Special Connection Homeschool

In our Social Studies book Social Studies Made Simple , we are studying "change." In this unit students are to learn how change affects their lives. For this, we were to ask our family and friends to share stories and pictures from events that happened long ago. My father-in-law shared a great story about Gesserine's great, great, great, great grandfather who experienced the "Night the Stars Fell" in 1833. I will first share her article with you here. The Night The Stars Fell Nov. 12-13, 1833 William Sevedge and his family were in the process of moving to Hempstead County, Arkansas and were camped on the St. Francis River on the "Night the Stars Fell." The "Great Leonid Meteor Shower" that occurred on November 12-13, 1833 was referred to as the night the stars fell from the sky which is exactly what eye witnesses, such as my great, great, great, great grandfather William Sevedge and his family probably thought was happening. The storm t...

Today we learned about President's Day which is the holiday dedicated to the memory of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who both have birthdays in February. Last year I tried to teach Gess about both Washington and Lincoln as well as the current presidents she was familiar with which are George W. Bush and Barack Obama. However, I could tell that was a bit much for her as she started calling George Washington, Barack Obama. She was just getting them all mixed up. This year I am simply focusing on the presidency in general and will touch on each president as we hit them in our history lessons. So all we did for today was watch a couple of videos and color a picture. The first video was from the History Channel . They usually have a nice, short video about the history of each holiday and today was no exception. We watched their video The History of the Holidays: President's Day to get a glimpse of how this holiday started and how it ended up being celebrated as we d...

I am still struggling to find some good ideas for Social Studies so I bought the book Social Studies Made Simple and am giving it a try. It looks like it might be a good guide to make sure we cover some important topics. The first lesson was on the family and it gives you the patterns to make acorns for a family tree so we set out to doing just that. This was fun because it gave us some art work to do as well. First I had Gess paint her tree. Then I had her color the acorns. Once we did that she glued them on. During the week we talked about family and I explained the relationships from the children to the grandparents. Here is her finished tree. This next week we are focusing on history and "change." We are having family come up with stories and pictures that show how things have changed over the years. My sister came up with a really cute one about coke bottles. She even had a picture of her and I drinking soda when we were young! Gess will then have to make a n...