You Say You Want a Revolution?

There are few things more satisfying than helping someone learn what they are desperate to know. In my opinion (and hey, it’s my blog).  When it’s time for AJ to learn about history, he approaches this much like others approach a big bag of potato chips or a hot fudge sundae. Which makes it wonderfully gratifying to be one of the many people finding the resources and ideas to help feed this passion.

Over the last few years, we basically went where the wind took us in terms of history. If something captured his attention in a book, or a documentary, or somewhere we visited, his curiosity would drive him to learn more, and the rest of us just tried to keep up. This resulted in several years of fun but not necessarily linear learning about the stories of history. This year, since we had covered a lot of things once already, I have designed our curriculum to start at the beginning of American history, and take us on the story up through today. This of course means we are repeating many topics, but with new resources, new ideas, and new appreciation for their place in the grander scheme of things.

So while I have not even remotely been updating this blog weekly, as I pretend I do in my mind, we can pick up right where I left off with my last blog post about history: the beginning of the American Revolution.

We all have a soft spot for this topic in our house, as we studied the Revolution for first grade and capped it off with an epic trip to Boston (search the menu of this blog to see our post: No More Tea. No More Kings from our first grade year!) No trip to Boston was in the cards this year, but we had the pictures from last time, and a slightly longer attention span for depth and detail.

As you know, if you have been following along with our blog, we are using the Intellegyo Unit Studies for History this year. Intellego kindly provided an American History: Volume II to guide us on the next chapter of our learning.

And while the outline is about what you would expect in a study of the American Revolution, I appreciate the “extension activities” they provide, which you can think of as a quick detour into something a bit unexpected. Like for example, we were plodding along, delving into the 13 colonies, ramping up for a little French and Indian War review, when bam! What about Blackbeard? What was his role in all this colonization and exploration and pillaging? Didn’t see that coming, did you? But here he is:

 

Here are some great Blackboard (aka Edward Teach) resources that we found to extend the Extension…

Videos:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pirates/bbeard.html

http://www.weather.com/series/great-outdoors/video/recovered-from-blackbeard-shipwreck

Cool Website:

http://www.thepirateking.com/bios/teach_edward.htm

AJ lives for a good extension activity, and has been known to peek ahead to see what might be coming.

Our focus this time around really was on the story of things, how one event led to the next, and how all the pieces of the picture fit together. Yes, there was the life and experiences of the colonists, but what did the Europeans think? Or the Africans, who were being brought over as slaves?  I continue to appreciate all the embedded links these until studies provide–to the websites of historical sites, to lengthy lesson plans, pictures of artifacts, video clips, activities.

In addition, we integrated the Liberty’s Kids DVDs into our studies as well. They cost all of $5 (for ALL of them) on Amazon, and they are a fantastic complement to the study of early US History. They are broken down by topic, so they are easy to build into lesson plans. I am a huge fan of relevant technology, so we loved how this worked for us. There’s a companion website to the DVDs if you want to check it out:

http://www.libertyskids.com

We merrily revisited the Boston Tea Party (no more tea. no more kings. Cue the Schoolhouse Rock!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-9pDZMRCpQ

We took that opportunity to talk about taxes. Why did they need them? Why were the colonists so upset? What do we use taxes for today?

We actually had a great time with this concept (more than people usually do with taxes). To drive home how those colonists were feeling, I drafted a list of taxes that would be imposed at our house during the week he was learning about this. Lego tax. Toilet tax. TV tax. Computer tax. That got old pretty quick! Later that day, AJ imposed a tax of his own: singing tax (apparently I’m not as good of a singer as I would like to think):

The story rolled on…the first Continental Congress, then the second…(wait–how about Longfellow? Did you remember him? Why was he important right now?).

As always, there were lots of great new books to read. Here were a few of our favorites for this unit:

We took a bit of time to read up on old Ben Franklin as well. He was such a Renaissance Man. (AJ insisted for awhile that Ben had “invented lightening”. I refused to let that debate go until he acknowledged that Ben discovered electricity using lightening, rather than INVENTING lightning).

