Homeschool Discoveries

I am so excited for our coming year of history studies.  There are many, many options to select from in looking for an American History curriculum for early elementary.  But even with so many options to choose from, I still didn’t find just one program that I liked completely!  I liked books from many of the curricula, and each had some books I didn’t care for as much.  Some were more or less expensive.  Some didn’t have the types of written work I was looking for (I wanted some lapbooking, notebooking and other papercrafts/activities!).

But, since I am a planner at heart and I love, love, love looking at book lists…I decided I could plan my own United States History curriculum for this year!  We’ll study American History from the beginnings to about 1850 this year (2012-2013), and study 1850 to the present next year (2013-2014).

I didn’t plan out a week-by-week schedule.  Instead I divided the first part of American History into five units or time periods.  For each unit I planned out various key non-fiction texts, literature read-alouds, literature for my 3rd grader to read alone, materials for use in making a notebook and timeline of what we are studying (and crafty projects too if Miss M would like to do them), as well as a big list of books for a “book basket” of optional reading.

We’ll make sure to work on history in some way each day, working through books from the book list and taking time at least a couple days a week to do something for the notebook (a notebooking page, a lapbook piece, etc).  I’ll be trying my best to keep a record of what we do with weekly or bi-weekly posts, as well as reviews/recaps of many of the books we read.

Want more details on what we are doing? Be sure to visit my “United States History Year 1” page, which has more info and a link to my spreadsheet of books.   And be sure to stop back often this year (or subscribe via email or RSS) if you want to see how this great experiment in D.I.Y history curriculum works out for us!

I’m linking up with Blogging through the Alphabet at Ben and Me (this week’s link-up coming on Thursday).