Jimmie's Collage » history

Beautiful Feet Ancient History Curriculum Review

Jimmie — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:15:22 +0000

Over the years, I have used three curriculum packages from Beautiful Feet (BF): History of the Horse, History of Classical Music, and now Ancient History Junior High. I like BF Ancient History for the same reasons I like BF in general. All three packages I’ve used have these same characteristics:

a foundation of living books
an emphasis on notebooking
a loose structure

We have already covered Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Now, after taking a break from history for many months we are beginning Ancient Rome. Since we are over halfway through the material, it’s a perfect time for a curriculum review.

BF Ancient History in its essence is a teacher’s guide that outlines lessons. (The guide includes an answer key.) There is a junior high track (grades 5-8) and a high school track (grades 9-12) in the same book. At a minimum, you need this teacher’s guide. As far as the living books, you can purchase them from BF in a package or find them on your own. Besides the books and the guide, all you need are normal school supplies and general reference books (or the Internet).

Notebooking

Notebooking assignments are included in the lessons. Examples of typical notebooking tasks are

to copy a quote from a book and comment on it
to explain a person’s behavior
to sketch a map of an empire
to research a personality or event
to write and define a few vocabulary words.

Left to right -- Guide, Notebooking Page, Living Books

The notebooking tasks are always meaningful. That means that not every lesson will have one just to fit an artificial standard. On the other hand, a particularly meaty lesson may have two or three notebooking tasks. The BF guide recommends a composition notebook, but a three ring binder (our favorite) can just as easily be used. Alternatively, you can assign some of the notebooking tasks to be answered orally instead of in writing.

Note that these are notebooking tasks, not pages. There are no reproducibles or hand-outs. There are instructions.

In the photo, you can see an example of the notebooking pages with which I sometimes supplement the BF ancients study. I either make my own or turn to the Ancient Times pages from Notebookingpages.com. [Use discount code discount5 to save $5 on your $10+ purchase; use discount10 to save $10 on your $20+ purchase.]

Structure

I say that BF has a loose structure because although there are clearly detailed lessons, there are no charts or check boxes. I have no regret about skipping over things or adding in tangents. Part of that tendency is simply my growing confidence as a homeschooler. But the organization of the teacher’s guide has a less rigid feel that many other curriculum sets we have used (such as Sonlight or Winter Promise) which have daily lessons laid out on strict grids where you can’t help but highlight or check them off.

The Children's Homer and Teacher's Guide

The BF Ancient History guide for junior high has only 71 lessons. This means you do around three lessons per week to finish the course in a typical school year. (The senior high track has 90 lessons.) This kind of flexible scheduling is good for someone like me who appreciates an order to the study but doesn’t need a day by day guide.

The Books

Ancients Teacher Guide and Book Stack

The books are quality, of course, and are a mix of non-fiction and fiction. According to the directions at the opening of the guide, the reading assignments are to be read out loud so that both parent and child hear the books together. However, the program can be done with the child doing all the reading independently. We do a mix of the two.

There is a single textbook among the selections – Streams of Civilization. I am not a fan of textbooks, so it’s not surprising that this book came off very dry and dull to both me and to Sprite.

The senior high selection includes more books and more difficult ones. Among the junior high choices, our strong favorites were The Children’s Homer and The Bronze Bow.

Timeline

BF sells a set of applicable timeline figures for each curriculum package. I have the entire Homeschool in the Woods timeline figure CD, so I use that instead. For each lesson, the teacher’s guide tells which figures should be placed on your timeline.

BF is a no-frills kind of curriculum. There are no hands-on project ideas. BF doesn’t do a lot of media hype although they do have a Facebook fan page. They have no forum where you can hang out with other users. They just make a quality, affordable curriculum and get out of the way so you can use it.

By the way, I have started an unofficial BF Yahoo group where you can ask questions and get support.

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Ancient Greek Art

Jimmie — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:35:08 +0000

For history, we are wrapping up Ancient Greece. One of the supplemental books I added to the Beautiful Feet curriculum is Ancient Greek Art. The art books in this series give a broad overview and always mesh nicely with our history books. As we read through the book and did a couple of the recommended act projects, Sprite took notes on notebooking pages. You can find those in three posts at The Notebooking Fairy, my second blog devoted exclusively to notebooking.

Of course, our visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art reinforced all we had seen in books with real life artifacts. I snapped a shot of Sprite explaining objects to her father. She felt herself quite the expert after studying Ancient Greek Art. I was quite impressed what she retained and credit much of that to our use of notebooking after each reading assignment.

