I Love Our History Timelines!

Ode to a Timeline

Oh I really love our timelines! I have been doing them for six years with my kids and this is something about our homeschool work that has really lasted and I still love doing with them. I may  be hugging a timeline right now. This idea of using a timeline comes from the Charlotte Mason philosophy of homeschooling, which she called a Book of Centuries.

What is so great about using a timeline for history?

The very most awesome thing about using a timeline is it frees you to study history out of order. Study history as your child's interest dictates! If they want to study the pyramids and then tanks from WWII--it doesn't matter! If you have a chance to check out a cool local history site even though you are studying the renaissance, go for it! It all just goes in the timeline and it is easy for children to see how it all relates to all the rest of history.
Another nice thing about timelines is you can go through them to review what you have studied. They don't have a chance to forget everything since it is all in a timeline that they use every week. It becomes a portfolio of their studies.

How I made our timelines:

I got my binders at Target. They are Up and Up brand 2" binders and they are PVC free, so no yucky chemicals for us. The covers and spine printouts I got from Guest Hollow. They are free printables and have a boy and girl version. They are pretty cute!

The timeline pages inside are from Build Your Library ($9.99). I got these because I liked the color on the pages and the way the years are set up (longer spans for the ancient times going down to 10-year increments for modern times. Each of the 4 main parts of history are a different color on the top of the page as well, so it makes it a bit easier to find out where you want to be in time. These correspond to many history series such as Curiosity Chronicles and Story of the World (the latter is not totally secular but I use it for some things).

This is how we do our timeline: 

Whatever history we learn about, whether in our history curriculum Curiosity Chronicles, on a field trip, in a YouTube video, in a historical book we read, or a documentary we watched on TV, we put it in the timeline. We do have some timeline stickers I ordered from History Odyssey and the printable timeline figures that come with the Curiosity Chronicles Activity Guide Bundle, but often we have to find our own, so we choose an image from Google Images and print it out, cut it out, and paste it into the book in the appropriate place (I buy lots and lots of glue sticks). Then I have the kids write the date and anything interesting we want to include.

Curiosity Chronicles comes with cute "baby was born" timeline figures, so we have put all the members of our family in, including grandparents and other relatives. This allows the kids to see, for example, that Grandma and her sister were born in the midst of WWII, and what else was going on in the world at that time.

When the kids are older I plan to do a family history project with the kids and we can add more ancestors to the timeline and see what was going on when they were alive. It makes history come alive when you know your ancestors lived through it.

The kids are able to make so many connections with this timeline! I plan to continue using the timelines through high school and they will be a great keepsake when my kids graduate from homeschool.

Second Grade Curricula 2018

Second grade? They were just doing preschool work a moment ago!

Math
Math-U-See Beta

Language Arts
Reading Eggs Online Curriculum
Books for reading

Handwriting
Handwriting Without Tears (we are doing the first grade books again for more practice)

Science
The Happy Scientist Subscription
Mystery Science Subscription

History
Curiosity Chronicles: Snapshots of Ancient History

Baby Trend Expedition Review

A big slope down to the water, and a bit muddy along there, but it was no problem.

Sharing my love of nature with my kids is super important, but I have a toddler and a bad back that can't handle any kind of carrier for my 2-year old. So long hikes are not really possible right now. But my kiddos and I really need our vitamin N (nature)! So I wanted a stroller that could do some off-roading. My stroller could not do any off-roading. It was strictly for mall-walking.

I looked at some strollers rated for hiking. Some of them were $400 which does not fit in this single mom's budget. Yikes! Sticker shock. Then I stumbled upon the Baby Trend Expedition which had pretty good reviews on Amazon, but wasn't too expensive for me. It's about $100, but at Amazon I even found a pink and black one for just over $70. Now that I can afford. Sold!

The stroller has a pretty full canopy, cupholders and a little box with a lid for my keys. It has a basket below that could be bigger and sturdier, but it is sufficient. With the addition of some stroller hooks it will be just fine. On our zoo treks the stroller drives so smoothly and rolls with the slightest touch.

Probably the only thing I don't like about this stroller is the mechanism that allows the seat to recline. It is basically just a cord with a clamp on it. So it works for the two year old, but if one of my older boys wants a ride, his weight pushes the clamp back down and the kid ends up lying down. I worry that the clamp might loosen over time. I might try to McGuyver something to hold it if that happens, but it's sad they didn't do something more solid for this.