Enter the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal.

 

(But as AJ pointed out, if all men were created equal, why did the colonists think it was okay to have slaves?)

We suffered along with the soldiers through battles, Lexington and Concord, the winter of Valley Forge, Washington crossing the Delaware. Hey, want to see a picture of Washington Crossing the Delaware? My kid painted it. He rarely consents to artwork, so I am particularly fond of it:

We also spent an unexpected length of time talking about Benedict Arnold:

Because AJ really could not believe Benedict Arnold was so deceitful. Intellego had a great set of resources about Arnold, and we had some books from the library as well that really delved into his story and his actions.

By the time the British surrendered, we had spent a good month wading through the long, hard fought war. Somehow that made things seem more real than when we previously spent a short week speeding through the events.

When we stopped for Christmas break (I said I was tad bit behind….), we were poised for the next chapter in our history: Westward Expansion, Lewis & Clark (we loved Lewis & Clark last time…what else might we learn about them this time around??), the War of 1812. Stay tuned!

Settle Down.

I promise I plan to post about all the other great things we have been doing this semester other than American History, but I am so happy with how our unit studies for social studies that they are worth at least a few more posts. But a few updates…

I will say we have had less luck with the science Intellego units than the history ones, but that might just be based on our learning style. As we speak I am transitioning us from the long-lasting chemistry unit we started at the beginning of the year onto more dynamic, shorter science units. AJ swears he “loves” the chemistry unit, but it has gotten pretty repetitious and less engaging as time has gone on, so I’ve made the executive decision to shelf it and move onto to something else. AJ continues to be passionate about chemistry, but I want to feed that with a different approach than the structured study we attempted this semester.

Mathwise, things are rolling along. We have two great math programs running concurrently: Math-U-See and Life of Fred. We are almost done with Math U See Beta level, and have Math-U-See Gamma level on the way. Matt does all of this with AJ, and I for one have been pretty stunned at the results. The foundation it provides for him to do all kinds of math in other contexts is stellar, and he is easily adding and subtracting multi digit numbers into the thousands. Multiplication is the next frontier.

I utilize Life of Fred when I work with AJ on math. I’ve spoken of it before, and it’s all the rage in the gifted homeschooling community. I like it because it is an ongoing story, following Dr. Fred Gauss, a 5 year old math professor. AJ finds it hilarious. He wants to do multiple chapters of Fred everyday. I have to literally prevent him from doing more when we are short on time. We have worked through Apples, Butterflies, Cats, Dogs, and now are on Edgewood. AJ uses the math skills he has learned from Math U See, and is also learning early algebra, geometry, etc. I am not a fan of math, and I love Fred.

Elsewhere on the educational front, AJ has been taking all kinds of great classes. He has continued with Museum Mondays at the Cincinnati Museum, which are fantastic. We missed last week since he was down with a fever, and he was crushed. The topic of last week’s class was Forensic Science, so I consoled him by promising that would be our next new science topic. We’ve done others on caves, bridges, and have one on money coming up next week. Matt has taken AJ to two months of Zoo Troop classes down at the Cincinnati Zoo, and we have also been to some really great weekend classes at our local library on Lego Robotics and  MRI imaging (the kid loves all things medical). Finally, AJ continues with weekly swim lessons, having graduated from Level 3 swim and now onto Level 4.

So yes, there are things other than American history happening around here, so much so that I barely have time to update the blog. But I have big plans to catch up over Thanksgiving break 🙂

My love for Intellego history units has grown over the semester. As I said, the science units seem to be created a bit differently than the social studies units, likely because of the nature of the material. I am a sucker for things that create a dynamic story and engaging narrative, and these history units have fit the bill. Since we have studied most of these topics already at some point, it’s interesting to start all over from the beginning and see what details and parts of the stories we missed the first time around.

