The past couple of weeks have been history weeks in our house.  I do have science-crazy kids, but the history-crazy kids overrule!  Funny how that works out since I have always been more of a science-minded person myself... 

My boys love, love, love history. 

I have a war nut.  He loves anything about the World Wars and the Civil War.  His favorite right now is WW2.  He's older so he mostly reads good  historical novels with some great nonfiction titles, including a good illustrated encyclopedia with a timeline if we can find one for the time period of interest.

I also have an Ancient History buff.  His favorite is Ancient Egypt.  He's deep into the pyramids and making his own paper right now.  A little more about that later...

Then I have the American History buff.  He is young, so he is really loving the basic stories from our nation's history.  This week we are concentrating on the Native Americans. 

We use a lot of real, living books from the library and any books we can find in the Five In A Row lineup, along with anything from Homeschool Share. 

In addition, we are really utilizing the information on Time4Learning.  The Social Studies lessons are indepth, informative and downright interesting!  We have used these lessons to kick off discussions, websearches and online video viewing (think YouTube). 

We've also found lessons to go along with the social studies lessons in the Language Arts lessons on T4L.  These are great animated lessons that ask questions and really add that little extra you sometimes need to get a child's attention.

We have seen images of totem poles and beautiful handmade jewelry, videos of Native American powwows,  and even found go-along books we can read-fiction and nonfiction.

Right in the T4L lessons on Ancient Egypt, we found a recipe for making paper.  How cool is that?!?!

 And all of those tough-to-prounounce words that turn kids away from reading?  They are clickable in T4L.  When you click on the word, a sound file pops up and gives you the correct pronunciation.  In some cases you also get the definition.  (You can check out demo lessons here.)

History is exciting in our house this spring!  Just what we needed to take the dull out of the last few weeks of the year.