History, Geography, and Cultural Studies: How We Learn It

We are winding down our school year and I thought I would recap what we have learned this year, and how we went about it. Last week D finished up his year-long study of world history from 1849 - present. Since he began homeschooling almost three years ago we have been using the Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer to study history and geography. We follow a classical approach, breaking world history down into four units, studying one unit per year. The summer before he began homeschooling we read Volume One, Ancient Times together and D was hooked! During second grade he learned about medieval history, in third grade he learned early modern history (from late Renaissance to the gold rush) and this year he finished up the fourth volume, from the gold rush to the fall of the Berlin Wall. D listens to a chapter or two on CD per week or reads them from the book, and does a corresponding map to go along with the learning he has done.

I think that there is no easier way to make learning history tedious than to give kids text books and to ask them to memorize dates and take tests, only to regurgitate information that they will quickly forget. I want history to come alive for my children, and I want them to always find meaning in what they are learning. So we read lots of historical fiction, take lots of field trips, and do lots of projects. This year D has read Farmer Boy, The Sign of the Beaver, David Livingstone Foe of Darkness, Number the Stars, Meet Addy, Stawberry Girl, Snow Treasure, Anne Frank, Life in Hiding, and Harriet Tubman, Go Free or Die, and has listened to the novels of Patricia Reilly Giff on CD just to name some favorites. We visited Plimoth Plantation, and yesterday went to Old Sturbridge Village for the first time! Next month we'll head to Battleship Cove to check out some WWII era subs. D was so very lucky to be able to travel to Greece and Rome with my dad and his wife last summer and to visit the ruins, museums, and cathedrals of many of the historic places he'd learned about over the past years.

Public schools seem to focus on U.S history, which makes sense in a way. It's good to know about the country where you live and ours is a very large and diverse country to be sure. But I want my children to be curious about the world around them and accepting and knowledgeable of other countries and cultures. So we focus on world history, but I also try to find creative ways to introduce U.S history each year as well. D has learned about famous presidents, important documents, the three branches of government, and the 50 states - mostly by reading books, watching movies (Brainpop and School House Rock are favorite sources)and playing stack the states on his ipod. Our new favorite book is the Scrambled States of America and we can't wait to get the board game!

J has been learning all about world culture this year. We use the book Around the World in 80 Tales by Saviour Pirotta and Richard Johnson as a jumping off point to learn about the world we live in. It's a book of folk tales from around the world. So we read several stories each week, and then put a flag sticker of the country we've been reading about from her Flags of the World book into a passport that we made in the beginning of the year. We also use globes and puzzles to learn geography. So far she's 'traveled' to countries in North America, South America, Africa, and Europe and this month we'll be reading and learning about Asia. We try to do a project for each continent - for example, we made clay beads last week when we were reading about Africa. When we learned about North America we did some crafts with quilting squares and made a southern-style meal. We also read lots of historical picture books and early chapter books for young learners. J loves the Little House books and some other favorites are the D'Aulaire's books of famous people (we love Abe Lincoln and Columbus), Follow the Dream, the Story of Christopher Columbus, Farmer George Plants a Nation, Martin's Big Words, Paths to Peace, Squanto's Journey, and Across a Dark and Wild Sea.

Happy history learning!

2010 School Year Completed!

Well, we have officially ended our second year of homeschooling! Of course, we never stop learning, and we never take the summer 'off' but we do shift gears and enjoy the warm weather and the unstructured learning that summer brings. We celebrated our last day of the 'school year' by learning about Mexico and throwing an end-of-year fiesta. We read about Mexico in our children's atlas and read a children's book about Frida Kahlo, Frida by Jonah Winter and Ana Juan. It is one my favorite children's books of all time - the artwork is absolutely beautiful and evokes the style of Kahlo. We also looked at some of her paintings online. The kids liked all of the monkeys in her portraits. Of course, no cultural study is complete without some sort of cooking project and Mexico was no exception. The difficulty lay in narrowing down what to make, as Mexican culture offers so very many delicious options. We chose to make empanadas, filling some with ground turkey sauteed with organic taco seasonings (for the meat-eaters) and some with cheese (for the non-meat eaters). We filled the remaining 4 with diced apples and apple butter, and rolled them in cinammon-sugar when they finished baking. I found the empanada dough recipe on allrecipes.com. It was simple, and delicious, though not at all healthy. We ended the day with a pinata! Now that we have put the workbooks and projects on the shelves, I am looking forward to sleeping in, hanging out in p.j's, delving into several art projects that have been postponed for quite some time, cooking mammoth ammounts of cupcakes (explanation to follow), exploring nature and the beach, and discovering the adventures that this summer will bring

