Social Studies and Homeschool

(Sorry for the unintended blog vacation. My blog was going through an update through the host website, but I think we're all good now.)

Social Studies (and allllll that it encompasses is probably one of my favorite subjects to teach and learn. And you can tell, because we somehow end up working in a little social studies with every other subject).

We use a Charlotte Mason approach to most of our schooling, and it's ABUNDANTLY evident in social studies. We choose an era (chronologically) to study each year. (This year we are covering from the turn of the 19th century to World War 2.) We choose biographies of people from that era ( we love the YWAM Heroes of the Faith books for this), and fiction books set in that era.

I will scroll through the Sonlight curriculum website to see what books they use for each era of history and make our booklist off that.

This year our list includes The Good Master by Kate Seredy. A young boy, Janzsi, has adventures with his cousin Kate on his families farm in turn of the century Hungary. We use that book to segue into geography and learn about Hungary, moving on to Hungarian culture and history. That then leads to learning about the different forms of governments (communist, socialist, etc). Gypsies are mentioned in the book, so we also look up information and learn about the Roma people in history and currently.

We'll do that with every book we read, studying the country and people, the government and religions.

For extra geography, we have a world map with each country unlabeled. We choose a region (usually correlating with the area we're reading about) and memorize the countries and capitols.

OK, now for the cherry on top of our social studies curriculum this year (and I am LOVING this book).

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. Oh my goodness, it's taking us so long to get through this book because we spend so much time jumping off into discussions. I read this one out loud to the kids and then we discuss how history has been rewritten (for many reasons) and how that affects us now, and also how we are currently rewriting history. It's fantastic and I can't recommend it enough for anyone whether you homeschool or not.

We discuss current events regularly in an informal format (super easy to do in an election year!) and check our perceptions of those against what we're learning from Lies My Teacher Told Me. Also checking our perceptions by seeing what an opposing side may be saying about the same situation.

And that's the brunt of our social studies curriculum. Lots of it is pretty informal (which seems to be our theme), but I feel like I'm learning so much alongside the kids and it's probably one of our favorite times of the day.