July 4th All American History
To help celebrate July 4th, I have raided the scratch and dent box at the BIP office. I have 2 complete sets of All American Volume 1 to give away! This includes: the Student Reader book, the Teacher Guide and the Student Activity Book! I will randomly pick two blog entries from the responses to this blog. (Well, actually I let my kids do it!) In order to be eligible to win, please share with us (in your comment) a favorite history project completed in the past few years of school.
Here in the Lane household, making a model of Egypt out of cookie dough with Hershey kisses as the pyramid and blue sprinkles as the Nile River was yummy and a favorite project.
We enjoyed a few random movies that still make us chuckle. One was a 1980’s version of Macbeth and when Macbeth rode in on a motorcycle I nearly lost it. Actually, other then being in a somewhat modern day setting it followed the play really well.
One night using our Wii Fit, we held our own version of the Greek Olympics. We picked 5 activities to compete with. Everyone wore their togas and the winner was crowned with our homemade laurel wreath. The kids thought it was a hoot watching Mom and Dad in their togas trying to hula hoop.
Winners will be posted here so check back next week!
Loving the adventure of homeschooling –
This post is part of a series by Stacey Lane on her experiences with Illuminations. For the first post in this series, click here!
Comments (58)
Hmm… favorite history project in the last two years? Well, we always love just sitting around and watching the Drive Thru History DVDs. But I think the highlight of this past year was my son programming a commercial about traveling back to Ancient Rome. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Caius/804190
Everyone pretty much got involved in this one.
I think my favorite was a paper my son wrote after reading the MOH vol. 3 chapter about Henry VIII and all his wives. He wrote a wonderful paper about all these women and titled it, ” The Unluckiest Women in History.” I loved it. He liked it enough to read it to everyone in our homeschool group during an Academic days presentation. I guess his favorite hands-on activity would be making a pair of mocassins from scratch during a unit on Indian Folklore. LOL They were too small for his feet so he gave them to his brother. All my children love history and the rest of the boys would definitely say the thing they loved the most about history this year was being read to everyday. Reading aloud is a big part of our day.
We have just started homeschooling. But when I was in school, I had to do a book report on 3 events in history. I may it like a diary and burned the edges to make it look old.
Well, we just started history this year with MOH 1. I am embarrassed to say I don’t have much cool unique stuff like a pyramid with kisses! YUM! However, we made an awesome timeline. It is gigantic and my son now wants it in his room so he can have it forever.
My favorite ‘project’ is also related to our time spent studying the Olympics. We set up some of our own activities. We had read the Magic Tree House book that is about the Olympics. My children most remembered that women were not allowed. My girls were talking in their ‘boy voices’ the whole time and my 4 yo DS wanted to be naked. The things they remember!
A few years ago I purchased one of those disposable pot roast pans (sorry, can’t remember the name) We put dirt and carved out the Nile River. We then put down foil and sprinkled grass seeds in the dirt. We got a poured water and flooded the Nile River and within days the grass was growing. I think we added rocks and some plastic trees. I should have taken pictures.
Blessings and thank you for the opportunity to win these books. I am planning to use them next year.
Hmmm…I think the Ice holding contest in MOH volume1. Turned into ice tag as everyone started to put it inside everyone else clothing. Also doubled as PE for the day. 😀
Heather
My daughter’s favorite project was making King Tut’s face mask 🙂 It’s hard for me to pick just one, as there are so many great ideas in MOH!
I think one that actually made a “wow” impression is when I dragged them all out to the cul-de-sac with a meter stick and measured out in the street the length of one of Colombus’ ships. I can’t remember the ship name or the measurement but the kids sat out there for awhile talking about where on earth he put all the crew and supplies. The ship was not that big for such a long voyage back then.
My boys made an ice cream viking ship, topped with Lego minifigs and a Lego mast. The waves were whipped ceam. We are always fans of ice cream, but to act out Viking scenes with Legos, too? Well, it was a huge hit!
Our Favorite activities:
Life size mummies. Trace your kids body onto large rolled out paper. then have them draw/color the mummies adornments on the paper. fold the paper in half so you will cut to of the same mummies out. Staple the mummies together and fill with scrap paper or newspaper.
Also we build a replica of a roman home with LEGO’s.