molto buono

Last Wednesday was Italian culture day (not officially, just here at our house). We read Strega Nona by Tomie DePaula, and I Vivaldi by Janice Shefelmas, as well as books about Italian culture and the people of Italy. We listened to some Verdi, and when that got a bit heavy for the kids we switched to Vivaldi and listened to The Four Seasons. D was outraged that Vivaldi chose to write Summer in a minor key. Why, he demanded, would someone write about the best season of the year in such a despondent and tragic sounding key? Hmmmm... something to ponder.

We also looked at some art of the Italian Renaissance in our Art Up Close book, which I absolutely love but haven't spent nearly enough reading with the kids. We looked at the Mona Lisa, and Primavera by Botticelli.

The best part of the day, however, was spent making homemade (from scratch!) pasta. When we spent our first Christmas together, DG told me of childhood Christmas' past when his mom and aunts would spend hours making homemade ravioli. He used to love helping with this tradition as a wee tyke. After we were married I bought a pasta machine, complete with fancy ravioli attachment, envisioning the creation of our own Christmas pasta-making memories. Six years later it was still sitting in the box, collecting dust in the basement - until Wednesday, that is, when we dusted off the machine, assembled it ourselves sans directions, and put her to long-overdue use.

We thoroughly enjoyed rolling the dough through the pasta machine, watching it come out a bit thinner each time. I cut the dough into strips by hand, because I couldn't figure out how to attach the linguine cutter. But I must say (pat on the back) it was delicious. We rounded out the meal with a garden salad and a nice chianti, which we devoured sitting outside in our olive garden, overlooking the Italian riviera...okay just fantasizing about everything from the chianti on, but we did finish the meal with some yummy gelato from Whole Foods.

All things Russian...

We use the Story of the World audio books, written by Jessie Wise and narrated by Jim Weiss, to learn about history. D loves the way she presents history as a series of interesting stories and is an avid fan of world history. We try to cover one volume per year, and this year we are using Volume 3, which covers history from the late Renaissance to Early Modern times. The great thing about stretching one volume out over the year is that it gives us lots of time to jump off, research, and explore the stories of different countries, religions, and cultures.

We've been learning about Russian history since last year and have loved learning about the 2 Ivans (the 'great' and the 'terrible', aka as Ivan the Awesome to us after watching Night at the Museum 2) and most recently about Catherine the Great and her achievments in modernizing and westernizing Russia. To explore Russian culture a bit more this week we read 'The tale of the Firebird', by Gennady Spirin, a beautifully illustrated book and lovely Russian folk tale. After reading the book, the kids made their own clay firebirds, and decorated/painted them while listening to the Firebird Suite by Stravinsky.

Next we made some yummy Russian food. I've decided that cooking something sweet is always a plus if you can add it into your unit study! D is turning into quite the chef and he made blini, which are Russian pancakes that taste a lot like crepes. (Also, it's really fun to say 'blini'!) We filled them with powdered sugar and cinammon, folded them up and ate them with our fingers. We all agreed that they were delicious. Then we moved on to borscht (another fun word), which is a Russian beet and vegetable soup. Our finished product looked a bit like pale pepto bismal with vegetables floating in it, but tasted pretty good despite it's pallid hue - although the kids might disagree with that statement! I think we probably didn't use enough beets, so it didn't have the vibrant red color one would would expect borscht to have. Borscht will forever be known as pink soup in our house.