Articles > Teaching History in a Catholic Homeschool, Part Two

Teaching History in a Catholic Homeschool, Part Two

(from a talk originally presented by Sonya Romens in 1999)

The next school year we started on Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament. I don’t remember that we did very much with it that year, but it was a start. I do remember that we read Old Testament stories from Fr. Lovasik's New Catholic Children’s Picture Bible and the kids drew pictures of each story on shelf paper to make a timeline scroll. They made a pyramid out of sugar cubes and we watched a National Geographic movie about Egypt from the library. I was pregnant that year and was too sick for most of the year to do much with the children, plus I was running a daycare in my home, so my grand homeschool plans had to be scaled back quite a bit. But the kids were young and we spent a lot of our time just reading out loud together.

The next year we started very slowly on Ancient Greece. We watched some movies from the library again, National Geographic and travel movies of Greece and some corny Hollywood productions which the children loved, like Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad the Sailor. The movies weren’t great history, but they did capture the children’s imagination and they spent a lot of time playing and acting out the stories from the movies. We also read D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. There are certain books in our family that get “read-to-death” and that is definitely one of them! We still have it; it’s been taped back together many times, but it’s still a favorite, especially for the boys. Reading the myths lead into a lot of discussions about similarities that the children noticed between the Greek myths and the Genesis stories in the Bible. We compared the Greeks’ creation story with the Bible’s and we were fascinated to learn that the Greeks, as well as most other ancient pagan cultures, had a Flood story, and stories of a man-god who came from the sky and rose from the dead. This was a wonderful opportunity to explain to the children about how God gave the pagans hints of the Truth to prepare them for the coming of Christ.

It is so important for our children to understand the differences between Mythology and God’s Revelation. Especially now when you can go into just about any bookstores and find books on Christianity on the Mythology shelf next to New Age books. A lot of people these days think that our faith is just a myth and they use things like the similarities between Greek mythology and the stories in Genesis to try to prove that they’re all fiction.

During the time that we studied Greece I was still doing full-time daycare and we were getting ready to sell our house in Apple Valley and move. This kept us from progressing very quickly, so our one year study of Greece turned into two years. I wanted to get more detail into our history study so I bought the Famous Men of Greece book. I’ve heard some people say that their children find these books boring, but maybe because we had already read the myths and watched some movies and spent some time with Greece my children and I enjoyed it very much. I read each story out loud to the children and then we would talk about it. They’re wonderful biographies of people from history - full of adventure, heroism, human failings, personal and military victories and defeats. The stories from Ancient Greece and Rome have been read and studied for thousands of years and if they’re told properly they can capture the imaginations of children and teach them many character lessons. We made a timeline of Ancient Greece as we read about it and we also read an illustrated children’s version of The Odyssey that made a good introduction to Homer.

I’ve found as the children have gotten older that they are very willing to try reading Classic Literature because they have been exposed to the children's versions first and have a familiarity with them and memories of having fun reading them together.

We tried to find a decent video version of the Odyssey also, because we enjoy historical movies, but the recent Hollywood versions that we found weren’t good for children. (We do now own the CCC animated video version of the Odyssey which our younger children enjoy.)

It was around this time that I first was given a pre-production copy of Laura Berquist’s book, “Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum.” It didn’t have all the curriculum plans that it had when it was published, just her essays on classical education. What she had to say made a lot of sense to me, and since we had begun to study the Classics I started incorporating some of her ideas into our History study. I became interested in learning Greek and Latin together with the children and it made sense to try to correlate that with our history since we were already studying the Greeks. So I bought English From the Roots Up and we studied the Greek Root Words together and had a lot of fun with it. I made up worksheets to go along with it and we learned a lot. I’m sure I learned just as much or more than the kids did. The book has a lot of historical information to explain the origins of the word meanings and how they developed into the words we use today. I could see the lights turning on in the children’s eyes as they discovered that there are reasons why certain things have their names, that tele-phone means “sound from far away” and “geo-metry” means “ to measure the earth.” They were finding connections between the ancient Greeks and our own lives today!

