Homeschool History: Our Year in Review and What’s Coming Up

What a successful year!  As the year draws to a close, I love taking a look at what we’ve accomplished not only in school, but in life in general.  I’m not one to make “resolutions” per se, but I do enjoy thinking about what’s to come and seeing just how to make that happen!

This year was a *huge* one for my blog.  January 5, 2015 was my last official day under the Parents umbrella. Hubby helped me move the entire blog over to our new website here. It was a great move for me in many ways because it meant an end to advertisements and annoying pop-up boxes (see the “old” look below!!).  But it also meant a lot of hard work behind the scenes.  Every link that I had made for the three years pointed back to the site at Parents. So when I moved… every single link I had made had to be changed to point to the blog here at homeschoolden.com.  Ack! Since I have over 2,000 posts now, it has been a huge job! I’m still even now finding links that need to be fixed. But… for the most part I think I have things working! 🙂

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I might save some of my other thoughts about this past year for the next post.  For now, let me jump into our homeschool year in review.  Today I’ll focus on history. Hopefully, I’ll get to science, language arts, etc. in the next couple of days. (We’re still on holiday mode, so no promises!!)

At the beginning of each semester, I take a good look at what we’ve done and then what we will (hopefully!) try to accomplish in the coming months. I keep tabs on what I want to accomplish over the long haul (see this post with our Homeschool History Checklist, which goes into detail about what I hope to cover K-8.)  I do that because we often deviate from our well-laid plans!

HistoryChecklist-Homeschool-GradesK-8Last spring (2015), we did two main units.  We finished up a unit on U.S. Civics and Government (where we covered the 3 branches of government, covered basic facts about how the federal and local governments work and more). Then we started a unit on the Middle Ages.  We covered feudalism, did some fun projects and learned a lot about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (The kids loved the movie, The Lion in Winter! (affiliate link) ).  We also read the entire book about Robin Hood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, (affiliate link) which was a huge it in our household! 🙂

Then this fall (2015),we were going to start back up with the Middle Ages, but wound up doing a unit on the American Revolution.  The girls were watching the series Liberty’s Kids (affiliate link) and we had also done trips to Washington’s Crossing, Valley Forge and Yorktown. It made sense to do a unit on the causes of the American Revolution. We covered the French and Indian War, the various acts that were passed by Parliament (Stamp Act, Tea Act, Intolerable Acts, etc.) as well as the response to that in the U.S. (the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, etc.). The kids then spent 2 1/2 weeks working hard to put on a play (which was about an hour long when we performed it!) all about the events leading up to the American Revolution.

Because of all of our other units, we studied the early Middle Ages last spring and only just finished up with the Middle Ages this December! We picked up where we had left off and studied the Crusades, the Hundred Year’s War, and the Black Plague.  In fact now that I think about it, I think I have a couple more posts to share with you all –including the super cool simulation we did about the Black Plague!

So, what’s coming up this semester?  We are going to move on to the Renaissance and Reformation for a couple of months. But then, we’ll stop and do a unit on the Native Americans of the West. That’s because we are planning a long trip out to Arizona, Utah and Wyoming and will visit a lot of the National Parks (Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Tetons, Yellowstone – plus Crazy Horse Monument, Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands). Last year (so actually a year and a half ago), we did a unit on Native Americans, but we only covered the Algonquian Indians, the Iroquois, Cherokee and Seminole Indians (and the Trail of Tears) before we ran out of time. Before our trip, I’d like to cover some of the cultures of the Native American people of the West.

I thought I’d try to put together a table sharing some of the links to the history posts I’ve shared over the past year or so:

History Topics We Covered in the Past Year or So

U.S. Civics and Government Unit

   Civics-Government-Unit-45Page-Packet QRCodeCivics

Causes of the American Revolution

American-Revolution-Unit-Worksheets-ReviewCards

Middle Ages Unit

MiddleAges-Charlemagne-KingJohnCrusades-Worksheets

Native American Studies

NativeAmericans-NortheastNatAmerican-of-Southeast-Notebook-Pages

 Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this blog are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. If you do click over, thanks for supporting our blog!

So that’s about it for today! See you again soon here or Homeschool Den Facebook page. Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter! ~Liesl

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