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//Lasted Updated: May 15, 2011//

This is a wiki for those who are interested in teaching K-12 history in small co-op groups, with mixed ages and abilities. I did this for 9 years (from 1999-2008), covering all sorts of topics and themes, and I think I was fairly successful in getting all the kids to love history--and value it. My approach was a combination of traditional lecture (though I approached it more as a story-telling venture), hands-on investigative activities, and the use of primary sources. In this wiki, you will find the differing approaches I have taken (some more successful than others!) with activities and ideas for teaching. I've uploaded as much material as I can to help you replicate any of the lessons and activities that you might like to! Follow the links below to topics you find interesting.

I also want to say that although I generally planned and led the class (especially after the first couple of years - I had a passion for history and kept butting in when the other moms were leading!), I had a LOT of help from the other moms in the group. They often pitched in with lessons, activities, ideas and just plain extra energy. Not only that, but they gave me lots of great emotional support all the time. We looked forward to our own times to chat after class, just as the kids did. These ladies have been my dearest friends throughout this whole journey. Now that I've "retired" to move on to other things, I cherish the time we had together, both the kids and the moms. We became like family and had so many good times. I hope you find that some of these inspire you to create your own!

If you have suggestions, comments, or need to report broken links, please contact jweller@montwell.org.

For all of these, I did extensive research on the Internet. I have set up a shared bookmark site on Delicious: [] Here, I've bookmarked sites that I've used all through the years and tagged them with appropriate tags. Tags are like category or topic indicators. For instance, one site might have the tags: "ancient" "mali" "africa" "resource" "k-2" "forkids" because it fits all those categories. You can sort by a tag (let's say you wanted to find all bookmarks related to "africa") by clicking on the tag listed on the right hand side of the page (you may have to open up the ALL TAGS list by clicking on the little triangle next to the term ALL TAGS). Once you have picked a tag, all you will see listed are bookmarks that are tagged with that category. You can narrow your list even further by clicking on another tag listed in the RELATED TAGS list on the right hand side of the screen. So if you clicked on "+Mali" you would get only 8 resources, instead of the 110 for "africa." These numbers will change by the way, because I'm culling out some of the old dead links right now and I'm adding in new ones as I find new great resources, lesson plans (don't worry--lesson plans are easy to decipher and can be adapted to one or more kids--look for great ideas that suit your child's learning style when looking through a lesson plan--you don't have to use all of it!), reference sites, games, etc. //Some tags I use and what I mean by them: "resource" means that it can be used as part of a lesson directly or that the kids can read it and get information from the page; "reference" means the reading level is beyond any but your oldest kids--it's usually stuff from researchers and is for your background information as you guide your student(s); "adswarning" means a page has ads on it, an unfortunate but necessary thing for many educational sites in these economic times; "marketingwarning" means the site is part of a site that sells things, like tours or goods from a particular country or books; and "world" means a resource that covers a good portion of the world and I didn't want to have to list ALL the areas and times.//

=This is the PowerPoint presentation on "History for the Ages--All Ages" from the VaHomeschoolers 2011 Conference: [|VH 2011 presentation.docx]=

Culture Studies for Very Young Students

Early U.S. History for Young and Middle Students

Middle U.S. History for Young and Middle Students

Decades: The 20th Century (U.S. History) for Young and Middle Students

Mini-Unit: U.S. Government for Young and Middle Students

Mini-Unit: What is History and Doing History (Recording Oral Histories)

Ancient History I (Pre-history to 1 A.D.) for Middle and Older Students

Ancient History II (1 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) for Middle and Older Students

World History I: Early Modern (1400 A.D. to 1750 A.D.) for Middle and Older Students

World History II: Middle Modern (1750 A.D. to 1900 A.D.) for Middle and Older Students

World History III: 20th Century for Older Students

Summer camps were created to kick off the year and let the kids have some fun together before the year got going in earnest. We had 6 camps.

End of Year Festivals were created to let the kids show off a little of what they learned while engaging with the wider homeschool community. We only had 3 of these but they were all a blast! include component="tagCloud"