Winging It - History

I mentioned in an earlier post that I planned to wing it more or less for our History and Science this year. Now that we are three weeks into our "un planned" subjects I figured it was time for an update.

History is going well. I have mainly been using The Story of the Thirteen Colonies and American History Stories which are on our Heritage History CD. My kids seem to enjoy these tales of the Spanish Conquistadors. I don't know about enjoy since these men were so ruthless with the natives.  But we are learning about many of the early explorers of the Americas the good and the bad.
I have been supplementing these books with some I find at the library. My kids always enjoy the You wouldn't want to be series. So I make sure I pick up any that might go along with our studies. This week we read You wouldn't want to explore with Sir Francis Drake, You wouldn't want to be Mary Queen of Scots and You wouldn't want to sail with Capatin cook.

Even our audio books have gone along with history lately. We recently finished Sing Down the Moon and then started Stowaway.  I really love using literature to study history.


I haven't had them do much as far as projects or writing. Mostly we just discuss and look at a lot of maps. I am going to have to try to fit in something a little more fun for them to do just to mix things up a bit.

Sophie's online Humanities class is studying Central and South America this term so all the history we have covered the last few weeks she is going to repeat again with her class. I think we are going to be heading more into North American History here shortly and jump into the stories of the early English settlements so I am sure Sophie will be doing history with us as well as with her online class. I hope it doesn't end up being too much.

So far so good with our History. Since we aren't using Story of the World as our spine this year I was little nervous but I think we are doing just fine with almost all literature.