After exploring the explorers, we moved onto Early European Settlements. We focused on five: St. Augustine, Jamestown, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay colony, and New Netherland/New York. We talked about why people wanted to come settle in the new world, and what role religion and religious freedom played in those decisions. AJ appreciated the irony that people came for religious freedom but then weren’t as excited to give religious freedoms to others.

We started with St. Augustine, arguably the first permanent settlement in the new world, though Roanoke might take that title. We learned about Roanoke as well, with all the mystery of the lost colony. We spent a good amount of time thinking about what might have happened to those colonists at Roanoke. The lack of answer was quite off-putting to AJ.

There was a great fort created at St. Augustine called Castillo de San Marcos. We explored diagrams of the fort and AJ made a watercolor interpretation of it 🙂

Then we moved onto Jamestown, exploring several online interactive timelines and videos of life in the settlement. We also happened upon this educational kit at the library, which contained great pictures and replicas of maps, artifacts, and other treasures from Jamestown settlement.

At this point in history, the subject of slavery becomes a key issue. We talked about the reasons and dynamics of slavery, and the different kinds of slavery that existed (indentured servants, slaves on plantations, etc).

We then began the study of Plymouth, Pilgrims, and the Mayflower. AJ was not impressed that many of the ideas out there on the Pilgrims were fictional. No big buckles on big hats, no  turkey at the first Thanksgiving, no actual November Thanksgiving. Such a let down.

AJ watched some Colonial House (PBS) to get a taste of what life was like in the colonies. The Intellego unit also gave us some colonial style recipes to try, but none of them appealed to the student, so we skipped making them 🙂

We went on to study Massachusetts Bay Colony, and then the crazy Salem Witch Trials. We had some books on that from the library as well. The whole story was so bizarre. And led to an interesting discussion about the validity of witchcraft, and why people would have wanted to create the stories about the Salem Witches.

After all was said and done, AJ created a big chart comparing life and conditions in all the different settlements.

This wrapped up our very first American History unit, and set the stage for the next phase of the story of America…the Revolutionary War.

The First Unit: The First People.

