History & Geography

Back to finishing up my curriculum plan... ;) Up next are two subjects that we cover altogether, though I'll be working on hopefully doing a better job of parceling out different levels of assignments to the boys as appropriate this year.

History. We really enjoy history. (You can read more about our history journey here, here and here.) As of last year, we cover both world history and US history.

For world history...In keeping with the classical approach, we use Story of the World and covered volume 1 last year, also utilizing a timeline book (that the boys added to as we learned things). We'll do volume 2 this year. (This will be our second time through the series for the older two boys but Micah's first time through.)

For US history...Last year, we just made our own sort of curriculum, reading books that interested us but without a true plan. (We added things to our timeline books, too.) This year, we're starting History of US by Joy Hakim (in part because I found a rockin' deal on a used set...yay!). Like with Story of the World, I've opted to break the series into four parts and will rotate through just like I do with Story of the World. (I broke it roughly into 1) pre-1800 2) 1800s 3) 1900s and 4) recent.)

For both of these, I tend to use the curriculum itself as a framework and then also focus each month on something of specific interest. For this coming year, sometimes that will be weaponry that correlates with the time. (Many thanks to this book, lol.)

Geography. As with history, we've now broken geography into world geography and US geography. 

For world geography, last year we started Expedition Earth. We're pretty happy with it and covered about 6 countries a week. (I would read the boys the information about that country...and have them locate it on a map to color...and then have them each write a sentence about that country to help them remember something about it. Randomly, I'd quiz them about the countries.) Last year, we made it through Africa, Asia and Europe. We'll continue this year to finish up all the countries and will then focus on reviewing each continent for a month at a time. 

For US geography, last year we used The Star-Spangled State Book. We covered the fifty states (I went in order of admission to the union) in a similar manner to the countries of the world. This year, I haven't really decided what we'll do. I've set aside time each week and will work on reviewing the map through games and books. (I particularly like this book, though it's a bit more in-depth than I'm looking for necessarily.) 

And that's history and geography. ;)