Now that the weather is good again I finally got to try it out for some off-roading. We headed out to the Hassayampa River Preserve. This place has a gravel parking lot, dirt paths with some areas of deep sand, a little mud, and some rocks, tree roots, and fallen branches.

The Expedition happily bounces over the lumps and bumps in the trail without slowing down. It hopped right over tree roots and small logs in the trail and it smoothly rolled my little sweetie up and down little hills without me working too hard.

My old stroller would have gotten stuck on this!

It was easy to get the stroller over this log.

My old stroller would have been lost forever in this sand.

The stroller did great on deep sand. It was slower and a more effort than on hard ground but it did it just fine.

Marvelous! We had a lovely day in nature and it's all because of this stroller. Yay! I can get back to adventuring with my kiddos!

My First Chinese Words Mandarin curriculum

I thought I would write an (initial) review of My First Chinese Words curriculum, thinking it might be helpful of others since I had such a hard time finding any sort of Mandarin curriculum for young kids, and so far this one is working for us.

I wanted my children to learn Mandarin because:

• They are half Chinese!
• My kids' Chinese grandparents, who are also here in the US, don't speak much English (although my mother-in-law has been learning lots of words, good for her) and I want the kids to be able to communicate with them. 
• I want them to be proud of and understand their Chinese heritage. 
• I want to give them a skill they can make use of in today's global economy.

So, since I am the teacher in our homeschool, I ended up being the teacher of Chinese culture and language for our children. Which I know nearly nothing about. Yikes.

So, I needed some kind of curriculum. My requirements were:

• Did not require me or my children to know any Chinese. I would be learning along with the kids.
• Was fun and colorful to engage small children.
• Would progress in slow, baby steps.
• Was a pretty good program in terms of quality (I knew I probably wouldn't find something amazing, since Chinese curricula aren't exactly super common in the US).
• Not too expensive, since my plan was to have the in-laws pay for it (hey, I'm broke, and they want the grandkids to learn Chinese, right?).

So I found My First Chinese Words, by the company Better Chinese. It looked as if it would fit the bill, so I talked to the kids' grandparents, and they gave me $100 to buy it! This program teaches by helping the children read books in Chinese. You learn all the words to read the first book, then the second book adds more words, and so on. The books in the online program are animated and can read the book aloud to you if you wish.

I purchased:
6 months of the online program
The workbooks (there are two)
The flashcards (They are huge! Classroom sized.)
The game cards

We did not buy the books and CDs, since they are the same thing found in the online program, and the online program has additional exercises, videos, and activities.
My kids really liked the videos about the development of Chinese writing characters that they have in the online program. They have a funny animation for each character.

Not that many people have kids learning Mandarin, so I thought I'd post some fun and useful resources that I have found. These resources are mainly for young children just starting out in Mandarin (since that's what I've got). I will be adding more resources to this blog post as I come across them.

Here are some free resources we are using along with this curriculum:

Fun Fun Elmo Videos
From the makers of Sesame Street, "'Fun Fun Elmo' is an Educational Program designed to teach children the basics of the Mandarin language." Thirteen episodes are free on YouTube.

Mandarin Numbers Music Video
My kids LOVE this video. We all know our numbers in Mandarin now but we still have to watch this video at least once a week, and with at least 3 encores. My son knows the whole song by heart.

Basic Mandarin Phrases Video
By the same people as the music video above. Includes phrases such as hello, goodbye, I'm sorry, thank you, you're welcome. I love this one because they repeat and that helps to learn to say it with the correct tones.

Monkey Write App (Android)
We use this smartphone app just for practicing writing Chinese numbers because that's the part that's free. It teaches stroke order, scores your attempts, and is fun and easy to use. If you are working on learning Chinese numbers it's just the thing.

 Miss Panda's "Ni Hao" and "Numbers" Songs Video
 Beginner songs for the little ones. Miss Panda also has other videos, including the itsy bitsy spider in Chinese, and popular children's books read in Chinese.

www.poissonrouge.com/schoolofchinese
A basic Chinese vocabulary learning activity. The kids click on objects in rooms and it says and shows the word in Chinese.

UPDATE: I stopped using this program after a couple of years, simply because I didn't have time, and since then I have decided to focus more on Spanish, because I know so much more about Spanish and I can teach it a lot better.

I did like the program, and I think it is nice for young kids or even a little older ones who are new to the language. My kids enjoyed it. The workbooks don't have very many activities for practice, so supplementing with more activities would be a recommendation. We watched a lot of YouTube videos with songs and such. But the online component of this program was good and the flashcards and especially the game cards were helpful.