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Nov. 10, 2006
Progress
I cannot say enough about The Story of the World Vol 3 and its corresponding activity book. We are having SO much fun with it. What's more, PJ actually asks to "do history and geography" now. And we're reading together a lot, too. So far we are only through the first three chapters; I estimate that we will NOT finish the whole book this year doing history 3 times a week, because we started it 11 weeks into the school year. I think if we do the remaining chapters and Vol 4 next year, we should be able to finish both books in two years.
PJ has improved so much in retaining history, understanding its purpose, and oral narration in just a few weeks. Since it is difficult for him to write long passages due to his dysgraphia, and since oral narration is a new skill to him, I still have him dictate it to me, and I was amazed at the level of detail and recall he had with the last chapter (on Mary, Queen of Scots.) We're having fun doing the Book of Centuries as suggested by Simply Charlotte Mason; it's turned into our own little history scrapbook.We've been printing out small pictures of some of the people he's been studying about (Rembrandt, Mary Stewart, Vermeer) and gluing them in there while he writes the dates. I can see these needing extra pages soon. :)
What's cool is that we're using a sort of multimedia and multi-curriculum approach to history. We've been making healthy use of our library; we've discovered there is
one a mere six blocks away from our home, so I've just been going
online and ordering all the books we need from the Miami-Dade system to
be sent to that one.
For example on the first chapter about "A World of Empires," we listened to Inca music, watched The Road to El Dorado (though PJ understood that the "magical" elements of the story were not real) and the Sophia Loren/ Peter O'Toole movie, Man of La Mancha, as well as listening to some flamenco music. We are also still getting through The Secret of the Andes, which is SUCH good historical fiction! He drew the Spanish and Holy Roman Empire flags just by description, which he had a lot of fun doing, then we looked it up online to compare. The two-headed bird one wasn't at all close, but his was pretty funny. :) We also looked at some of the paintings of Don Quixote online, especially the one by El Greco, so we're getting some art history in there, too.
In the second chapter, "Protestant Rebellions," we listened to Scottish and Celtic folk music; we read The Boy Who Held Back the Sea and Katje the Windmill Cat together, which really helped bring 16th and 17th century Netherlands alive for PJ. Both those books have absolutely beautiful illustrations of the Netherlands in that time period. For art appreciation as well as fleshing out history, we flipped through Rembrandt and 17th Century Holland (WARNING: despite being intended for children, this book contains some graphic images of autopsy paintings - I ALWAYS recommend flipping through an art book first before giving it to a young child!) and learned all about Rembrandt and Vermeer and life in early 17th century Holland. It was even neat because we finally learned what a "gable" was, since that was a major part of Dutch architecture at the time. We live in a Miami-Dade municipality called "Coral Gables" so now we know why the town is called that!
Through it all, we've been looking at the different countries' pictures in the Time-Life World Atlas my dad gave us last year. I love that book. It is so child friendly and relevant and well put-together.
PJ was very saddened by the terrible tale of Mary, Queen of Scots. We got into a neat discussion about the occurrence of injustice, about how it was indeed going to be a recurring theme in history study. We talked about how we should learn from these mistakes as a society, and sticking to your guns and holding fast to your faith even in the face of adversity. Since 400+ years later no one still has any clue who killed her husband, Lord Darnley, we also got into some discussions about how there are many mysteries in history that we may never know the answer to.
Now that we are moving on to chapter three ("James, King of Two Countries") I think we will maybe start a "family tree" of the major kings and queens of Europe because it really is hard to keep track of all the Peters, Richards, Jameses, Phillips, Georges, Charleses, Elizabeths, Annes and Marys. LOL. We have checked out Kings and Queens of England and Scotland which I found very child-friendly and well-organized, too. We may be hanging onto that one for a while.
We've been reading the SOTW chapters and then the additional reading on the weekends and the days we don't do history. The SOTW chapters help put the historical fiction and the additional reading into context. With the study of James and early American colonioalism, we'll be reading a brief biography of Pocahontas and comparing it to Disney's Pocahontas (or possibly their sequel, Pocahontas II, since it is a bit more historical) in order to bring up a discussion about historical fiction vs. historical fact. I tried to get Pocahontas and the Strangers as the bio, but it wasn't available in time from my local library. When we are done with The Secret of the Andes, we'll be reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which is about early US colonialism. We'll also be reading A Lion to Guard Us, which is shorter, and also about the same time period, and Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims. Very timely study since Thanksgiving is just 2 weeks away! We'll be reading ABOUT the Pilgrims the week before, too! Finally, we will be comparing the text of the 23rd Psalm from the King James Bible and the New International Version (the version we usually read).
The best part about this is how much I'M learning about history, which has never been my strong suit. My minor in college was art history, so I'm glad to finally be able to have a medium through which I can share that with my child. We are really having a great time.
Tomorrow we head to the Miami Art Museum since they're having Free Saturday. We've never been so that should be exciting. It's right across the way from the Main Library, too, so I'll probably be abusing that. :)
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Nov. 10, 2006 - Story of the World!