Or course any type of food that we made was always a big hit.
Loved making a model of an Iroquois longhouse and a Podcast about Ferdinand Magellan. The cornhusk and yarn dolls were fun, too, as examples of toys that little girls played with long ago.
When we were studying Rome we had a Roman feast. Card table on the floor, pillows and blankets to recline on, kids as royalty, and my husband and I as servants. We had boars head (meat loaf shaped over an upside down cereal bowl with celery tusks, olive eyes, and bread ears), rotisserie chicken, tons of wine (grape juice), pita, etc. My husband was so great! He bowed and groveled before all the royalty. The kids loved it!!!
The hardest thing here is to choose just 1. Oh no there are so many.
We did a caste system simulation when studying India. Drawing randomly it turned out that the most social child was the outcast. For him to not be able to talk or interact with anyone was torturous. They all remembered it and wanted to do it again this year. Only this time I made sure the one who was the Brahman was in the working caste and the one who worked his tail off last time got to be the Brahman with delicious food to eat!!
We have also learned we love Mediterranean food. Lentils, hummus, foccachia are on our list of staples now!
My mosaic stepping stone was great, although it was harder than expected. Holds a prominent position in my front garden to see every time I come home and reminds me of all the joys and benefits of homeschooling my kids.
Our favorite history project was the Roman meal with stuffed grape leaves, goat cheese, roasted fowl (chicken) and hard bread. We laid around on couches and we tried to talk about the things that were happening at that time in history like we were there.
We love adding to our timeline. It is fun to see how things fit together and how things progress as we closer to current dates.
One of my favorite projects was when I was studying the Greek myths with my daughter and we created a 3-D portrait of Medusa with all her snakes coming out of her head. It was a project from Evan Moor’s Literature Pockets.
Our favorite history activity, which has sort-of turned into an on-going project, was visiting the Ft. Davis National Historic Site. We’ve been twice in the last two years and the 2nd visit was fun because the older kids (ages 1-8) remembered the buildings and what was in each one and had their favorites they wanted to visit. This year, we happened to be visiting at the same time as a small, well-behaved school group. So, there were several volunteers in period costume. After talking with the lady dressed as Mrs. Grierson, the school children left and we walked though her house. As we were leaving, she showed the girls a hair saver on the dresser and then showed them a needle point which was made using the Grierson’s hair in the place of embroidery floss. My girls have just started learning embroidery and they are so entralled with the “hair work”, they are on a quest to save their own hair and made a sampler. In a house of 5 girls, it shouldn’t be too long.
We watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail after MOH2. We had a great time laughing at the jokes and then talking about what REALLY happened. I love that my son can understand the jokes because he has learned sooooo much real history!!
Our favorite History project was celebrating Guy Fawkes Day as we studied England’s History. To Celebrate we built a huge bonfire where we roasted sausages, potatoes and marshmallows. We also had built “guy” dolls from old baby clothes stuffed with newspaper. At the end of our bonfire we recited “Remember Remember the 5th of November,” and then threw our dolls into the bonfire.
Our favorite project by far has been the timeline. This is a beautiful visual of all of our historical studies so far. We have it up all along our school room walls. It is a constant source of conversation and refererence for us.
My kids and I wrapped our youngest in toilet paper to “mummify” him. They loved that! We have done several other projects but that is one they remember best!
So many activities come to mind. My boys loved mapping Egypt on a cake. We also enjoyed doing an archeological dig in our sandbox. Recently, we made Hoplite shields, helmets & swords…a big hit with the boys. But, my favorite is probably the video we made of them acting out the story of the Trojan war. We used their old spring horse olling on skateboards. It had a cardboard box filled with army men attached to its belly. A little gal friend of ours played the beautiful Helen of Troy, and my boys loved acting out the battle scenes.
Thanks for doing this give-away!
One of our favorite activities was an Egypt party that we held with a few of our Mystery of History friends. We divided the children into three teams, and the teams competed in “events,” such as decoding a hieroglyphic message, writing their birthdays in hieroglyphic code, and completing pyramid math and crossword puzzle activities together. Another featured activity involved mummifying the participants in toilet paper. Additionally, we played “Egypt twister,” where each colored circle featured the name of a significant place or person in Ancient Egypt that the players had to identify. The teams each constructed an Egypt time line, matching pictures with their descriptions, and affixing them in correct order on a blank time line. Spread across our kitchen table was a feast fit for Antony and Cleopatra. Of course, the pyramid with the gold chocolate nuggets hidden inside “took the cake!” Delicious! What a wonderful way to learn!
