Story of the World was the first history curriculum we purchased years ago when our homeschool journey was just starting out. While we enjoyed it for a couple years, we quickly realized that it wasn't going to be the direction we wished to go in. Since then, I've given away all of our STOW curriculum except the audio CDs. And while we haven't listened to the CDs in years, we still would like to keep them and refer to them during our unit studies.

How I put together a history unit study has been a process I have honed over the years. I like an enriching unit filled with books, projects and hands-on activities. I look for varied material so it will appeal to multiple ages, grades, abilities and skill sets. I love picture books. I feel they are an undervalued and overlooked resource in education beyond very young elementary, but I will incorporate picture books well into upper elementary and middle school. I include some non-fiction books as well.

It's not a history unit if you don't talk about the people. After all history is His Story right? Her story is mixed in there, but is rarely the focus. While I have not made an effort to explore female historical figures, I think we do ourselves, our education and our children a disservice when we don't include their stories.

When we first embarked on our Silk Road main lesson block, we thought we would simply add a few resources to complement our Middle Ages unit. Three years later and this little unit has grown into several deeply engaging main lesson blocks that span over 1000 years of history and half the world from North Africa to China.

Unit studies can be so much fun to put together, but I face one problem every. single. time. I plan too much. I get overly excited. I get too many resources. While I struggle to learn how much is just right, come along and I'll show you what works, what didn't work and what we'll save for later. Some resources are worth using again and others weren't worth buying to begin with.

Not only is this a review of the materials we used for our Ancient Roman History main lesson block, but it's also an insight in how we do our main lessons or unit studies. I share clips of my children doing their work throughout this unit during the video as well as my son's main lesson book so you can see the work he completed during this unit.

At the close of a unit or main lesson block, I share the books we read and projects we did and let you know how everything went. Some books are worth buying and keeping, others are worth checking out at the library, and still others might be passed over in preference of games or kits.

We completed our Colonial Times unit study from our American History unit. Some books were fantastic! Others were okay, but not worth owning. We did a number of activities inspired by three activity books, but if you had to just pick one, which would you choose?

Join me as I share the resources we are using for our Discovering the Americas unit study. I share how I chose books, decide which books to read aloud versus which books I'll assign to my child, and lesson plan this unit study.

Curious about how to put together a unit study? Join me as I take you through my process for putting together a unit study for Ancient Egypt. Much of the process is the same for all my history units, and only varies slightly for other units. I use a Waldorf curriculum as a default curriculum but often stray from the curriculum and come up with my own lesson plans

The Ancient Civilizations are taught in Waldorf schools in grade 5 when children are 10-12 years old. The ancient cultures are taught uniquely in a Waldorf setting as the main aspects of the lessons are concentrated on the beliefs of the people, their spiritual beliefs, their creation stories, and their divinely guides teachers on the earth plane.

It's time to put together another unit and this time it's Ancient Greece. We already started out with materials for this unit, but over the last few years, we added more resources. It's quite a full unit now, and it doesn't look like we'll be able to cover everything we want in four short weeks.

I start my lessons on Ancient Persia in the kitchen years before we read a single book. In part because we love Persian (Iranian) food deeply and have learned several recipes from my friend Teyebeh who is a profoundly talented cook. Most of not all of the recipes featured for this unit are recipes I got from my friend. These have been family favorites for years and it has been our delicious introduction to this unit. year late.

The ancient civilizations blocks for the Waldorf curriculum for year 5 is fairly extensive having continued from the previous year's exploration of Norse mythology, the civilizations of Akkad and Sumer and the study of the Buddha and the Jataka Tales. For year 5, the student will cover the ancient civilizations of India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and finally Greece. Greek history and ancient Roman history will also be covered in year 6.

Here you'll find nearly every resource we've used or plan to use while covering our Middle Ages unit. You can find details of the books and other resources we've used as well as the vendors I purchase material from on my website on the blog post that accompanies this video.

When we did our Norse Myths, I collected various books and put together my own block without the main lesson book. I sourced various books, but many ended up being similar and redundant. Only one book on Norse Myths is needed, while I ended up with four. One illustrated, one for upper elementary, one vintage and one curriculum based.

This is a different unit study for us because we don't typically do one that's this small and so specific, but years ago I bought a pirate book that came with pieces to assemble a pirate ship and recently my 10 year old assembled it and that was the spark that ignited this unit study.

Our exploration of Alaska came about because my sister, Samiah and her family, moved up to Alaska in the fall of 2020. Once there, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and after surgery, it was discovered that it was an aggressive and fast growing brain cancer.