History Odyssey

I have decided to use History Odyssey by Pandia Press for our study of Ancient History this summer. The girls are not too thrilled about school during the summer, but I told them we would make it fun and since we are only studying history, we will be finished fairly early in the morning, so they will still have lots of free time.

I purchased the e-books yesterday and have been devouring the schedules and book lists and I LOVE it so far! I cannot wait to get started this summer. We bought Ancients Level 2 for Bailey and Ancients Level 3 for Amanda.

I plan to add TONS of extras (short books, internet sites, games, videos, recipes, etc) to make this a fun study of Ancient History. So I will have to schedule each of their studies to coincide so that we can do projects and activities together. Right now, they do not coincide because Ancients 3 has 165 lessons and Ancients 2 only has 87 lessons.

I noticed that Ancients Level 3 (9th-12th grade) is VERY writing intensive...luckily, Amanda likes to write! It also has scheduled some very involved books (The Iliad, The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc) but I think she will be fine reading these, as long as she has some free reading time also. She usually reads 20+ books in the summer, and I don't want to restrict that freedom, so we will see how it goes and adjust the schedule as necessary.

I have also thought about continuing into the Fall Semester with this History study since it is so involved, but we will see how it goes (and see how long we all can keep up the summer schedule, since we have never done school during the summer before!)

Some Good Geography and History Links

The girls have been working through their World Geography (using Winter Promise's Children Around the World as a framework). Right now they are studying the continent of Africa. Here is a cute game they played yesterday; they said they really liked this one, so I thought I would post the link here. Inturi Forest Adventure

**If you are working on US History (pioneers, Oregon Trail, etc) here is an EXCELLENT computer game that we used called The Oregon Trail. The kids played it over and over (they still do). Anyway, the Inturi game reminded them of The Oregon Trail game.

Another game that Bailey played while we have been studying Africa is Mancala. There are online versions of the game, and we also have the board game. It's pretty fun and takes very little skill to play, but lots of strategy to win! Online Mancala Game

Do you like lapbooks and notebook printables? Here are a few links that we used for Africa:
Elephant Lapbook
Lion Lapbook
The Great Kapok Tree Lapbook **For younger kids, but we still love this book
Masai and I Lapbook

Homeschool Share also has lapbooks for monkey, rhinoceros, and zebras and an entire Africa Resource page. There you can find links to some lapbooks resources to purchase as well (*they have grasslands, zebras, and Africa on the Hands of a Child website).

Printables:
African Animals (*note: Enchanted Learning has free printables, but they will have advertising on them, or you can join and get "clean" worksheets)
Early Readers African Animals Book
African Animals Coloring Pages
Jan Brett Animal Printables (*look under Noah's Ark for lots of beautiful pages of African animals)

Links:
Ancient African Stories (*reminds me of Aesop's Fables)

Don't forget about the wonderful FREE geography software Seterra. The kids "play" this several times a week and have memorized most of the countries of the world now (and lots of the capitals, too!).

Another fun Africa geography game here It's a drag and drop type game.