As a future educator I guess I was starting to think like a teacher. I had never understood history in the context of what I learned in that class. At the same time I had never really had a real appreciation for art. So maybe that class was both an art journey as well as a homeschooling journey. But I think that class was certainly the moment when I felt like the way I had been taught so many things didn't really make sense. Seriously, how much more fun would lit class have been if we were learning about the same things in history?
Subjects just make more sense when studied with the other subjects. So we are starting at the very beginning. I hear it's a very good place to start.
History
We use The Story of the World as our main history spine. We started with the hunter gatherers of the fertile crescent and we will be ending somewhere in the Roman Empire, Constantine maybe??, I can't really remember. We will go through all of history in four years, then we will start back at the beginning.
This book is a more narrative approach to telling history. It reads like a story book, but there are very few pictures and they are all in black and white. If you purchase this book for history the teacher book/student workbook is a must. The book comes together, which I didn't like. Although, I guess it made the book cheaper.
The student workbook pages tear out with perforated sheets. Since I didn't want half of my teacher book missing as the year went along, I went ahead and pulled out all of the student sheets, hole punched them and put them in a 3 ring binder. This way we can add narration pages and pictures as we wish. I may even add his art work or pictures of his artwork. Then I tore the rest of the pages out and cut them cleanly (they probably could have done the cutting at Office Max) and had it re-bound using a spiral binding. It was a little an hour or so of cutting, but it costs all of three or four dollars and now a half empty book won't drive me crazy all year. Time and money well spent in my mind. I like the spiral binding better anyway, because I like bending books back.
The teacher book has lots of ideas about comprehension questions, extra read-aloud suggestions to check out from the library, narration sentence examples, and how to do the map work. On the mapwork, Sterling l.o.v.e.s. the mapwork! The student workbook now in a binder includes a few projects, map work for every week (aka geography), and a coloring sheet. Because Sterling is really into doing the maps (he's always been a map nerd) I even bought some tracing paper so after he does the coloring on the actual map page, he can practice drawing the map.
He told me this week he was going to take the map he traced of Egypt to the fertile crescent when he's grown and moves there, because that's really close to Egypt and he may want to take a trip.
We use these encyclopedias as supplements they are full of information and have lots of great pictures. Even if we don't get to the library that week they provide plenty of extra information and visual learning. The Kingfisher book is also recommended by The Well-Trained Mind for the next classical stage starting in fifth grade, so we have it already, and it also has lots of lists we can use for memory work in the back.
I made these timeline books for the kids. I just made a cover and printed a whole bunch of pages with this line across. I printed them on cardstock to make it a bit more substantial. Technically timelines probably don't fit in the stage of learning we are in. I think it's more of a skill for our second round of history but I printed them anyway. We haven't done them yet, but I think Sterling will like it. I haven't decided what pictures to put in it either. There are some really great printable pictures that you can color to go in timelines but they are all pretty pricey. So, I'm sure eventually I'll bite the bullet and purchase. I'm thinking the timeline might be more of a review every so many weeks. Plus we can connect it to the timeline in Classical Conversations. A class he is taking that I'll talk about later.
Art
I'm not sure what I think about our art book yet. I like that it mixes art history along with art instruction. It seems that it will follow the classical model by using the masters to teach and model the lessons. It seems that we will do a lot of recreating/reinterpreting great works of art. This I like.
In the art history section it does begin with cave paintings and a third of the book is lessons devoted to a sequential historical approach, although it goes beyond the dates that we will cover, while the other two thirds use the other works to teach the lessons. So, we are not going straight through the book. We are going to match the art history section when possible and on weeks that there is no match we will work our way through the book learning to think and see like an artist. I love that the curriculum has the children using art supplies, this seems kind of obvious but what makes art more fun to a five-year-old than oil and soft pastels and watercolor crayons?! The kids have loved it so far, art is certainly something they look forward to!
No comments:
Post a Comment