Homeschool Den

Making Homeschooling Hands-On, Engaging, Meaningful & Memorable! Be inspired by all the possibilities!! Check out our unit studies, packets and printables!

Category: History and World Cultures Units

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Arts and Crafts / History: Ancient Aztecs, Incas and Mayans / History: Native American Indians Unit

Ancient Mayan Indian Unit: Wood Animalitos – Oaxacan (Mexican) Folk Art

We continued to read The Corn Grows Ripe (about a Mayan boy and his family) this week and talked about life Mexico. We read about these imaginative creatures called Alebrijes at this art lesson plan website. In Mexico these are carved from one piece. Since we had lots of woodscraps (I bought lots of wood craft kits of cars, bird houses etc. for 50cents back in December), this seemed like...

2

Arts and Crafts / History: Ancient Aztecs, Incas and Mayans / History: Native American Indians Unit

Ancient Mayan Indian Unit: Rugs

We looked at the brilliant colors of Mayan rugs visiting these sites: here, here, and at the Mayan Culture websites. We talked about the patterns they saw. Then the kids spent a lot of time while listening to our novel coloring their own Mayan rugs.  They worked really quite hard over several days: They used oil pastels for this project.    

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Arts and Crafts / History: Ancient Aztecs, Incas and Mayans / History: Native American Indians Unit / History: World Religions

Ancient Mayan Indian Unit: God’s Eye — Yarn Craft

The Huichol Indians of Mexico and Aymara Indians of Bolivia make “eye of God” yarn crafts. Originally they were placed on alters, but now they are often sold in markets. I thought this was a perfect craft for the kids to go along with our talks about the ancient Mayan Indians. I used to make these in Girl Scouts, but came across this website which has details on how to...

1

History: Ancient Aztecs, Incas and Mayans / History: Native American Indians Unit

Ancient Mayan Civilization

In our slow, but steady move through history we have talked about nomads, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient Greece and Rome and then up into the Middle Ages. From here we’re going to turn to the Americas. Our next history unit study will be on Native Americans. I hope to incorporate some good literature books into our studies over the next few months (let me know if you have good...

Geography: Europe board game 10

History: Geography Activities

Geography: Europe board game

We’ve done a lot with geography of Europe this semester. That’s in part because three of our unit studies have focused on Europe — our world music class, the Middle Ages unit and our fairy tale unit.  I ordered this game back in February, but with the flu and pneumonia descending upon us we never got to it.  We’ve had a blast with it the past week or so. Here’s...

So Many Toads! 2

History: Middle Ages / Nature / Outdoor Fun / Science: Garden Science

So Many Toads!

The other evening I came home during a thunderstorm.  The toads were covering the road leading to our house. Not one or two, but so many that I couldn’t drive the car around them. I went back a little later and there weren’t nearly as many, but still saw at least 50 toads! And saw that even though I was driving about 5mph and swerving wildly from side to side,...

6

Elem-Children's Music 1 (6 yr old) / History: Geography Activities / Music

World Music : Europe

For the first time in months, we had our music classes. We took a long break because of the holidays, sickness and house problems. It was so wonderful to catch up with our friends again.  We are continuing on with our studies of Europe and the music of Europe.  First, we reviewed the seven continents (to the tune of Frere Jacques). Europe, Asia, A-fri-caa, North America South America Then there...

How Castle Walls Were Built 2

History: Middle Ages

How Castle Walls Were Built

 We’ve been reading bits of Castle by David Macaulay aloud together.  It is a very detailed account about how a castle and the adjoining town were planned out and built.  One section talked about how the castle walls were built.  We tried to design our own walls to be as strong as possible. The drawing from Castle shows how thick the castle walls were constructed. We tried to do the...

4

History: Middle Ages

The Four Alls (Learning about Feudalism in the Middle Ages)

A place for everyone and everyone in his place: We have been studying the Middle Ages.  We’ve read lots of books or snippets of books about castles, knights, the Church, and feudalism.  This is an activity suggested in one of the books we checked out from the library.  It’s called the four alls and talks about some of the roles people had in the Middle Ages. These roles were ‘fixed...

Europe Pin Map 6

History: Geography Activities / Montessori (general info)

How to Make a Pin Map of Europe

We are heading off to Europe in our world music class this week and to get ready for that, I made a pin map of Europe.  I’ll explain how I made mine in case someone else finds it useful. Step 1: I printed off a blank map of Europe from freeusandworldmaps.com.  I also printed off the labeled Europe map from that same website as a control. I laminated these two...

2

History: American Colonies / History: American History / History: Native American Indians Unit

Books I’d Recommend for the Study of Jamestown Colony

**FREE COLONY RELATED CARDS: I just noticed at http://www.currclick.com/ that their current free product is on the American colonies.  There are lots of picture cards related to colonial life — pictures such as chamber pot, cotton, embroidery, flax, hearth, hornbook, indigo, tallow,  and more that would be great discussion points for the elementary crowd. One set of pages has a detailed description of the word, another group of pages includes...

2

History: American Colonies / History: Native American Indians Unit / Trips We've Taken

Jamestown Settlement — What We Learned This Week

We have learned a lot about the history of Jamestown settlement this week: Three hundred years ago,the English wanted to create a settlement in the Americas.  They knew about all the gold and silver that the Spanish had been bringing back from the New World and were determined to gather some of these riches themselves. They financed a trip with three ships to sail to the New World, to Virginia....

Field Trip — Learning about the Powhatan Indians 2

History: American Colonies / Trips We've Taken

Field Trip — Learning about the Powhatan Indians

We’ve had Grams and Gramps visiting us for the past several weeks.  Last weekend Grandma and Grandpa also came out to visit us to celebrate DD’s 5th birthday.  Happy Birthday DD! Then we headed off for a four day holiday.  What is AMAZING to hubby and me is the fact that we can drive a few hours and be someplace completely new! When we lived in central Australia it took...

2

History: Japan Unit

Japan Unit: Zen Garden

Yesterday, I showed the kids a few pictures of Japanese Zen gardens before we settled in to make our own. We listened to a couple of beautiful Japanese pieces as we worked on our Zen gardens. We used sand and a few objects I had on hand for the kids (rocks, acorns, fake grass, pine cones).  We used forks instead of rakes. DD and ED wanted to do it again...