Block Upon Block

We try to lapbook different topics once or twice a year and this year our subject was the Underground Railroad.

The topic was the same for all of the kids but the required work for a lapbook ranges according to the kids’ ages. Each of the kids worked very hard and their finished lapbooks have a place on our “history shelf”–after all, they are beautiful to look at and full of great information! Here is a glimpse of the kids work.

This was Peter’s first lapbook and he enjoyed making it. He enjoys looking at the finished product more.

Rianna has done quite a few lapbooks now and they get better each time! She puts a lot of detail in each one.

Heidi is a very creative person and her lapbooks showcase that.

Our tour of Canadian history has made a several week stop at the Underground Railroad as we’ve studied it in detail and are now working on a lapbook about it. We enjoyed reading The Last Safehouse as a family and Rianna quite enjoyed reading Underground to Canada as personal reading. During our daily read aloud time I’ve been reading a biography of George Washington Carver. I really wanted the children to realize that while the Underground Railroad was a good work, it wasn’t a magical fix for black people in either Canada or the United States. Justice is more than just an amendment or a new law.

In the neat type of miracle timing that I can never quite manage on my own, in Rianna’s vocabulary today she had to read a story on Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. This led to an interesting discussion on segregation and I read the kids Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham Jail. This always makes me cry, and while I don’t relish making my children cry, I was happy that it moved them, too.

Through-out our tour of Canadian history we have come face to face with injustice that has been faced by others; not just black Canadians and Americans but the Canadian native tribes and many ethnic groups as well. Learning history is so key in children learning life lessons. Eccesiastes 1:9 says, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” The horrible injustices we see in the world now are not new, and the incidents of injustice that occurred in our country’s history did not occur for the first time here.  I hope that reading the parts of our history that don’t inspire us with heroic acts or noble deeds will help all of us grow in compassion and understanding. That is more important to me, in schooling my children, than the memorization of pertinent facts.

I’m in the midst of lesson planning for next year’s history right now and I’m quite excited about what we are doing. I love history, so every time period we study becomes my favourite for a while and then I gladly move to the next. We are doing ancient civilizations next year and between Egypt, Persia, Assyria, Babylon and Greece there is enough scope for the imagination for anyone. I got a few resources on modern Iran, too, to compare a bit.

Rianna, my oldest, will be in Gr. 6 and will have a heavier workload than the others. There is such a thing as exasperating, though, and I’m trying to be careful to balance things. I don’t want to overload her, but neither do I want to keep absolutely all reading/writing assignments history focused because I think that will kill some of the joy for her. My compromise for Rianna’s schoolwork is that I’m dropping some of her extra language arts because I’d like her to be able to focus on some fun things like re-writing Greek myths and also because I’m introducing her to a more in-depth style of outlining in her history reading. She will still have more then enough language arts with defining words from various periods and writing about some of our historical discoveries. I’m still keeping some of the more “fun” language arts like Wednesday’s journal activity and our Tuesday focus on letter writing. Learning new skills is hard work, but keeping the topics as interesting as possible and trying to keep fun where I can is important to me. It seems that often homeschooling parents can be very concerned about school work being enjoyable when kids are younger but when we start to “buckle down” with older kids we think that all fun has to disappear. I don’t think that has to be true. I think you can enjoy learning all of your life.

Heidi (Gr. 4 next year) is going to re-write some Aesop’s fables this year for a combination of language arts and history. She has a great sense of humour and I think that she will be able to showcase it in her fables.

Humour, like fun :), is important not to leave out of your school day. History lends itself to a lot of great read alouds and I try to read aloud a history title every day but I’m careful not to have it the only book we read. A book like James and the Giant Peach, Charlotte’s Web or at least some nonsensical poems adds a much needed touch of laughter to the day, too.

I’m not finished dreaming and scheming about next year’s lessons yet, but I’m feeling good about what I know so far.

I’ve been re-reading the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder to my big girls before bed. We were reading Little Town on the Prairie one evening and came across a chapter where a man was giving a “Fourth of July” speech and referenced the Americans beating the British in battle:

“A few barefoot Americans had to fight the whole of them and lick ‘em, and they did fight them and they did lick them. Yes sir! We licked the British in 1776 and we licked ‘em again in 1812…….”

To which Rianna immediately piped up, “They did not beat us in 1812.” You see, we’ve recently studied the War of 1812 and while we are not British, since it happened on Canadian soil, this is a victory most Canadians claim. This started an interesting conversation about how that war looks very differently to the people involved: to the Canadians it is a victory, to the Americans it is where they got their national anthem and the name of the White House and to the British it was really just one battle in a whole series between the French and the English.  We concluded that history is best studied and understood by looking at all sides of things, not just our own.

Note that this was not during a history lesson at all–it was just talking because what we studied stayed with them and a book that was not meant to reinforce a lesson sparked a reaction. I think I like this part of school best of all…when I can see that what we learned really clicked.

I have a piece of curriculum that I’m enjoying very much: Uncle Josh’s Outline Map Collection on CD-ROM.  There are over 180 maps of various countries on there (including ancient countries) and I’ve used it for ancient history, our current Canadian history studies and geography studies of various countries.  I really like that I can pick the map I want and print what I’d like to use.  I’m also really enjoying that there are maps of Canada and the USA with and without province/state divisions.  Anyone who knows me personally will know the struggle I have had to find a non-political wall map of Canada this year (I still haven’t found one).  It has been wonderful to chart the paths of explorers and fur traders without having cities and provinces marked for me.  There is a world map without country borders, too, which I’m looking forward to using as we start ancient history next year.

There were so many map resources and there may be others just as good or better (I’d love to hear what others use for their maps) but Uncle Josh’s consistently got good reviews in places that I looked and as I said, the fact that it was on CD ROM and I could just print off what I wanted had a lot of appeal.

As I’m blogging this, the kids are labelling  places where Radisson and Groseillier (men who helped save the early fur trade in Canada) visited.  Finding a map specifically for that purpose would not have been easy but the blank map of Canada suited us perfectly.

“Mommy, do you know what school I like best? When we learn about Canada.”

That’s a quote from Peter (age 6) and music to my heart. History is my absolute favourite subject and one of the biggest joys I have is teaching it to others. This year I decided that it was time for our kids to have a good immersing in Canadian history (mainly pre-confederation).

We’re using My First History of Canada as our main spine and my goal for this year was to have us meander leisurely through this history of Canada, stopping where we are most interested. This last week saw us taking a look at all of the Aboriginal people groups of Canada. We read The Kids Book of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and the kids really enjoyed learning about the Aboriginal people in different parts of the country. We spent a good deal of time at Fort William Historical Park this past summer, so our kids are familiar with the birch bark teepee type of dwelling, but discovering that there were tribes in the pacific northwest that made permanant homes from wood was a surprise to them.

It was also quite exciting for our kids to discover that the peoples of the Plateau lived in pit houses with a dome shaped roof because this summer we had an opportunity to visit a replica of the home of a group of Mandan people in North Dakota, “On-A-Slant Village”, and that was the type of home that they built, too.

We’re moving on to the arrival of Europeans in Canada next week but I’m glad we took the time to get to know history that we were already familiar with and expand our knowledge beyond our backyard.