Keeping It Simple

Some of this is a rerun, but I have gotten a lot of interest in last year's American History Studies, so I thought I'd post an overview of the "Division and Civil War" portion of our studies. Mark and James (9 and 12yo) used History Pockets to document these two history units. Paul, my high school student, used notebook pages that I will add later (don't have pictures). We used " Hands on History " to document our Colonial and Revolutionary War studies, but I was not as happy with the Hands on History Civil War volume.  (By the way, if I could go back in time, I'd make this two posts. Lots of pictures and very long! It took too long to get it up, so I leave it as it is with my apologies.) American The Story of Us- Episode 4: Division  (We purchased the DVD series new at a very reasonable price after it became unavailable on Netflix) Episode Guide:  (IMPORTANT UPDATE ABOUT EPISODE GUIDES AT BOTTOM OF POST) I fi...

We have been following so many rabbit trails that we find ourselves pretty thick in the forest right now. There are just so many fun books and movies to go with this time period (some more historically accurate than others!). I have made some adjustments to James' participation in our American History studies. He seemed to be getting frustrated with what I had planned for the boys to do. After giving it some thought, I realized that in spite of being the sophisticated age of nine, he really is more of a "younger elementary" student. To that end, I am picking and choosing a few projects that more fit his needs and he can just listen in for the rest. In a few years, he can have a redo. I knew that my assessment was correct when he was working on his Thanksgiving booklet and said- "I think this must be way funner than what the boys are doing." This booklet is made using US History Little Books: Famous Events . You can tell James took a little artistic l...

Notebooking is not new to us. I love my son's  history notebook  from years ago. More recently, we have been creating lapbooks or a combination of lapbooking and notebooking that might be called a lapjournal. I did this post a while ago that explains some of the methods we use. I also have a page below my blog header with examples of some of our lapbooks and notebooks. Notebooking is different than lapbooking not just in presentation, but in that it tends to a long term project. Once we made the commitment to documenting our Galloping the Globe studies using the notebook pages, I wanted to get things organized so that we (I should say "I") would follow through. Binders labeled and ready to go: A section labeled for general geography and one section  for each continent-  These sample pages are a mix from our China and Korea studies (I don't want to confuse anyone!) and some are not complete.  I tried to include so...

My apologies for another very long post- but it is mostly pictures this time! :) During my schoolroom organizational efforts, I came across some "yearbooks" that my children had made years ago. I had not thought that much about it when they made them, but after looking through them now, I thought- "Wow!! Those are pretty cool!". (I wish we had kept it up!) You could do some pretty high tech stuff these days, but I really like these yearbooks created by the kids. So, here some examples of their very "down home" yearbooks. Erin's 5th grade yearbook cover page: A field trip page: A service project page: Some page protectors stuffed with memorabilia: Erin started this memory page- it is a "rough draft" and the "final draft" was in progress in the back pocket of her notebook. I think this is perfectly adorable as is. :) Paul's K cover page: A few of Paul's favorite Kinder drawings were in the back of his yearbook: A ...

More purging and walking down memory lane... this time with history notebooks. For this notebook, I photocopied (reduced) pictures from the D'aulaire's American history picture books for my son to color while I read the book to him. I printed up some lined paper, my son glued the finished picture to the top half of the page, and then he wrote a brief caption. He colored several pictures for each book we read. This format is super simple to follow through on, and it makes a nice completed project to share. (The idea originates from Rea Berg's Beautiful Feet American History Guide K-3) I can't find the source for the world map above- the link no longer works, but I often print maps from here . We also used several maps and resources from Enchanted Learning to add to the notebook. The lined paper is available and Donna Young's Printables (I am not sure where we printed it from way back when, but I have seen similar paper there).