How we learn HISTORY

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I'm linking up with Learning All the Time's "Favorite Resource this Week!"

It's hard to narrow my favorite history resources down to just one, because we pull our lessons from so many different sources!

The Horrible Histories series by Terry Deary is lots of fun. So are Bentley Boyd's Chester comic books. Dude loves DK books; we own a few, but most of them are available at the library. Super likes E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World. We use it as a basic outline for our chronological history studies.



We love hands-on projects, so sometimes we use History Pockets as a supplement. We also like the Spend a Day in... series by Linda Honan because they are full of fun crafts and activities. I believe there are only three in the series; I wish there were more!

This is one project we made from Spend a Day in Ancient Greece. We still use the caduceus as a symbol for medicine today.



Notebooking is a great way to summarize what we've learned. It's also fun to go back and look over their past work as a review. The kids recently asked to study Vikings, so I got these great pages from The Notebooking Nook.



As you can see, the kids also made paper shields. We cut out cardboard swords and covered them with foil, but they didn't stand up to "battle" as well as the shields!

We also used the Brandenburg Vikings unit, downloaded from CurrClick. You probably can't read the Viking sayings above, so here they are:

A man who wants to kill his foe
Must get up fast and never slow.

A wolf who wants a snack
Never sleeps on his back!

Beer and mead are not that good.
They make your brain as thick as mud.

And my personal favorite:



Didn't realize those Vikings were so well-spoken! :)

These are all great resources, but I would have to say that our absolute favorite resource for history is...

Dad!

When you're a homeschooling mom, it's extemely handy to have a history loving-husband! (Dad's idea of a fun evening is reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson, or watching a Ken Burns documentary.)



Dad is in charge of helping the kids with their timelines. He also likes to read Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe books with them. And if the kids ever have a question about some arcane bit of historical trivia...well, they don't come to me!

My public school history education was based on boring textbooks and memorizing dates, so it's not surprising that I forgot nearly all of it. I'm grateful to have an opportunity to get a great history education along with my kids.

Who knew that history could be interesting and fun?