Tag Archives: homeschooling

History in March ~The Underground Railroad and Abraham Lincoln

We started out March with the underground railroad for history.

It was a hard subject to explain to a 5 and 6yr old.

We read about Harriet Tubman in our Value Tales book and my oldest got mad.

Very mad about the way she was treated.

The funny thing was the civil war made more sense to him after reading about slavery.

We read the You Choose history book on the Underground Railroad.

I highly recommend it to anyone doing this study!

Both of my boys (ages 5 and 6) really got into it.

I forgot to take a picture of all the books on the underground railroad together since I really did not think we would be spending much time on it.

After we started studying it we stretched it out for two weeks.

This is the only picture I have of one of the other books we read.

Friend on Freedom River by Gloria Whelan is a beautiful book.

I have really liked all of the books I have read in the Tales of Young Americans series.

The illustrations are beautiful and the stories pull you in.

We listened to the three part series on the Underground Railroad by Adventures in Odyssey.

I cried.

It was amazing.

We usually listen to these in the car on the way to a field trip or something.

When I get to our destination I always feel like I am being hunted, or in the midst of a battle.

We also read Booker T. Washington’s a Slave Among Slaves.

It was in a reader so I had my oldest read some of it and then I finished it since it was a little long for him.

It was a great read.

The second part of the month we learned about Abraham Lincoln.

Again this was supposed to be a short study but it ended up going two weeks.

I love that about homeschooling.

We again listened to the Adventures in Odyssey on Abraham Lincoln.

It ends with his assassination.

I did not tell my boys what was coming.

I felt mean but I thought they would get more out of the story that way.

Thankfully they did not end it with too much drama so it was not as scary as I thought it might be.

We did the reading guide with the magic tree house lesson plan while reading the book Abe Lincoln at Last!

They have lesson plans to go along with the Magic Tree House books!

The reading guide is towards the end of the lesson plan.

We only did the reading guide this time but the boys loved finishing reading our chapters and running over to the computer to see what they remembered.

After reading the Magic Tree House book we read Mr. Lincoln’s Boys.

They mentioned the boys in the Magic Tree House book so the boys loved reading more stories about them.

Just a Few Words Mr. Lincoln is about the Gettysburg Address.

At the end of the book they have the Address and the boys were excited to hear it after reading about it in the book!

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a hard book for my oldest to hear.

I did like how it did not end with him getting shot though and continued the story until they caught Booth.

There are a lot a good books out there on America’s history though!

Do not give your child a book full of dates to learn history!

Give them a good piece of historical fiction first, make history exciting!

How I teach History and Science without a curriculum.

I am going to attempt to explain how I choose what subjects we learn each month.

I try to link together History, Science, Reading, Literature, and Geography.

I used to do this by figuring out what we were wanting or needing to learn about for a month and then doing searches online of timelines of big events in history and science.

My mother in-law found a really good book of timelines that put them all in one place!

I just look up the year I want and it tells me what was going on in science, literature, and so on.

I have also used History for the ages for help in finding out things that have happened in the past.

This timeline includes events in the bible and I really like that!

If you do not want to spend money, you can use wikipedia.

That is what I did before.

The reason I try to tie my subjects together is because history and science are tied!

What would WW2 be without Albert Einstein?

Scientific discoveries changed history.

Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” means so much more if you realize it was written during the war of 1812.

Here are a couple examples of how I link my subjects.

Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin, Electricity, Pennsylvania.

War of 1812, Grimm Fairy Tales, Electricity, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, United States Geography, The Star Spangled Banner.

This month is:

The Underground Railroad, The Civil War, Germs, Louis Pasture, The Red Badge of Courage, Harriet Tubman, The United States Geography.

It does not always work out perfectly but I do enjoy it!

It is almost like digging for treasure when I am looking for things that go together!