Love America all happen close together so you need enough room on the paper. I also wanted Builder Boy to see the span of years between the discovery of America and the American Revolution period. The first page has to be glued to a piece of construction paper that is already in the folder or the pages won't fit properly. 

I love Velcro dots!

That many pages folded up with stiff "joints" stuck out a lot an kept wanting to unfold and bounce out, so I made a paper clasp to hold it all in. I taped the red strip of construction paper to the back of the piece of blue construction paper that I glued the first timeline page to. I folded over and glued the end of the strip of red paper to reinforce it. Then I used sticky velcro dots to finish the "clasp."





Since the pages load in the back, behind the timeline I put a page protector for holding the maps that are used for multiple lessons. All the pages that the kids color get three-whole-punched and put in.

Constitution Week with I Love America

I was given I Love America: Teachers Resource Kit by another homeschooling mom who was done with it. I was looking for a simple way to add some American history to our history plan and she very generously offered it to me. It was written for a full classroom but the times I have used it I have had no problem adapting for just one or two kids. My father in law is the one who used it with Builder Boy last year, so this is my first time doing it myself. (I planed it, printed the pages out, and got everything ready and 'Apa taught it when I was at Bible Study Fellowship with Early Bird.) It teaches early American history going with the holiday schedule, so events are out of chronological order. For that reason I made a folder timeline that also holds the coloring pages.

Reading the text of I Love America is where I first learned about Constitution Week. It was set up by Ronald Regan to celebrate the adoption of the United States Constitution and to serve as a time to remember what it stands for.  I Love America has a school week's worth of activities, finishing off with a class parade. We chose to do just some of the activities, but we read the story of Betsy Ross making the first flag, talked about the original colonies (Builder Boy remembered a lot from last year,) talked about the meaning of the colors, talked about the different flags throughout our county's history, the rules concerning the treatment of the flag, and more! There is also a hidden pictures page and a modern flag to color (I helped Early Bird with his.)

October's holiday in I Love America is Columbus Day and we'll be using I Love America to supplement the Holidays Around The Year when the day comes.

Teaching 9/11

Teaching about holidays is one of our homeschool gaps. Besides Christmas and Easter we haven't discussed or taught our kids much beyond mentioning "oh, yeah, today's Valentine's Day" or "what do you want to dress up as for Halloween?" I really want to remedy that. I got discouraged last year when I picked up the Hurray for Today book and found a lack of actual facts, invented facts, and a completely anti-God viewpoint. This year when I was looking through the dollar deals I found The Scholastic Big Book Of Holidays Around The Year. Their brief explanation of the different faiths that holidays come from is respectful and much better than pretending that none of these holidays came from any religious observance.

The book is written for teachers of regular sized classrooms, and is adaptable for any elementary aged child. It gives a brief summary of the origins of each holiday, the meaning of it's symbols, and some activity ideas as well as several books recommendations. They cover all the major holidays, all of the national and minor holidays, and even add in some that I had never heard of, including celebrating the birth of Confucius and Hispanic Heritage Month. We're not going to do every single holiday in the book this year. But we will be using it through the year, possibly for several years in a row.

The first holiday we will cover (skipping over Labor Day and Kite Festival) is September 11. I was initially surprised that it was included in this book, but I think it very right that they did. The events on September 11, 2001 are not something I had told my kids about before. But I think the kids are ready to hear the general details now. First I told them that 12 years ago some bad people hurt a lot of people in New York City and that I was going to show them a video about it. I showed them the Brain Pop video explaining what happened and why. I think it was an excellent, child appropriate video. (I previewed it ahead of time.) After we watched it was talked a little bit about it and I told them how I found out about it when it was happening.

While searching online for resources for teaching about 9/11 I found a teacher's website that put an emphasis on appreciating the volunteers and rescue workers.That gave me the idea to make cards thanking our local firefighters for their service. I don't know when we'll get them to our local station; probably this weekend.

Then Builder Boy made a video thanking all the firemen (and women) in America for keeping us safe. (He improvised it all on his own.) So to all the "fire rescuers" (as Early Bird puts it,) 

Thank You for your service and sacrifice. Thank you for working so hard to keep us safe. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13

More resources: http://teachinghistory.org/spotlight/september11
______________________________________________________________
The e-book is available at the Scholastic website and as of September 11th was still $1.

