When I was a kid in public school, history classes seemed like just a jumble of dates and names that didn’t matter anymore, but had to be memorized for tests.  Actually, now that I think of it, I never really had a “history” class – it was called “social studies” and it included a wide range of topics, including smatterings of boring textbook history.

Before I started officially teaching Miro anything, he became interested in presidents.  I remember when he was three years old asking me who was the first president … who was second … who was third … and I couldn’t answer him past that.  (Thanks, public school education!)  Maybe that’s what started him on his quest to learn about presidents – he wanted to know more than his old mom!

One of the joys I get from homeschooling is learning along with my kids.  Both of us can now name all the presidents in order.  But, even better, we understand a lot of the issues that they were facing while they were president.  We know about the various wars that were fought.  A lot of history actually makes sense!

I realized this year that I didn’t want to limit our history lessons to just American history, so my plan was to learn history in order from cavemen to today.  Life rarely goes as planned, though.

One morning my husband brought his lapbook to the breakfast table and started reading the events of This Day in History.   Miro was immediately hooked, and every morning thereafter he has asked for the day’s history.  We’ve learned about events during various wars, fast cars beating speed records, amendments, famous people, inventions, astronomy, and all sorts of other really interesting stuff.

In an effort to remember at least some of the great information, Miro started a Timeline book.  It’s just a three-ring binder.  When he hears something he wants to learn more about, we grab a sheet of paper, look it up in-depth online, he writes some details on the paper (making sure to include the year it happened), and sticks the paper in the proper place (gotta keep those dates in order) in the binder.  My hope is to keep adding to the timeline over his school career – by the time he’s in high school, we should need several binders.  And maybe by then we’ll have covered all the major periods of history … at least it’ll be in order in the book.

So how do you teach history?  Do you focus on one specific time period at a time?  Which time period has been your (and your children’s) favorite so far?