History & Geography

  • The 1920’s and 1930’s

    The Roaring 20’s led way to the Great Depression of the 30’s.  Such a stark difference from one decade to the other. When we went through our first four-year cycle of history using The Story of the World as our main spine, I have to admit that we glossed over modern American history at the…

  • World War I

    WWI has been richly covered and lots of wonderful projects sit in our notebooks to prove it.  The School History site was invaluable for me during this unit!!  You can see some of the activities we chose to use from School History below. This map shows the allies at the beginning of the war. This…

  • Intro to the 1900’s

    The beginning of our semester long unit about the 20th century is off to a great start!  Besides WWI (which we’re going to do next), we have covered the main topics from 1900-1919.  For now, I’m only planning one small project per section of the unit.  When we get to the end, a big explosion…

  • US Geography Resources

    We had a great time studying United States geography!  One of the coolest projects during the study included research, some technology skills, writing and a bit of art. US Geography We took some time to learn about famous national landmarks during the unit.  As a final project, I gave the kids a list of several…

  • Frankfort Field Trips

    In case you don’t know, Frankfort is the capital of Kentucky.  It’s also where I grew up and where my family still lives.  There is a wealth of field trip opportunity in Frankfort from government to history to museums and more.  We’ve been trying to make it a habit to go on a quick field…

  • Slavery and Civil War Resources

    Slavery and Civil War Teaching Resources You might remember from my post about Planning a Large Unit Study, that I pick and choose the best ideas for our learning styles and learning objectives from many resources.  These are the the fabulous materials that provided many of my lesson plans. National Geographic Underground Railroad Interactive Civil…

  • The Freedom Center

    Words cannot adequately express our trip to the Freedom Center in Cincinnati yesterday.  After spending so much time in our unit study learning about slavery in our country before and after the Civil War, we have become immersed in the sadness, courage and strength of slaves, abolitionists and those who risked their lives to help…

  • Slavery and Civil War Plans

    Wow.  We’re on our last planned history unit of the school year.  It feels great to be ahead of schedule!  (At least in history, anyway!) I’ve sketched out the main topics I hope to cover in a unit on slavery and the Civil War.  I think we’ll plan to make this mostly a literature and…

  • Westward Expansion Projects

    (This post contains affiliate links.) Westward Expansion Unit Our time spent learning about pioneers and the Westward Expansion was so full, fun and meaningful.  As with most of our unit studies, this one was very literature-rich and included a healthy portion of project-based learning. What Did We Learn? I tried to pulled together a unit…