And…we’re back. It’s taken me awhile to 1) find the time to update the blog and 2) decide how I wanted to organize the blog this year. We have been marvelously busy. I have felt more comfortable taking risks this year with our routine and curriculum, which means things no longer neatly fall into clean weeks of unit themes that can be easily blogged and recorded. This took me a few weeks to adjust to–I am so used to exploring a new topic every week, and had developed a sense of how much we could bite off to finish on schedule. Now that we are using the Intellego Units, we have taken a deep dive approach. The pace is slower, the material is more detailed, and my preconceived ideas about how long it would take to learn a topic have been uprooted. Intellego estimates 40 hours to work through an entire unit study. I thought for sure we would roll through it faster than that. But soon I realized we needed to take our time with it–the beauty of these unit studies lies in their detail. Roaring through them was really not the point, especially since we have studied in a more broad way many of the subjects covered in the unit itself, and the purpose of choosing these was their well organized, in-depth look, allowing us a deeper dive into things we had taken an initial look at over the last 3 years. We just finished our very first Intellego Unit this week, about 6 weeks after we started it. Since we have been working on it about 3 days a week, about 2 hours a day, I suppose that does ultimately work out to about those 40 hours. This unit was American History I: Before the New Nation (3rd-5th grade), and consisted of three lengthy chapters. We have been supplementing it with books from the library, and activities we come up with. Between that, the other Intellego science unit Matt is teaching, language arts, two kinds of math, AJ’s newly discovered passion for reading excessively long chapter books, and the huge amount of classes and activities he is in, we are finally settling into a rhythm for the school year. So I now return to regular blogging. I have quite missed it, as I always feel a sense of accomplishment recording what we have learned. So now, our exploration into our first unit chapter: Life Before the Europeans.  AJ’s one request when we decided to go with Intellego was that we still pick out lots of other books from the library to go along with it. And so we did: We studied Native Americans in Kindergarten (which was great fun, and resulted in a tepee being built upstairs in the schoolroom). But this unit started with the first people crossing the land bridge Beringia into what would later be known as North America. Somehow AJ knew all of this already (“It’s in a book I read…”), but he knew much less about what came after that–namely, the migration of specific tribes for specific reasons. This is where I really got hooked on the Intellego. When I was researching these unit studies, there were not many reviews by homeschoolers about them. What I was hoping for was the detail, the chronology, the perspective of how seemingly separate events were connected (the story of history), as well as great online links, activities, and ideas. In short, something that was not 2-dimensional, but alive and engaging. I have been impressed by the story told by these units–the different perspectives, the depth of discussion, and the critical thinking they promote (discussion questions about why certain tribes would have needed to live in certain places, debate about what may have happened to tribes that mysteriously disappeared, etc). I  am not a universal fan of some of the links embedded in the units, some were marvelous and others were very dry and overly detailed, but that’s where I think you have to steer according to the kid’s interests and level. I readily skipped over very long, textbook like detail and let him spend all kinds of time on the interactive activity sites and videos. The chapters all start with a KWL chart. AJ hates KWL charts. I might have overdone these in a teensy way when we first started homeschooling–now when he sees one he has a visceral negative reaction. So we skipped over that and just had a nice discussion of what we Knew. This unit took us on a journey of the Yupik, the Mississippi Mound Builders, the Cliff Dwellers, the Ojibwa, and the Plains Indians. The story behind each of the groups–what took them to where they settled, and how where they lived influenced how and what they hunted, the climate challenges, and what they invented–was fascinating. Yupik: Also known as Eskimos. AJ enjoyed the Smithsonian activity included in this section, as well as the folk stories about the role of the Raven in the creation of the first people. Mississippi Mound Builders: I have memories of going to Effigy Mounds when I was growing up, and we have two different mound sites close to where we live (neither of which we have been able to visit yet!). The story of the mounds (and the lack of agreement of what the mounds were actually for) was fascinating, and we are planning a field trip there soon (hopefully before it gets too cold!) AJ and one of our college students who come out to the Schoolhouse attempted to make Clay Pots during this part of the unit, and ran into all kinds of struggles finding a kind of clay that would work. They tried Crayola air dry clay, which crumbled, and then some Sculpty, which dried instantly. Leave me a comment with some child friendly clay pot clay if you have any good suggestions–we never did master those clay pots. There were good, deep discussion questions on this unit-for example, a discussion of the ethical considerations of excavating the mounds. Anasazi: The Cliff Dwellers. There is a good bit of mystery on the Anasazi, ancestors of the Pueblo people. We read a few books to go with this unit, and are still debating what might have happened to these people… Ojibwa: Moving north, these people lived on the Eastern Woodlands. AJ’s favorite part of this was making a dream catcher (again, with one of our students) to hang over his bed: Impressive, huh? It was a kit from Hobby Lobby. Plains Indians: This took us on an overview of the many tribes living in the plains prior to the arrival of the first European explorers and the different kinds of homes they built and why. We did a few other fun activities during this chapter as well, including making a drum (coffee can, old school), painting rocks, and an odd but interesting activity involving folding and biting wax paper to make patterns and indentations (this was in one of our books): At the end of the chapter, there is no shortage of reflection activities and questions–designed for every kind of learner. We opted to go straight for the big finish–creating our own board game on all the tribes we had learned about. Technically you are supposed to use Monopoly as the basis for this, but I couldn’t exactly FIND our Monopoly at that particular time, so we used a Monopoly knockoff instead, and it worked fine. I ended up making this up as I went, writing some clues and questions, improvising categories, etc, as I wanted this to be more like a 45 minute finale, rather than a whole day long one: I must say, it won’t win any style prizes but it was a great way to test what AJ had learned over the prior weeks. I asked pretty hard questions, as the kid has a crazy good memory. Definitely going to use this idea again down the road! Next up: European Explorers. Columbus Day is tomorrow, so I might be motivated to start the next blog topic on that very topic (sneak preview: AJ thinks Columbus is a big jerk).