Sunday, January 3, 2010

Big Idea Number One

Ask any homeschool mom about her favorite activity with her children and expect a detailed, enthusiastic description of books, art projects, or field trips. We all have those times when we can recall the light of actual learning burn so uncharacteristically in our children’s faces that we can hardly stop talking about them.

Today and Wednesday I will share with you all my two best projects, and I’ll try not to go on and on!

Winner #1
History Time Line
This was without a doubt the best learning tool we used in History. After studying an era in our lesson, the children would choose the twenty or so most important people or events. So they used their little brains right from the start to assess importance to what they had just learned.

The next step was to draw a picture depicting the person or event on a three-by-three piece of paper. For this activity they had to recall or research details. An added plus—counts as art, too.

Step number three—the children then affixed the pictures to the timeline that for years adorned a long hallway at kid-height. They looked up the date associated with the picture and positioned it near the date on the timeline. Then they drew a line to the actual date and noted the event or person above the date.

This may seem like a simple activity, but making the timeline was excellent review and more importantly, caused them to appreciate the sweep of history and not just a series of battles and treaties. We included the composers, artists, scientists, and writers we studied, so the work of Charles Dickens made more sense in light of the Industrial Revolution. They could see the interconnectedness of our world—an ability I hope they have taken with them. A singer like Marilyn Manson doesn’t spring up out of nowhere, and neither did a composer like Bach.
It’s all documented on the timeline.
Share some of your best today. Who knows who could benefit from a fresh idea?

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