Top 5 Educational Resources Day 2: Learning Through History Magazine

Learning Through History Magazine is another Favorite Educational Resource we use.

History is a really important part of our curriculum. We use The Story of the World series as a general text. The kids learn to outline, summarize, and make conclusions about history as they write, write, write about history. Anyone who has read our monthly Homeschool magazine, The Sahuarita Saga knows that our kids spend a lot of time writing about history.

Beyond the writing and map work and timelines that we create, I ask the kids to do history projects. This is where Learning Through History Magazine comes in. Each magazine focuses on a major historical movement. I buy the back issues that I want. I think they are around $6. They have activities for children in preschool through high school. There are articles about people, technology, politics, and fashion. There are art projects, primary source documents to study and essay questions and ideas for further study. The magazines are black and white and have no advertisements.

We take 2-3 weeks to work on each history project. We do a couple of big history projects each year. This year we are studying modern history (1850-1900s). For World War I, I used the Great War issue and assigned Paige and Daniel to come up with projects using this magazine. Daniel chose to write about planes and tanks. He studied the events leading up to the US deciding to join the war and summarized them in a paper. Paige found an article about Choctaw Indian code talkers and wrote a research paper about them. She also thought the War Propaganda article was interesting and spent a lot of time on the internet, looking over propaganda posters and then she wrote an essay contrasting opposing views about the use of war propaganda. To finish their WWI projects, the kids wrote a trivia game about about WWI and we watched Sergeant York.

Next year as we study ancient history, I will order the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine magazines to supplement what we learn in our history text.

Learningthroughhistory.com is where you can order these magazines and a lot of other fun history stuff.

History in textbooks is lame. A project approach to history just rocks.

Top 5 Educational Resources Day 1: SCBF Series

This week I will share five of my favorite educational resources.

My first pick is the Shakespeare Can Be Fun! Series. I mentioned this series in my last post. I am truly inspired by this author, Lois Burdett. After spending an hour reading her version of Hamlet, written in couplets and including the more famous lines from Shakespeare, I was hooked. I’m going to buy the whole series. My kids love the books that I have ordered so far.

Something charming about this series is the author integrates writings from 3rd-4th graders in the text and the book is fully illustrated by children. She is an amazing educator, helping the children with their writing and reading comprehension skills.

I wrote the author last week asking for permission to do a stage performance of Burdett’s play, Hamlet for Kids!.  Today I opened my e-mail to find her most warm, kind response. Not only did she take the time to personally write to me, she was personable and passionate about helping children to write well. She’s Canadian and now that’s my favorite country next to the good old USA. I would love to have her come down here and do a workshop. Please look into buying one of these wonderful books because you heard from me how FABULOUS they are.

You really ought to click on your link to amazon.com and get ordering. She’s got a huge selection of titles!

Stay tuned for more of my Favorite Educational Resources from our 2008-2009 school year.