Great Indus River Civilization site!

I found this great site with photos, videos, games and info for kids about the Indus River Valley Civilization!
BBC Indus Valley

If you click on any of the sections, you can then scoll down to play the Professor Indus Game.
:)
Enjoy!

A Great Start!

Yesterday at History Club we got off to a great start!  We discussed what History and Geography are.  We learned the five themes of geography.  (Ask your child what MR.LIP stands for)  We looked at historical atlases and we started our timelines.
On their timelines we labeled 2.5 million BC-8,000 BC the Paleolithic Age (the younger students labeled theirs Old Stone Age), 8,000BC-3.000 BC the Neolithic (New Stone Age), and the Bronze Age from 3,000BC.  We noted on our timelines that around 8,000 BC agriculture began and around 3,000 BC people began to use writing.  We'll get more into that next time!
We looked at some examples of cave art from Chauvet Cave in France and recreated some of our own.  If you'd like to look at the gallery of photos from that particular site, here it is:
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/chauvet_cave_art.php

We also briefly discussed the transition from pictures to alphabetic writing, and I sent home a cuneiform alphabet that the students can play around with if they'd like.

I assigned each student a person to find out something about and report back to us as we get to them in class, some at the next mtg and some two mtgs from now.  This isn't a report or project, just find out some thing about this person to tell the class about so we understand why this person is important to us in learning history.  It could be one sentence, or more if they are interested in telling more.
Olivia - Hammurabi
Celee - Ramses II
Bella - Abraham
Lyla - Sargon
Gwyn - Nebuchadnezzar
Evan - Otzi the Iceman
Michael - Hatshepsut
Lydia - Nefertiti


For our health lesson, I talked with the students about September being Emergency Preparedness Month.  We discussed having an emergency plan in case of a fire in our homes.  I based the information on the Boy Scout Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge.  They should have all made it home with a sheet with information about fire emergency plans.  I also told the students about the Carroll County Emergency Preparedness EXPO at the AG center Sept 25 10-2pm.  If anyone is interested in going, let me know.  Here's a promo video about it:

Emergency Preparedness EXPO video

Link to textbook resources

The Journey Across Time textbook has a website with chapter overviews, interactive maps, vocabulary cards, etc.  There are some puzzles and games as well.  :)

http://glencoe.mheducation.com/sites/0078241332/student_view0/unit1/chapter1/index.html

History Club Begins Again!

I'm excited to start a new school year and a new slice of history!  This year we will be focusing on Eastern Civilizations from pre-history to Medieval times. I will be utilizing this Glencoe textbook:

We will loosely follow this textbook.  If you would like to use it for reading outside of class, just let me know and you can borrow it in between lessons.  It is a middle school textbook, and so it geared toward that level of reading, but many of the shorter articles are just cool to read for our younger students as well!
We will have a number of different grades, learning styles, and interest levels present at our History Club Meetings this year. (as usual)  With that said, I encourage each student to keep a three-ring binder to put handouts and project instructions in.  We will be maintaining a timeline that would be useful to have in the binder as well.  For some lessons we will be creating lap-book type inserts that can also be kept in the binder.
I will be using this blog site to keep us all on the same page as to the subject area covered at each class and any extra assignments that may be worked on outside of meetings.  I will also try to keep a running list of videos and books that relate to our lessons for added interest.
 Parents and students feel free to post comments or share things you learn along the way!  It's a lot more interesting to take ownership over our learning than to passively absorb info every other week.

*A note on Health lessons:  We had discussed having the students take turns sharing a health topic with the class at the beginning of each History lesson.  This would entail the student to read, watch, or in some way learn about a health-related topic, present a short synopsis of what they learned (5 min) and hand out some type of info sheet to each of the other students to keep.  Each student would only have to do the work once every few months, but they will all be getting a short health lesson twice a month.  I will do an example lesson at our first History Club so that everyone will have something to go on.