We love history. I have several little children. My children love the little every day projects like making old documents by staining them with tea and burning the edges. They love our timeline trivia we do with daddy at the dinner table. They love read aloud time and we are now in Vol 3 of MoH and they want to do much more than 3 lessons/week. We also have done a few feasts – the children always love these. My sincere desire is that since they love history so much – we will begin doing some bigger projects as they get older. I look forward to seeing some of the great ideas from what others have done. Have a wonderful day!
So cool! I just know I’m going to win one of these one of these days =) One of our favorite history projects was making a trojan horse out of paper towel and toilet paper rolls! Fun!
This year, for our homeschool presentation night, my daughter made a stop motion animation video of the black plague. She used Lego figures (and even had one of the figures vomit small red legos.) Her little movie turned out great and it was a big hit.
While studying MOH II, we visited a replica 11th century castle, called Castle Anam Cara. The couple who built the castle actually live like medieval times ALL the time. They have no electricity or plumbing; they grow almost all their own food; and they even wear clothing from the time period. They provided us with a feast of dried and pickled foods, and we ate with our fingers, talked with our mouths full, and demonstrated the worst table manners ever. The kids loved it! The castle owners had a chain mail collection as well and the kids were able to try on full body chain mail and armor and sword fight with each other…hoping all the time the chain mail was the ‘real deal’ and the swords weren’t!
For our timelines, we printed out medieval notebooking pages…free from Notebooking Nook…and drew pictures representing different people and events of the Medieval time period… King Arthur, Castles, Vikings, Knights, and Robin Hood were some of their favorites to draw. If they made a mistake or weren’t happy with their first drawing, we just printed out a new page. At the end of the year, we cut strips of clear contact paper (2″ x 11″) and taped all the pages together in order, in one long line. The contact paper is so pliable that you can then fold the entire timeline up, accordian style, and tuck it neatly in a pocket page of their history notebook. It was a great way to review our year, and now, at the end of every year, we pull out all their old timelines and review history from beginning to end!
Some of our favorite supplemental books for the Medieval time period were “Crispin – The Cross of Lead” by Avi, “The Door in the Wall” by Marguerite DeAngeli, “Ronia, The Robber’s Daughter” by Astird Lindgren, “The Sword in the Tree” by Clyde Robert Bulla, and “Tales of Court and Castle” by Joan Bodger. We also read “The Magic Treehouse: Christmas in Camelot”, and as luck would have it, our local theatre had the play “The Magic Tree House: The Musical”, where Jack and Annie were transported from Frog Creek Woods to King Arthur’s Kingdom.
It was another great year of history!!
we aren’t huge activity/project people but the kids really enjoyed ‘bath night’ wrapping up in togas after a soothing bath…..
We haven’t had an opportunity to do a ton of activities this year since I have been sick most of the year, but one of the biggest hits was giving my children modeling clay and letting them design ziggurats and then displaying them. Mummification activities were also a blast for them.
A few years ago when my children were all 8 years old and under, we studied the Little House on the Prairie books using the Prairie Primer. One of our favorite history activities was to measure out the size of a covered wagon and mark it on the floor with tape. My children put all the things inside there that they would need if they were travelling west in a covered wagon. They of course wore their bonnets too. Even the littlest children remember it and ask if we can do it again.
Well, this is where I need your help! We aren’t big on activities here and any ideas your books can give are appreciated. We enjoy reading on the couch…is that a “project”? 🙂
My favorite projects came this year. We allowed the students in class to select a project for the time period that was being studied. When we were in Egypt, my daughter made a scrapbook. Every page had a different topic that she researched. She made the pages look old. She was so proud of that project. She got kuddos in class from the teacher. Other kids made canopic jars, scrolls, shadoufs, and scarab stamps, too.
The projects continued in China, Greece and Rome. We got the ideas from Enchanted 4 You.
My favorite project has been ongoing for MOH I & II. It is a huge wall timeline. We daily refer to it for many different subjects. It has really helped all my children to get a great overall view of history. My only concern is what will I do when we eventually paint!