Another plus was seeing objects similar to ones we had seen in our art calendar. Living books (and calendars) are wonderful, worth their weight in gold, but nothing compares to the real thing.

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Field Trips That Don’t Match Your Curriculum

Jimmie — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:30:19 +0000

Slave Haven or Burkle Estate

It doesn’t matter if field trips don’t match perfectly with what you’re studying. In fact, there are advantages of a museum visit long after or even before you’ve studied the topic.

1. REVIEW

For example, it has been some time ago since we studied the Underground Railroad. But our recent field trip to Slave Haven Museum was a perfect chance to review what we learned.

About Slave Haven

German immigrant Jacob Burkle ran the stockyards close to the Mississippi River in what was, at that time, outside of the Memphis city limits. According to folklore, his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Now the Burkle home is a museum that educates visitors about slavery, the abolition movement, and, of course, the path to freedom via the Underground Railroad.

A highlight was touring the cellar where escaping slaves probably rested and refueled for their long journey northward. Unfortunately, photographs were not allowed inside the museum.

Because another group was on the tour when we arrived, we had to wait outside for about 40 minutes to get our turn. But the weather was lovely, and the wait turned out to be well worth it. Our guide (Valencia or Malencia — there was some dispute about her name later) was excellent. She captured the attention of the whole group and patiently answered our questions. I do recommend the Burkle Estate museum for a homeschool field trip (grades four and up).

A museum visit long after your study brings those dormant facts back up to the surface and cements them into the memory once again.

A wonderful took for getting the most out of a “REVIEW” field trip is a K-W-L Chart. I had Sprite fill one out and add it to her history notebook. Before we even left home for the museum, she was beginning to review what we had learned.

You might regret that a field trip didn’t mesh perfectly with the timing of your curriculum, but allowing distance between the study and the field trip is often beneficial for learning. The brain needs time for that new information to simmer. Too much information on one topic can lead to overload where the brain just stops taking in new facts. So don’t worry about a field trip long after a topic of study. It will serve as a great review.

2. PREVIEW

Sprite Reading the TN State Marker at Burkle Estate

Even if we hadn’t already studied the Underground Railroad, the field trip would be an anchor for attaching that learning onto once we reached it in our curriculum. In education circles, this teaching strategy is called activating prior knowledge. As we read our living books, I would be quick to mention the things we saw at the museum which parallel or illustrate what we read.

Slave Haven

The bottom line is that field trips work no matter where they fit into the curriculum. First hand experiences that come from field trips are beneficial whether before or after formal study.

If you love field trips, visit Live the Adventure blog where the Prater family shares their travels around America. I’m sure that their explorations didn’t mesh neatly with their book work. But they take advantage of every historic site and museum that they can. Tonya even has a Field Trip Friday feature on the first Friday of each month. From reading her blog, I’ve discovered another place we want to visit here in Memphis — the Pink Palace Museum.

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Middle School Egypt Study

Jimmie — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 06:58:10 +0000

We covered Ancient Egypt way back in first grade, and now we’re revisiting it in sixth grade, using Beautiful Feet ancients as our base.

THE BOOKS

Non-fiction

Activity/Notebooking/Lapbooking

Remembering God’s Awesome Acts I love this book so much that I’ve already purchased the sequel. It’s in the mail.
History Pockets: Ancient Egypt: Grades 4-6+

Fiction

Books that Bombed

Mummy (Eyewitness Books) (DK Eyewitness Books) This one gets very gruesome towards the end. Sprite didn’t like the pictures. So I put this back on the shelf.

Tales of Ancient Egypt Sprite and I both disliked this book. We read a chapter or two before I decided we had more meaningful books to read. Yuck.

Books Postponed

Mara, Daughter of the Nile This one is sure to be great. The author is one of our favorites. But since I want to wrap up this time period, I’m putting this novel on the shelf of reserve books.

THE PROJECTS

Potato Stamp Heiroglyph Cartouches

Sculpting Tut

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Sprite put all of the notebooking pages and minibooks created during this study into a bound book made from manila envelopes. She also used the Ancient Egypt pages from our art calendar to spruce up her project pages.

She spread everything out and organized it for her finished project which is a lapbooking-notebooking hybrid.

This is the first inside spread.

The best part about the bound book made from manila envelopes is that you can put notebooking pages into the pockets.

The second inside spread.

Third inside spread. We used three manila envelopes for the base.

Fourth inside spread.

This is Sprite’s monthly writing assignment. She wrote an essay on significant animals in ancient Egyptian culture.

You can see the envelope flap to the right (photo above). Inside that pocket are more notebooking pages (shown below).

Next stop is ancient Greece.

