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Well we are just about wrapping up our studies on government. We’ve done a trip to our state capitol, mock elections, meeting with a local state Representative, toured campaign offices and worked on a mailing for a campaign. At home we’ve studied various parts of government, checks and balances, candidates, other forms of government, how our government was formed and some of the documents and more. All that we have left is our election night party to watch the returns, play some games and eat pizza.
You know I’m glad we studied it but I’m also glad it’s almost over too. I can only take so much politics. My oldest now thinks this is a possible career choice (well, along with several others at this point…) He heard from the local state Representative all you have to do is get 200 names on a petition and be 18 to be on the ballot. On the way home he wanted to know if I’d sign his petition!
Even though it’s over I did learn a lot especially from the book, Are you Liberal, Conservative or Just Confused?. There’s just so much I was never taught. One thing that struck me in there was taxes. Did you know that until the 20th century when income tax was created all the U.S. governments taxes were from liquor, tobacco and imports? Now only 3% come from these and 97% come from income tax!* No wonder so many people came here!
In that book the kids learned about Fascism, Communism and Socialism. I can’t say that they got it all but at least they have an idea what it means and are familiar with the terms. When we did this section I just had to read Animal Farm by George Orwell to them! I still remember reading it in school and the impact it had on me. I believe it had a similar effect on my kids today. It’s not just about Stalin, Marx and Communism but about knowing what you believe and standing up for it. That was the impact it had on me.
If you’ve never done Animal Farm by all means try it. There are many online study guides that will help you with some of the symbolism if you’ve never done this book before or need to brush up. I even found an online quiz and only got 2 wrong just from what I remembered years ago. So what was that about old timers?
The girls did some notebooking and made a lapbook with some of their information. The boys did all their work in notebooks, paragraphs and reports.   
You'll notice the lapbooks are very eclectic. We made the flip books on some of the first presidents ourselves but took a lot of the little booklets from various sources (homeschool share, hands of a child etc...) You can see some of the sources we used for information in a previous blog. We still want to add a booklet on impeachment and do our covers but we may not get to that till at least after the election.
So now after doing Government for the fall it will be nice to go back to our regular routine of History. We were glad to take a break but now glad to return to. I guess it’s kind of like vacation, it’s great to leave but you always look forward to coming home.
* taken from Are you Liberal Conservative or Confused, by Richard Maybury p.89 | 
