History and geography

I love to teach homeschool history and geography.  That last part of the sentence particularly surprises me because I hated geography in school.  However, as I’ve grown up and learned more about the topic I discovered I hated HOW geography is taught, rather than the topic.

Because I love homeschool history and homeschool geography so much, I write about them quite a lot.

Eventually I will have a landing page for each of these separate topics, but for right now let me give you a quick overview of how I organize our homeschool history.

We are following a mostly 4 year history cycle.  That means we cover ancient history, middle ages, renaissance, and then modern history, before cycling back to the beginning.  After we finish our current cycle, we will be switching to a six year cycle and add in 2 years of American history.

This covers from the Creation of the World to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

This covers from about 30AD to early 1400s

As we have more information, the time periods become shorter because there is more to cover, so this time period covers from 1400s to early 1700s.

We haven’t covered this as much, so I don’t really have posts on this YET.  It’s time will come.

I divide homeschool geography into two different types: United States geography and World geography.  Both of those categories are further broken down into states and countries, but since we live in the United States I wanted to make sure my kids have a fairly good grasp of our country’s geography.  I do not have a specific homeschool geography curriculum, so I plan geography without a curriculum.

We go through each state and check out mountains of library books, or as many books as our library has on that state.  We started this back in preschool and then got lazy, and so now I’m heading back to work on this again with my kids’ in elementary school.  This time around I started on the West coast and am working my way East.  It’s slow going as there are some amazing picture books.  To get you started on this topic, I’ve got 50 state study ideas, from sea to shining sea.

The other part of our homeschool geography is country studies.  I handle it much like I do our state studies with lots and lots of picture books.  In addition I bring in some fun recipes if I can find the ingredients to try out how other countries eat.  It’s a messy messy time in our house.