The Mystery of History

I love history. If you'd asked me while I was in school though, I would have told you that it's the most boring subject to have to study! I didn't realize how very interesting and fun history is until I was grown.

Kristen was three and we were in Fort Myers visiting my mom (she had a winter home there at the time). As I was driving to the beach one day, I drove right past a sign for Thomas Edison's winter home. It had been turned into a museum and they had tours. I thought that sounded like a nice break from the sun and we made plans to go check it out. Well, it was amazing! I learned so much more about him and his very interesting life and inventions that I ever learned in school.

Now that I homeschool my kids, one of my goals is to make history fun and interesting to my kids. I realize that not everyone will have a passion for it, and that's ok, but I think they'll learn it better if the can have some experiences that are memorable. I do this largely with field trips. There really is no better way to get a hand-on experience than that. But we are limited as to where we can go. We can't experience European history or the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. (although I would love that ;))

What I've done instead is carefully chosen our history curriculum for the year. I read and research, go to curriculum fairs and talk to other parents trying to find the perfect combination of good literature and factual information. I've tried Beautiful Feet which I loved, but the "textbook" part was somewhat over their heads and difficult to follow. I do still use alot of the books though through the elementary years. They are fantastic!

We've also tried Sonlight as well. This is a literature based curriculum and the reading books for language arts go along with the history lesson being taught. So many books! I was so very excited and sure I'd found the perfect one. But the "textbook" part of the year that we tried was the encyclopedia on the computer. Now I'm not against using encyclopedias; in fact as I kid I used to read ours all the time! But this was on the computer and I found it very difficult to operate. We would spend half our day just trying to find the answers to the questions in his workbook which left very little time for the literature part. We ditched the encyclopedia and just read the fantastic historical fiction and nonfiction for the rest of the year. We very much enjoyed the books, but it still didn't have the balance that I wanted.

This year we are trying the Mystery of History. It is a very detailed history program that incorporates the happenings in the Bible into secular history to give you a full, chronological history of the world. When I started reading it, I thought "Perfect!", but after we started I was having doubts. Were there enough facts for my fact-loving boy? (this is Brandon's history curriculum) I dug out my Abeka history book and prepared to switch.

But I think we'll continue giving it a try. Brandon seems to enjoy it more and more each day. There are activities listed after each days lesson that I thought would "bring history to life" for him and he's really getting into them! So we'll see how it goes :)

Here are a couple of his favorite activities:

He read about Stonehenge yesterday and the activity was to make a large circle outside so you can see how difficult it was for them. You could use anything you wanted to make your circle:

We have lots of Legos ;)

This one was when he was learning about the Sumerians and their false gods. His assignment was to build a ziggurat which was what they called their temples:

I love the detail of this one! We have some Indiana Jones Lego sets that include some idols. They really came in handy!

Of course, any curriculum that allows him to build using Legos is ok in his book ;) (there have been other activities...he got to use clay the first week) but I do think it's thorough enough also. I have the first two books which should take us up to the middle ages so we'll get a pretty good look at it. We'll let you know!