History

Teach history chronologically via literature, plays, novels, essays, biographies, poetry, architecture, and paintings of the period. Read someone's firsthand account who saw what happened whenever possible. Spend time pleasantly with one time period in the life of one man. If you spent a whole year with one man you would learn about a whole nation and time period in which he lived. It is better to know as much as possible about one short period than to know the outlines of history.

What were the ordinary people's conditions?
What were the "great" people doing?

Read 40 pages a term (60 school days) from a well written, well illustrated large book. Not a book written down to a child's level and not one full of little summaries. Amplify this with biographies of people involved in the time period. Visit the monuments of this age or look at pictures of them.

Study the history of countries other than their own.Compare what was occurring in other countries at the same time period.
Read biographies to learn Greek and Roman hisotry.

Projects:
~Have the children illustrating scenes from books. If they can imagine it enough to illustrate, they know it.
~Act out scenes with their dolls or paint scenery and act it out themselves.
~Make history charts. Make one hundred squares (10x10) on a piece of paper. Each square is a year, each paper a century. Invent a symbol for each major event like a war.
~Make a timeline. Make columns with the first century in the middle. Each column represents a century. Don't worry about exact dates, just the order of events.
~Make a book of Centuries - make a 3 ring notebook with one lined and one blank paper per century. This gives a place to make notations of illustrations of historical events. Every book you read or museum you visit should provide a quick notation. This is a running timeline. This can include sketches of artifacts, costumes, ships, weapons, or musical instruments. Can be a quick name and life span of an author or newspaper clipping. Include 10 blank pages in back for map work.