My three boys really enjoyed the timeline we made for MOH1. It kept everything visible and in order for us. They also loved building ziggurats with Legos and performing “mummification” rituals on each other, which consisted mostly of wrapping each other in toilet paper. MOH has definitely made learning history so much fun for us all.
Unfortunately, we haven’t started serious study of history either. We did do a unit study on Ancient Egypt and loved learning about the dead King Ramses needing a passport to travel out of Egypt. On his passport, it said DEAD.
We did make a tomb and a mummy to go in it. And we loved going through some of the interactive tours online of the pyramids. Nothing terribly exciting but to a 5 year old, she had fun!
We are just getting started so we have not done any history projects yet. But, when I was in high school my friend and I did a video project for Government. We created our own country along with a representative flag, flower, laws, etc. But we also had a special country dance in which we performed barefoot outdoors in the middle of a snowy winter! We received the highest grade four our total project.
Last year while studying countries around the world, we had a luau party. My mom had tons of grass skirts, tiki torches, flower necklaces, little umbrellas, etc. that she let the boys borrow. My boys (9 and 11 at the time) decorated the whole house, picked the menu, did the shopping and cooking, and then served all of us. They invited their grandparents and cousins and we had a wonderful party complete with music, food, and games.
One of the best things we have done is to print out pages and make a timeline in their binders. This way each boy gets to decorate each of his own figures and also remembers them better. With 11 children, eventually, each will have their own history timeline.
We calculated the size of the ark. We were able to compare it to the height of our home and the distance from our front door to the neighbor’s home… and then paced the length. Even I was amazed at how large it was! Now we all have a good feel for the size.
Our favorite history project… well we’ve had a few… building sugar cube pyramids and a replica of the Nile River; making mummies; making/churning butter; acting out the pioneer days; and definitely our living history day at a one-room schoolhouse and pioneer village!! Thanks for the opportunity to share and the chance to win an All American History set.
We took a road trip to Mount Rushmore a couple years ago, our favorite history family vacation. Recently while learning about the presidents, the kids remembered which presidents we had seen.
We’ve done some really fun things. We got togther with some other homeschoolers for some projects. We built ziggurats from cardboard and lots of tape. We built pyramids out of sugar cubes and lots of glue. We made sphinx out of clay. They love the toilet paper mummy , but they both want to be the mummy! We drew pictures of our favorite Greek god and then we had our own Olympics. We’ve had a blast and can’t wait to get started again!
We tend to be “small project” people…making mummies out of dolls we bought at the thrift store, sculpting the Sphinx out of floral green foam blocks, writing a “Grandma Farrow” song for a Canadian Family Reunion to the tune of “Father Abraham”, writing our own tales like the Epic of Gilgamesh and dressing up like dog mushers after our study of Balto and the Iditarod all come to mind…Love all these great ideas!
We did a couple of weeks’ study focusing on Mississippi since we currently live in that state. As the big finale, my daughter made a quadruple triorama about Mississippi Native Americans. One section was on their agriculture and had a mini farm, complete with pipe cleaner corn stalks, deer, and a basket of berries. The second section was on their housing and she build a thatch roof hut out of clay. The third section was on their clothing and had a man and woman dressed in traditional garb fishing by a river. The last section was on their arts and crafts and showed the inside of a hut with some beadwork and a basket on a table. It was an amazing project and she learned so much doing research for it.
Last summer we spent three week in the Boston area visiting as many historical sites as possible. Prior to our trip we watched the Drive Thru History DVDs America series. They gave us a great feel for what we were going to visit. For review, we watched the DVDs again after our trip. Everyone had fun playing, “I remember seeing that!”
Last year we studied Florida History and we took a weekend trip to St. Augustine. Our favorite part was seeing the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse and The Old Jail. They let you go inside the jail cells and it was so dark and ominous in there, it really made you feel like you were incarcerated. They told you what kinds of crimes were punishable by a stay in a cell, what you would end up in the stockades for and which crimes cost you your life, by hanging. Then we saw the hanging tree with the rope still attached.
