Pages

Thursday, April 15, 2010

History with our version of the unschooling method.

For History/ Social Studies/Geography this year, we are sort of doing "Unschooling", which means that you randomly pick a subject you want to learn about and just dive in. It has been a lot of fun, and I would love to do this for every subject some time, but I'm not that brave. We have learned about various U.S. presidents, events in American history, and other famous Americans.
I go to the library and find fun books or series of books. This morning we read You're On Your Way, Teddy Roosevelt. It was a fun book. I ordered several more books by the same author, Judith St. George. Reading "living" books about a subject or person is so much more fun and easier to remember than reading something out of a dry, boring text book.
Another fun thing that we are doing as a family right now is to try to learn the states and capitols. Thanks to my sister, Kellie, we know a song with all of the states in alphabetical order, so we have that part covered. Kellie learned the song in school and sang it in the car all of the time until I learned it too! We have several of the plastic $1.00 place mats from Wal-Mart. There are a bunch of educational ones. I keep the United States map placemat on the table at dinner time every night and we try to see how many capitols we can remember. Warren and I will also tell a little trivia about the states. I traveled a good bit around the U.S. before I met Warren, and he has been to several states for work that I haven't been to. After we learn the capitols, I'm going to get the placemat with the presidents on it and try to tackle that. Unschooling has been very productive and fun this year, especially since my children are very young. If it's interesting, they are going to retain so much more information!

1 comment:

  1. Hello Aunt Monica!
    I have had so much fun reading your blog today!
    I have not been on the computer in a while, so I had much to catch up on:)

    I loved all the gardening pictures below... I am having so much fun with the raised bed garden boxes here. There is not near as much weeding involved! I hope your box is a big success!!
    We have planted over five hundred plants of corn this week and I am praying they all do well.

    Love you all very much, and hope to see you soon!

    Your niece,
    McKenzie~

    ReplyDelete

free counters

My Play List