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!