The school year is upon us, and it is planning time for many, if you have not already started homeschooling. As you prepare to start your school year I would like to give you some tips on how to plan out your study of history this year.
History is a very rich field and there are a lot of avenues you could seek to follow this year. As you plan, narrowing down your goals will be beneficial to you so that you can keep on target and assess what your kids are learning as you go along.
1. Identify what period of history you want to cover this year. Usually history is taught according to time periods: Ancient, Middle Ages and Modern times. Most people teach these periods chronologically, but not everyone does. Theoretically, you can teach any time period you so desire, in any order you want; it may be a time period you are most excited about or one that you think your child will enjoy learning about.
2. Identify what you want to focus on: people, dates, major events, etc., within that time period.
3. Identify how much time you want to dedicate to history in your school week. In our homeschool, history is a major component, so we do history every day. Some days we focus on reading about history, others are dedicated to map work or timeline work. Other homeschoolers like to dedicate one day of the week to delve in their history study. Some even dedicated portions of their school year to history by using block scheduling.
4. Identify what style of teaching you want to use based on your own style of teaching and your children’s learning style. Some kids learn better through hands-on, so unit studies might be a better choice, while other kids do better with books, so you could use a living books approach mixed in with a textbook method.
Whatever you do, schedule it in. I find that when something is not on the schedule, it just does not get done. Map out your plan of study for the year, whether it be how you are going to get through a textbook, choosing and scheduling which unit studies you are going to do, or even preparing the list of historical fictions you are going to read through.
Including history in your homeschool schedule isn’t difficult as long as you pinpoint what you want to cover, and schedule it in your overall school schedule or routine.
