Our History Of Learning History

I don't often write about how we do things in our homeschool, but I noticed an interesting phenomenon recently that I just couldn't keep to myself.

My son has read much further beyond the assigned work in his American History course.

I don't think I've ever had this happen before, at least with him. He's the kind who knows how to read but doesn't want to do it. So when I started catching glimpses of him reading the text purely for enjoyment, I was surprised.

How did this happen? I'm not sure. The only answer I can find is that he is hungry for it because he has never studied it before.

It's true. My son is in 9th grade and yet he had never studied U.S. History until this year.

It all started as an experiment. Okay, experimentation in our homeschool is not something new. Our family has been homeschooling since the mid-1980s so the whole scheme for our children's education began as an experiment. We homeschooled when homeschooling was something few had begun, let alone completed.

But in this instance I'm talking about experimenting with the way I presented history. I decided to teach a straight timeline from creation through to the here and now. I started this with my girls when they were students but I always chickened out somewhere and gave them doses of U.S. History thrown in intermittently totally out of sequence. I think it had something to do with the fear that developed during those early years when it was required that the child be dropped off at the front door of the public school in grades 2, 5, 7, and 9 for standardized testing. It was obvious that the parent was the one being tested more than the child. What parent wants to send their child to school without a rudimentary understanding of their country's history? I decided that I didn't!

Our state law later changed, but not before scaring the wits out of me! By the time my son began school we were operating under more lenient laws and our oldest had already graduated. Our oldest graduated a year before the youngest even began school. Thus, this was a new beginning in many ways.

When teaching him, I constantly resisted the urge to veer from the plan of teaching history sequentially. The first time I took him for an achievement test with our local co-op he was in 3rd grade. He said afterward that he could not answer any of the American history questions and I almost wavered. But when I saw his total battery scores I resolved anew to stick with it. History was a small part of the social studies segment and the social studies segment was a small part of the whole test battery. It would be of small consequence for a child to be knowledgeable in American history.

By the time I had him tested a few years later, he had picked up enough information merely by being an American that he was able to answer the basics with no problems. Even he was able to recognize the face of Abraham Lincoln and knew that Martin Luther King was the person honored on the January Monday holiday.

Now here we are six years later and he can't get enough U.S. History! The whole spiritual, political, and geographical picture interests him. I remember snoozing through high school history because I knew all the dates and pertinent facts by heart having heard them every year since the early elementary years. But I had no concept whatsoever of how the spiritual, political, and geographical aspects meshed to form the fabric. And I barely remember the one year (or was it only a semester?) of world history that I took as a teenager. For all I knew, history began in 1492. Who knew or cared what people did prior to that?

Besides the fact that my son is interested and therefore learning I noticed another perk to teaching sequentially. We used the Bible as our main history text in those early years. This led to a firm belief in the Bible as being true. He has never questioned the veracity of it.

What we used in prior years:

• The Bible - we began a timeline that included a line graph of the lifespans of Adam and his descendants. The Bible gives the age of each father when his son is born and the age of the father at the time of his own death from Adam through Jacob. We did the math and plotted a line for each person. We discovered that Methuselah died the year of the flood long before the Creation Museum mentioned it in one of their exhibits. We also showed the year of creation at the top of the timeline, creation taking place in Year 1, and the years B.C. and A.D. at the bottom. Since some events are known to have taken place in certain times as verified through other extra-biblical means, we were able to extrapolate some dates in relationship to others. I'm sure Ussher did the same.
• James Ussher's "The Annals of the World"
• A timeline taken from Ussher's chronology. Ours is old but they are now republished under the name "Adam's Chart of History."
• When the first two volumes of Mystery of History were published we used them to review the Biblical personalities we'd already covered and to add people and/or cultures from around the world to show how they compared in time.
• We used Greenleaf Press guides and books obtained through them or the public library to cover the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and Reformation periods. At the time, the Mystery of History series ended with Volume 2. I actually preferred the Greenleaf approach (Mason's "twaddle free" learning) and wish I had discovered Greenleaf sooner.
• Family history. After my dad's DNA results showed that we were of Scandinavian origin those Vikings became a lot more interesting to study! Several of our family lines on both sides can be traced to the 1600s, which would be the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. History is much more fun when one considers their own ancestors living through certain portions of it and upon the affect it had in their lives.

What we are using this year:

• You may notice that the book shown at the top is the Bob Jones University Press text for the 8th grade. I chose to use it because it presents our history totally from a Christian perspective and in an easily readable format. It is our springboard for further exploration.
• Since my son is now in high school I supplement the text with biographies and autobiographies that we have in our home library. Treasure hunts through flea markets and old book stores have been worthwhile.
• We are planning to visit a historical archive which houses the original handwritten journal an ancestor kept in 1797 while journeying from Virginia to frontier Ohio. I held this artifact in my hands once before and can't wait to do so again.
• We purchased and watched the newer Drive Thru History DVDs. These were excellent! Not only do they provide a tour of many historical places within the 13 original colonies but Dave Stotts is funny but thought-provoking at the same time.
• We are planning a trip to Washington DC this summer. It seems so much more appropriate now that our son has an appreciation for his country, its seat of government, and for the presidents who are memorialized in the city's great monuments.

He seems to be having so much fun that I hate to interrupt him to make him do his other subjects. Sometimes I don't.