Homeschool History Curriculum Options for Engaging & Exciting Learning
Homeschool History Curriculum Options and Ideas
For children with learning difficulties, history can be one of the most fun subjects to learn. Homeschool History can also be fun for you to teach!
As one of your first options, homeschool history curriculum in the form of “Living Books” can transport your child’s mind to the place and time of the historical events. Experiencing the events through visualization can add meaning that enables your child to remember. Learning history through stories can engage your child in a way that is much more effective than fact memorization.
Although using Living Books can be an engaging way to study history, for kids with dyslexia, they often won’t be able to read books unless you purposefully select Hi-Lo books that are at a reading and interest level that appeals to your child. As an alternative you can also get Living History books that are read alouds which you can read to your child. Our first year of homeschooling, before my child was able to read, I did all of the reading aloud and it was fabulous to curl up on the couch and read with my children! Sonlight homeschool history curriculum read aloud books are great for this purpose.
Another homeschool history curriculum option that makes history ‘come alive’ is History Channel videos, or other historically accurate accounts of events. We often checked videos out from our local library. I printed a list from the online library catalog and we systematically checked out each video. Then we checked that particular video off of our homeschool history curriculum list.
Our goal was to watch every National Geographic history video in our local library system, along with many travel videos. The travel videos let my children gain visual knowledge about countries around the world, our national parks, and many landmark locations.
We also borrowed History Channel Videos as our primary homeschool history curriculum. The History Channel has great documentaries that are rich in visual content. They are an easy choice of homeschool history curriculum for any child who is a visual learner.
The two programs I recommend most heavily for daily homeschool history curriculum are **Sonlight and **Beautiful Feet. Both programs provide homeschool history curriculum through literature. Personally, we used Sonlight for its comprehensive approach, but found that Beautiful Feet was very similar in approach and scope. The books used by these programs are often Caldecott or Newberry Award winners, are rich in historical content, and they make reading about history fascinating and enjoyable for your child.
When using Sonlight or Beautiful Feet as your homeschool history curriculum, it is best to use them as read-alouds if your child is not YET a good reader. The Sonlight program, in particular, is a LOT of reading. We bought a subset of the read-alouds (read by the parent) and a subset of the readers (read by the child) for our homeschool history curriculum. We used the readers for practicing reading skills as part of our reading instruction.
I purchased the Sonlight level that was two grade-levels below my son’s chronological grade placement our first year of homeschooling. After we had worked on reading for the first year, I bumped up two grade levels for the following year.
There are many “hands-on” field trips that can be taken as part of your homeschool history curriculum too. Outings to any historical places in your state or to nearby states, and virtual field trips on the Internet, are all fun options. Tours can make history seem more “real”.
Using multimedia homeschool history curriculum online and hands-on field trips has made History one of our children’s favorite subjects! We LOVED the DK books and visual encyclopedias to learn history in a rich and colorful way. 😉