Part of our study through MOH III included studying some of the important artists of the period. One of the funnest activities my daughter did was to paint part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on our ceiling. She taped paper to the ceiling and lay on top of our entertainment center as her scaffolding. It was a great way for her to get an idea of what it took to do that kind of work, and I know she will remember that lesson well.
My kids LOVED being rolled up in toilet paper to be mummies when we studied Ancient Egypt! They even wrapped up thier stuffed animals! 🙂
This is a project my children completed unbeknown to me!
Several years ago I looked out the bedroom window to see all my sheets strung haphazardly around the edge of the wooded area next to our house. Immediately thinking about how much more laundry I was going to have to do, I quickly stomped out of the house to inquire. Thankfully, God stopped me from being quick tempered with the children. I was able to calmly ask them what in the world they were doing with all our clean (now dirty) sheets!
Their response went something like this:
Well, mom, remember how we were learning about the Native Americans? We love them so much we wanted to be them! So we’re building wigwams just like they did! See the mud we’ve put all over the sheets to make it look like the mortar holding the sticks together? And, we even just finished a battle. Look, Jake’s inside the wigwam because he’s mortally wounded from an enemy arrow.
I peeked through the sheet doorway to find a tidy wigwam with stuffed animals strung up by their necks (apparently they were the skins of the hunted animals), a makeshift fire ring (with a hole cut in the sheet above it to let the “smoke” out!ARG!), log benches, grass clippings in some cereal bowls for food, and in the back corner, my 6 year old son laying on a blanket in the dirt. He was wrapped up with fabric scraps on his chest to show the “arrow wound”, with red marker marks all over the fabric for the blood! His sister was sitting nearby ready to feed him some kind of “concoction” to heal him. Thankfully I intervened before he was made to eat bits of mud, grass, weeds, and dandylions!
Needless to say, they loved learning about Native Americans and took their learning to the extreme. I however learned to keep a better eye out for the dangers to my household items as a result of their education! LOL!
In 2nd grade hs history we glued popsicle sticks together to create log cabins of all shapes and sizes. Shingles were made with various size rectanular cuts from brown construction paper. Our “village” was surpringly realistic!
My six year old was so enthralled with the Romans that he spent weeks cutting copy paper and scotch taping together armor patterns, many times over until he got it just right. Then he copied his pattern onto heavier paper and duct taped the pieces with silver (not gray) tape. His design was so good that my 12 year old son’s drama class asked if his little brother would let them copy his armor for their production of Anthony and Cleopatra.
We enjoyed making a Roman Road in a shoe box lid. It gave us a fun history project to do together and as we kept it, it gave us a way to relate Christ in History.
Once when studying early American settlers, we spent a day with another homeschool family at our home building a small wattle and daub house. The kids all pitched in to find appropriate branches to weave together and then cover with mud. (The mud was considered the best part of the day!) A thatch roof was added later. At the end of the day we had a completed structure that 2-3 children could enter at a time and they played inside it for a few months before it had to come down.
My second grader was fascinated by Queen Elizabeth I and the Elizabethan era. We made a tin-foil crown with construction paper gems, turned a fairy wand into a scepter, and she dressed up in something appropriately fancy. Then we paraded through the house for her “coronation.” I interviewed her about what it was like to become queen, which turned out to be a very fun way to review the history and drama of the Tudor line!
Our favorite Egypt project was mummifying a chicken. We found the instructions on the web. It was 6 weeks of messiness and now we have a beautiful shriveled mummy. We still haven’t named it. The entries are:
Cluck-ankamen
Chicken-ala-king
Ahkmen-fred
Hatch-up-cluck
Cleopatchick
When studying the lesson on Squanto in Volume III of Mystery of History my 11 year old daughter and 13 tear old son went all out in conducting an interview of Squanto. My son was Squanto who was done up in his best Indian attire which included a feathered headdress. My daughter was the reporter who went by the name Sally Superstar. She was all done up in heels, a skirt, her best blouse, and her hair done up in a bun. The interview was conducted on my son’s video camera that he set up and positioned just right for the interview. My kids were very professional and rather entertaining!
One of our very favorite history projects was creating a replica of the Nile out of sand. We made it in a box from a case of soda lined with aluminum foil. We used regular sand for the desert and blue sand for the river. We planted chive seeds along the bank of the river and preteneded that it was the yearly flood by watering it. It was so neat to watch the “crops” grow!