Me in Place

I love history, but, frankly, didn’t learn (or should I say, retain?) a lot of it from school. I’m horrible at remembering dates of events, but always learn/retain the information a lot better if it’s told in story form. Which is why I am enjoying Susan Wise Bauer’s books on The Story of the World. While using this for my first grader’s schooling, I find I’m learning so much. Right now we’re on the ancient civilizations – just moved on from Egypt and today studied the Phoenicians. Just to keep track of what we’re learning, I thought I’d include some highlights here on my blog, so I can review at a later date.

Bauer’s books are written for the 1st-4th grade crowd, but are applicable to older kids/adults too! They each have corresponding activity guides which are full of student worksheets (which I think could be better drawn by my mother-in-law, but that’s another story) and craft ideas. We’ve done cave paintings on garbage bags and made ancient Chinese pottery out of Sculpey clay. Today we used ConTact paper to make a set of the plagues of Egypt to reuse to tell the story from the Bible. She also gives great bibliographies to use to buy books or borrow from the library about the subject.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.