Sunday, October 17, 2010

SOTW1 - Chapter 17: Babylon Takes Over Again!

 




SOTW1 - Chapter 16: The Return of Assyria





  • THE LIBRARY OF NINEVEH



SOTW1 - Chapter 15: The Phoenicians



SOTW1 - Chapter 14: The Israelites Leave Egypt




SOTW1 - Chapter 13: The New Kingdom of Egypt




SOTW1 - Chapter 12: The Middle Kingdom of Egypt

  • EGYPT INVADES NUBIA
    • Watch: Ancient Egypt by Schlessinger Media (check your library)
    • Complete activity: Make Nubian Gold Bracelets (SOTW1 Activity Guide)

  • THE HYKSOS INVADE EGYPT
    • Play Seega, a game from Ancient Egypt (free printable)



SOTW1 - Chapter 11: Ancient Africa






SOTW1 - Chapter 10: The Far East: Ancient China

 
  • THE PICTOGRAMS OF ANCIENT CHINA
    • Complete activity: Making a Chinese Lantern from SOTW1 Activity Guide or follow these instructions.
    • Get a Chinese name and horoscope here.





Saturday, October 16, 2010

SOTW1 - Chapter 9: The First Cities of India



SOTW1 - Chapter 8: The Assyrians


SOTW1 - Chapter 7: Hammurabi and the Babylonians


SOTW1 - Chapter 6: The Jewish People

  • GOD SPEAKS TO ABRAHAM



SOTW1 - Chapter 5: The First Sumerian Dictator


SOTW1 - Chapter 4: The Old Kingdom of Egypt







SOTW1 - Chapter 3: The First Writing



SOTW1 - Chapter 2: Egyptians Lived On the Nile River





SOTW1 - Chapter 1: The Earliest People

  • THE FIRST NOMADS
    • Complete "Make a Cave Painting" activity from SOTW1 activity guide (will need brown paper bag)


 



SOTW1 - Introduction: How Do We Know What Happened?


  • WHAT IS HISTORY?
    • Complete "The History of My Family" activity and interview family members using worksheet from SOTW1 activity guide.
    • Read: Me and My Family Tree by Joan Sweeney (ISBN 0439184665)
    • Read: Families from Reading A-Z, level I and take the quiz.




 
  • WHAT IS ARCHAEOLOGY?
    • Do "A Dirty Dig" activity from the SOTW1 activity guide (needs to be prepped in advance without the child!)
    • Explore the site "The Processes of Archaeology"

Welcome

Welcome to my Story of the World-themed blog!  Noah and I used SOTW1 and SOTW2 during our homeschooling before I enrolled him in public school, and we enjoyed it.  I know it has its detractors, but I feel that for an elementary school age child, it is absolutely fine.  Yes, it has a Christian bias but hey... ancient history was shaped in great part by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, whether we like it or not.  I might be atheist, but I feel that it's idiotic to want to teach history without including religion in it.  Without a modicum of understanding the tenets of these religions, a lot of the reasons why history unfolded the way it did will remain incomprehensible to our children.  That being said, while I am not in favor of purging the religious aspect of it, but I did spend more time on secular aspects of the curriculum, and I interjected my "some people believe" caveats instead of teaching the religious aspects as accomplished facts.

I used a lot of outside resources to supplement or support SOTW, some recommended by Susan Wise-Bauer, others that I found on my own or created from scratch.  This is what I used during our studies, but of course it is far from being exhaustive or authoritative!  But I thought it might help those of you using or considering using the curriculum and who might not be interesting in doing so much research, lol.   I used a lot of online resources. I'm not so much into doing projects but if you are so inclined, the SOTW Activity guides are replete with them. They're also a great resource because they reference exact pages from several encyclopedias and titles of suggested reading and supplemental reading.  Some of the reading resources I used came from the SOTW Activity Guides, but a lot of times those weren't available at my library so I substituted with books that were because I'm cheap :)

I will be revising the posts once in a while to add resources or delete links that have been reported to me as dead.  I plan on dedicating one post to each chapter so it's easy for readers to search the archives.  This is a lengthy process so thanks for being patient :)

Caveat: I accumulated my Reading A-Z.com resources through the years thanks to their generous "free download day" that usually takes place around Mother's Day.  So you might want to make a list of the books you'd like to download from there, because you are only allowed a few free downloads each year.  The quiz would count as a second download.

I am providing the ISBN number for books we used so you can quickly search your library's website for it or input it in Homeschool Tracker and I am also linking to the book on Amazon (or other site) if you wish to read more about it. Please note that I found the vast majority of these books at my library or did Interlibrary Loans for them.  Sometimes the ISBN at your library will be different from the one I provided (I used the one for Amazon) so you might want to search by title and author as well as ISBN if you don't get the result you want right away :)  There is really no reason to buy those books unless you'll be using them with several children and you're rich!

I might post downloadable documents on another site and link to them from this page.

For now I will work on presenting resources that I researched for SOTW1 and SOTW2.  Later on I will add resources for SOTW3 and SOTW4 so bookmark me or add me to your Google Reader!