Ready. Set. Plan.

To be honest, I don't always plan. Sometimes I am a "fly by the seat of your pants" kind of girl. Other times, I plan my brains out. I can't say that one method has been more successful than the other. Just different. This year, I feel like planning. Usually that is a sign that things are going to get crazy and I am going to need a plan to be able to fall back on! We'll see.

Phase 1::History Plans 

I have wavered all year trying to decide on what to do next year. When it came down to it, it needed to be affordable and doable. Following another blogger's lead, I am making this video series the base or guide to our history study.


Step one was to print up the teacher guide for each episode through the Civil War. (Look down the left hand column to find the guides.)

UPDATE- the above link is broken.

 You should be able to get the guides this way:
By searching "American The Story of Us Episode ___" (fill in numbers 1-10 one at a time), you can find the guides!!  You can use the link below to get started and should be able to just change the episode number to get to the next pdf, but I was directed to "no page found" more than once. Just do a new search using the episode number you are on. If you want to use these guides, I suggest printing or saving them all now.

http://www.history.com/images/media/pdf/America_Episode1_guide_FIN.pdf


For step two,  I went to the above mentioned blogger to copy her plans. You can see Nicole's series on what she did with her freshman son last year on her blog Journey To Excellence.


Next, I printed plans that a friend put together for her family and graciously shared with me. They are perfect as her target was grades 4-8 and that is just where Mark and James are. 

Do you notice that I don't have an original thought in my head? So thankful to people who freely share their plans!


Each section of my binder has the History of Us pages for that topic, my friend's plans on that topic, and Nicole's plans as well. 

On to resources- 


Am I the only one never knows what resources I have downloaded? I have files that are well organized, but inevitably I find that I had the "perfect resources" after we already completed a subject.

To fix that, I have included a resources tab and a notebook tab in my binder.

I printed the cover page and table of contents for each resource that I plan to use.

The notebook section has all the topic overview pages from the History Scribe notebooking pages that might be useful. 

Whew! Now that all of that is organized...


I am going through the plans to see which books our library has, which ones I have on hand, what movies are available through Netflix, and what resources I might want to invest in.

My goal- to finish planning this subject by the end of this week.

Comments

  1. NicoleJuly 16, 2012 at 4:59 AM

    So glad you are finding my resources helpful! I pray that you and your children enjoy the study of our country as much as Dawson and I did last year. Seriously, it was the most fun I have had in a long, long time, and gave me such a strong understanding of where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going.

    Nicole

    ReplyDelete
  2. PattyJuly 16, 2012 at 5:56 AM

    You are awesome! History can be one of those subjects that if there isn't enough information to engage the student, so much can be lost on them. You definitely will not have a dry curriculum. Good job!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 15, 2014 at 5:32 AM

    Can you tell me the link to this? I have a 10th grader that this would be perfect for!
    Suzanne

    ReplyDelete
  4. LaurieDecember 17, 2014 at 8:51 PM

    Hope you check back here, Anonymous! The link to the plans is within the post under the red update- http://www.history.com/images/media/pdf/America_Episode1_guide_FIN.pdf (see my update for more specific instructions on how to get all the guides) Also, if you click on the tag at the bottom of this post "America: The Story of Us", you can see more posts on this topic. Let me know if you need any more help- you can email me at laurie (underscore) duquette (at) yahoo (dot) com

    ReplyDelete

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