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Egyptian Art — Sculpting

Jimmie — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 06:27:27 +0000

It seems we keep pulling out our carving tools lately.

First it was potato stamp cartouches, now it’s clay sculptures.

I had planned for Sprite to do some drawing in the Egyptian style, but she was more inclined to reproduce a three dimensional object.

I’m flexible. Why not?

She chose the famous Tutankhamen mask.

I didn’t intervene at all. I just gave her the tools. Through trial and error, she learned what was the best order for putting the pieces together. There were a few instances of taking things off and then putting them back on at a later stage in the process.

I love how she hollowed out eye sockets and then put in “eye balls.”

The book pictured here is Ancient Egyptian Art from the Art in History series. We have a few of these titles, and I really like the way they give a concise overview of art in various time periods. They are full of photographs (as an art book really must be) and vocabulary.

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Ancient Egypt Hands-on and Printables

Jimmie — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:41:23 +0000

We are using Beautiful Feet’s ancients as our history base, but we’re making room for tangents too. We’ve got several more weeks left of Ancient Egypt, so I will postpone sharing Sprite’s notebooking pages, her minibooks, and the books we read. But there’s a sneak peek at Heart of the Matter with our hieroglyph potato stamp craft.

In the meantime, here are some brand new Ancient Egypt printables:

Enjoy!

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Studying the Civil Rights Movement

Jimmie — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:47:30 +0000

Normally I think it’s best to study something and then take the field trip. But when a chance to tour a museum presents itself, I certainly wouldn’t turn it down because we hadn’t reached that part in our curriculum. Actually, for the Civil Rights topic, I think that having our visit to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN was better before our book study.

Books We Used (mainly the first three)

If You Lived at the Time of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Don’t Know Much About American History
Lift the Flap Timelines — American History (notice the yellow timeline below)
Childhood of Famous Americans series — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Amazing African American History
Children’s Encyclopedia of American History

Sprite remembered the main gist of many of the exhibits. So as we read our living books, she already had some understanding of the events. Then she used the postcards I bought at the museum as the meat of her notebooking pages.

Of course, we had to watch the inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech by MLK, Jr. during the 1964 March on Washington. Then I gave her both the printed text and this notetaking guide to analyze the speech a bit.

For more language arts tie ins, I assigned Sprite The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 (downloaded to her new Kindle 2, but my DX is pictured here) and this proofreading page with a MKL, Jr. theme.

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World War 2 Lapbook

Jimmie — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:30:42 +0000

We have finished another period of history — WW2. I admit that I learned a lot myself about this monumental war. Here are the primary resources we used for this (four to five week) unit:

WW2 Books

World War II for Kids

I ditched the Winter Promise reading schedule and instead used this book as our WW2 spine. (I really like all the books in this series.)

Hoodwinked: Deception and Resistance (Outwitting the Enemy: Stories from World War II)

I chose select stories from this book.

Story of World War 2 (Dover coloring book)

WW2 Videos

Diary of Anne Frank

WW2 Historical Fiction

Journey to America (read aloud)

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? (Sprite read alone)

Snow Treasure (read aloud)

WW2 Audio

The Music of WW2 This is a fabulous site that has authentic songs from the time period — ballads, Big Band music, political songs, etc. So much fun!

I asked Sprite if she’d rather do a lapbook or notebook for WW2, and she chose a lapbook. It’s been quite some time since we’ve made one, actually, so I was rather glad she’s not outgrown them altogether. (Not that I think lapbooks are only for young children, but it seems that she was getting tired of them.)

For the lapbook base, we did something different. We used two very large manila envelopes to make a book with pages and pockets. I got the idea here. (I made my own tutorial which will be posted at Heart of the Matter later.) This envelope base is perfect for a lapbooking-notebooking combo since you can slide notebooking pages into the pockets.

Inside — first spread

Inside — second spread (see the flaps for the pockets?)

Inside — third spread

WW2 Minibooks

Here is a list of the minibooks Sprite created. I listed the links we used for graphics or for study where applicable. For the most part, each book represents a summary of the day’s lesson. In some cases, we pulled a specific detail out of the reading to focus on, for example the Thompson gun.

1. German U-boats trifold

2. Fascist Leaders accordion book

3. Start of WW2 four-sixths book

4. The Battle of Britain accordion book

5. The Fight for the Suez Canal accordion book

Animated Map The North African Campaign

6. Operation Barbarossa special fold

Hitler & Stalin image

7. Pearl Harbor is Bombed pentagon special fold

map of Hawaii

8. Japanese Internment Camps matchbook

9. Rosie the Riveter single fold

EduPics WW2 Coloring Pages

10. The Big Three single fold

coloring page

11. Thompson Sub-machine Gun single fold with four corner book inside

(Sprite’s choice of one WW2 weapon)

12. Holocaust pentagon special fold

This was a mini geometry lesson as Sprite worked on the six pointed Star of David.

