A History Lesson

Chalk it up to homeschool lessons learned the hard way.

Back at the beginning of the year, I had a hard time finding a history curriculum for K that covered American History on a 5th grade level. I would have settled for anything in the middle school range, but we kept running into too hard or way too easy. I finally found one - a textbook that separated everything into short lessons that were easy to assign and easy enough to understand while still being somewhat challenging. It was working well for us.

Until last week.

When we got to the American Revolution and the book devoted all of *3* pages to that very significant part of our history.

3 short pages.

The next 3 pages were about the people who refused to fight in that war. There's something not right about that quantity and ratio, so I did a little research and discovered the book was published by the Mennonites. Who are pacifists. Well, alrighty then. That explains it.

It doesn't excuse it; it just explains it.

I'm not planning to chuck the book out the window just yet, but we will be setting it aside for a bit while we supplement with other resources that actually teach the American Revolution. What a revolutionary concept!

Get it? Revolutionary? I crack me up.

We'll be reading Johnny Tremain, a historical fiction novel that explains much of the build-up to the revolution and how it started. Then we'll do a lapbook, which is this big posterboard-like "book" with lots of things pasted on that give information about your topic. I've never done one, but it looks interesting.

And keeping things interesting is Homeschool Lesson #1.