History Confessions and a Decision

Confession #1: I threw away our unfinished mummy chicken when we moved. :(

I was sooooooo excited when I first learned about the mummy chicken (probably almost 2 years before we actually did it.) I started with enthusiasm, and, I thought, a realistic understanding that I would be the one doing this, and Builder Boy would be mainly a spectator, until it came time for wrapping. But somewhere around the 4th changing of the salts I ran out of my pre-made bags and I also hit a depression swing and it sat on my counter being ignored for much longer than it was suppose to be. Builder Boy forgot about it too, so I guess he's not truly missing out. And in truth, I think the Horrible Histories Mummy Song taught him the same stuff. It makes me sad, and a feel like a bit of a failure, that we didn't finish it, or get to wrap it, or decorate the sarcophagus I had prepared.


Confession #2: My last history post is from October because that's the last time we did Story of the World.

This kids got sick for over a week. Then I got sick. Then the kids got sick again. Then December rolled around. Then I got pregnant and almost immediately started puking non-stop. Not much got done. That's not to say that no history got done. On Wednesdays Builder Boy spent the mornings with Apa (his paternal grandfather) and they worked through I Love America, studying early American history based around the holidays of each month. We also watched a lot of Horrible History episodes on youtube (before they were taken down.) I made a playlist of the songs the kids liked (and that didn't have anything too crazy violent) and the kids memorized them. We can sing the entire list of Kings and Queens of England since William I all on our own.

When I realized that this pregnancy is going to be light on school until walking across the room is no longer a challenge I had to decide what to do about Story of the World. I LOVE SOTW. I love the idea behind it, I love doing history systematically, I love the plan of going through the whole of history three times through, each time at a deeper level. Not being able to do all of the fun activities that we had been doing I had to decide between two courses of action: continue reading SOTW and just having Builder Boy do the maps and coloring sheets with no extras, no dress-up, no hands-on, no activities (which many parents do with no detriment to their children's education.) Or I could wait until I am well enough to do it "all," which means schooling though the summer (which we were planning on doing some anyway) and not freaking out about the schedule (have I mentioned that I like schedules?!)  I thought about it a lot, and in the end decided to go the second route. I want to do all the fun stuff, and that's what the boys are going to remember. So when we start doing it again, I will start blogging about it again. In the meantime, I'm going to be thinking about what it is kids this age should actually know in a learning-about-the-world context, and see what I can do about that from a chair and a laptop (and a tv.) I have some thoughts about science that I'm going to try to type about tomorrow. (Assuming I can stand to sit at the computer without losing my lunch and the internet and computer work with me.)

I also have something really cool from Zaner-Bloser that I'm going to try to share on FRIDAY!

What Does It Take to Make a Brick? Part 2

Well, this turned out to take longer than I thought it would.

Before Baking

It was 86*F weather when we started the bricks, so I thought they would dry just fine. But then it got cold and damp. I brought them inside before it started raining (which, as my dear husband pointed out, it what I get for attempting this project in October.) We had read in one of our books that the ancient Indians (India, not America) backed their bricks in ovens, so after a week of the weather not getting any warmer, we tried baking the bricks. I had learned my lesson; we did not try the broil setting. We turned the brick forms upside down and tipped the mostly solid mud/dirt kept it's form. I kept it in the oven on 200*F for a few hours. I can see how this might work well if the brick mud had clay in it, but ours didn't really have any. Also, it made me wonder if the baked bricks the ancient Indians made were significantly better than the wood they had to burn to bake the bricks. Because it doesn't seem very efficient to me.

After Baking

The Winner

We only had room for three bricks, so we baked bricks 1, 2, and 3. Number 2 was the only one that didn't crumble, so Number 2 is the winner. Builder Boy declared it "absolutely perfect" and "brilliant."


(Click here for the beginning of the project.)
_________________________________________________________________________________
The brick making idea came from the Activity Book One: Ancient Times. This activity was for Chapter Nine The First Cities of India.