(This was a hard topic, needless to say, and I didn’t require Spite to write about it. It disturbed her too much. Instead, she cut out text from a worksheet linked below.

There are some powerful black and white photographs in this PDF. (I ended up not showing them to Sprite. The reading was hard enough.)
Remembrance Poster

13. Pacific Victories accordion book

WW2 Notebooking Pages

I really liked this visual literacy PDF. Each page has either a political cartoon or a photograph to analyze and learn from. We used several pages from it as notebooking sheets to add to the pockets of the lapbook.

We used a WW2 map of Europe from our Knowledge Quest Maps CD.

We also added the poem If We Must Die by Claude McKay, which was read by Winston Churchill to inspire people during WW2.

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World War 1 Notebook or Lapbook

Jimmie — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:33:51 +0000

Another period of history is complete; this time it’s World War 1.

We used the Eyewitness WW1 book as our main resource, and I pulled a few chapters from True Stories of the First World War. The stories were not as good as I’d hoped. They had more of a textbook style than narrative style. Some of the stories dragged on and on… like the war, I guess. I had planned to read all of the book, but because of the style, I picked the best, most engaging stories instead.

For notebooking, we used quite a few pages from the History Scribe Combo I bought way back here. (I’m so getting my money’s worth out of that purchase.)

I found some fabulous printable resources at Schoolhistory.co.uk. The site is a tad difficult to navigate, so I’m going to give you two links to get you started: WW1 Worksheets and Grade 9 WW1 Worksheets. Don’t let the grade 9 scare you. I found several things that were prefect for 5th grade Sprite. The map on the right is an example of what is offered there, all in PDF.

And Teacheroz.com has some wonderful WW1 maps. I’m a firm believer in having a map handy during history studies (as well as other subjects). Otherwise, it’s so hard to visualize what you’re studying. The Eyewitness WW1 book is good, but it is really lacking in maps, in my opinion. We referred time and time again to the Western Front map glued onto the blue notebooking page to the left.

The PBS site was helpful in this regard too since it has some interactive diagrams showing battles and the frontlines.
Some more notebooking pages:

As it turned out, my initial plans to create a lapbook changed. So although I found these neat printables, we didn’t even use them. I’ll add them here for YOU!

Free Printable Templates

Free templates for minibooks related to WW1 and WW2.
Templates for WWI- German Aircraft minibooks.
Free sample from A Journey Through Learning –shutterfold minibook template including the two sides that fought in WW1.

And here are thumbnails of some additional websites that looked very promising:

Worksheets

A WW1 Lapbook (Canadian perspective)

A Map of Europe during WW1

Art of WW1

My blog will be a tad quiet for the next week or so. All is well. Be blessed.

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Theodore Roosevelt President Study

Jimmie — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:18:32 +0000

I have a new favorite president. No wonder this guy is on Mount Rushmore! I can’t remember ever studying Theodore Roosevelt in school. Where was I? Did we just skip all the interesting things in history? Surely we did because I was a “good” student. If it was taught, surely I heard it. But I only remember a few times in all my years of school when history was interesting, and it was never American history.

We read a very simple book –Time For Kids: Theodore Roosevelt: The Adventurous President — from our Winter Promise American Story 2 curriculum. I love how it was full of photos and quotes.

In fact,the quotations inspired me to make the copywork pages that are a part of my notebooking set. I love it when Sprite’s handwriting can be meaningful and tie into what we’re studying.

Of course, I’ve included his famous quote, “Walk softly and carry a big stick.” Historically, at least, that is very important. But listen to this one:

The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books.

Isn’t that beautiful and true? This one resonates with me because it values 2 things I revel in — books and nature. Most everyone admits that reading needs no defense, but in our nature deficient culture, many people need to be reminded of the value of time spent outdoors.

And two quotes about working hard (something I feel very strongly about instilling in Sprite):

When you play, play hard. When you work, don’t play at all.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

That last one reminded me of King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, so we pulled out the Bible and compared.

Of course, the notebooking set also includes some basic pages for recording history. Sprite focused on the Spanish American War and the Teddy Bear (no surprise there).

I hope that you find them helpful when you study Roosevelt or need some cursive copywork.

For some Roosevelt minibooks, see Learning by Living for photos. The printables are actually at Homeschool Share. And this PDF has notebooking pages for many presidents, including Roosevelt.

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