Research Skills: Research is an important characteristic of the History Portfolio curriculum. As the students work toward completing a Portfolio, they will incrementally pick up research skills, and begin to work more independently. Initially though, you will need to facilitate and model the process of research. But, with some graceful steps, you can pull back […]
Today’s lesson focused on southern society before the civil war. I emphasized that in order to understand the causes of the Civil War, we have to first understand what was going on in the United States during the antebellum era. The antebellum era is the time from the signing of the Constitution until the start […]
This post is the second installment in a series about writing, especially supporting the study of history in your homeschool, co-op, or small school. This installment will focus on what I call “Practice and Play”. The previous post,“Observation and Analysis,” laid out the proposition that the first step in “knowing” something involves careful observation of, […]
With the 4th of July just around the corner, it seems like a great time to offer up my Declaration of Independence Freebie again. This freebie is a special project compiled from the Modern History Portfolio “classic” and the Modern History Portfolio Junior. Notebooking activities promote observation and analysis, and include notetaking, outlining, vocabulary, Latin […]
Teaching writing to a multi-level group, at home or in co-op, does not have to be a challenge. Make it focus on organization, and give skills which will serve them in all areas of their lives. It may come as no surprise, but I use history as a spine on which to hang many […]
This school year, we are studying the background to the Civil War through the 1990’s. We do 1 hr. of writing and 1 hr. 15 mins. of history every other week with a group of about 12 students who are between 5th and 8th grade. Between co-op times, we work on our own. The students are […]
This post addresses how to sort keywords into topics, as an initial step in the process of outlining, using the web style graphic organizer such as the Cluster, Wheel, or Spider Web. Suppose, you’ve got a drawer to sort, and this drawer is full of various objects and papers: so many that you can’t even open […]
I was just wishing that I could have captured, on video, the scene of a wild mother cat that adopted us. She was a little calico. Before children, when Paul and I were living in Chicago, she began to visit me on the porch and I started feeding her. I noticed, of course, that the […]
This post will be part of a series about writing, especially supporting the study of history in your homeschool, co-op, or small school. I’ll be contributing to this series bit by bit. The first installment will focus on “Observation and Analysis.” Upcoming posts will follow-up, and will focus on the steps which I call “Practice […]
