Geography and History

Each week I've been giving you a little glimpse into our homeschooling journey, and today I'm going to share how we tackle geography and history. I knew early on that I wanted to give my girls a global worldview and bought a huge map from IKEA that hangs in our school room. It's quite possibly my favorite thing we have in our house!

Currently I read from our history book and the girls do map work. They either trace the world map, or attempt to draw free-hand. We've been doing this for several years now, and hopefully, after a few more years, they will be able to draw the entire world map with accuracy and detail. This is not a daily activity - we do this 1-3 times a week.

We participate in Classical Conversations which runs in a 3 year cycle. Last year was cycle 1 and it focused on Ancient History (for history) and Africa (for geography), so there was also a lot of map work with Africa.

This year is cycle 2 and we are focused on Medieval History and Europe. In CC they memorize a timeline that covers Creation to present day and takes about 13 minutes to recite. They also memorize weekly history sentences, as well as geographic locations.

At home we do our own thing. Because our curriculum is largely based on read-alouds, I have chosen to use history books that are stories. We started this 5 years ago and went through all 4 volumes of Story of the World which were fantastic. Last year we did nothing, but this year I learned about Genevieve Foster's series. Currently we are reading George Washington's World (because we are all a little obsessed with Hamilton the Musical and it makes sense to capitalize on that interest and learn as much as we can about that time period). I also bought The World of Columbus and Sons because that will correlate with the Medieval time period we are studying in Classical Conversations.

We are loving this series because it takes a familiar, American figure and tells his story, but also looks at everything else going on in the world.

I'm linking up with Little Things Thursday