The next year, after we had gotten settled into our home in Wisconsin, we finished up on Greece and began studying Ancient Rome - and learning Latin.  We began Latina Christiana which has the benefits of being a Catholic program, better organized, more interesting and is also correlated to Famous Men of Rome. So now our history and language studies were more organized and connected with each other. We read the stories from Famous Men of Rome out loud together and discussed them like with did with Famous Men of Greece. And we added the geography and review drill questions from Latina Christiana.

We also began incorporating a lot more outside reading - especially historical fiction. I bought a copy of Let the Authors Speak by Carolyn Hatcher, who is Catholic. It’s a list of “living books” in chronological order to go along with history studies. Everyone in our family loves to read and we needed lots more books to read. Let the Authors Speak helped me learn what books and authors to look for in the library and watch for at garage sales and used book stores. I had also discovered by this time, that I wasn’t good at the kind of activity-based unit-study teaching that I had planned to do. It was too dependent on my coming up with activities and projects for the kids and I’m just not that organized or creative. I like the idea of Literature-based unit studies better, and really that’s what we’d already been doing. It fit with our family’s life-style better than trying to do lots of projects. We are a family of readers so we began doing a lot more reading for history.

We found an original copy in our little local library of a children’s version of Virgil’s Aeneid that I read out loud to the children that winter. I tried to edit out some of the more violent parts, but the kids usually caught me at it and forced me to read them anyway - oooh, ick! But it gave us a chance to talk about the difference between pagan culture, where the individual had very little worth, and the changes that Christ’s teachings brought to the world. Can the pagans be judged by the same standards that we use now? Where did they get their ideals of justice and mercy? What was good about their culture, what was bad? How did the spread of the Roman Empire make it possible for the Gospel to be spread by the Apostles? We were making more connections.

During our study of Ancient Rome I went through my most difficult pregnancy and birth of our sixth child. I was in and out of the hospital a lot and our history studies were interrupted a lot so we ended up spending about 2 years instead of one studying Rome, just like we had with Greece.

When we finally came to the end of Latina Christiana and Famous Men of Rome and were ready to move on I realized that we had a problem. We were ready to head into the Middle Ages, but by then I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of using non-Catholic books as the core text to study what I now realized was a Catholic time period.  I decided to use a Catholic history textbook as a Core or Spine text then fill in with lots of living books as we had done with the Famous Men books. Our oldest started with the Story of the Church and the others read The Old World and America.

We also began using a new writing curriculum this year that works very well with any history program,  Writing: Structure and Style from the Institute for Excellence in Writing [IEW]. I had tried a lot of writing programs over the years and had been disappointed with them all until I found this one. It has fulfilled all my personal requirements. It's broken down into easy-to-follow, logical steps - it's very concrete. It teaches simple outlining and note-taking first, which is a key skill in mental organization and preparing a coherent written work. Then it progressively teaches the student to use their outlines to construct a well-written paper, one paragraph at a time. By having very specific goals to achieve it matches the mental process of writing - taking abstract ideas and making them into a concrete written work.

I had always thought that writing should be learned, not in isolation as a separate subject, but in the course of using it to do actual writing about topics that interest the child. IEW is designed to be incorporated with other school subjects, particularly history, science and literature. Our family mainly used it with our world history studies. Each child was assigned to a particular person or event from a history unit and wrote about it at his or her own level. The younger children practiced their writing skills by making "key word" outlines of paragraphs I had selected for them from their history texts and then orally narrated them to me or an older sibling. My older children wrote longer summaries from their outlines and learned the various writing "dress-ups" to add to their compositions to improve the style of their writing. The goal for each child is to gradually achieve writing independence, choosing the source texts for their writing and then composing a well-written essay, critique or narrative.

This was the first writing program that all my children enjoyed using, in fact I often heard them make comments such as, "This is really fun!" They viewed it almost as a game and I saw an immediate improvement in their writing abilities and in their willingness to write. We used it right along with our history program and the two subjects complimented each other beautifully.

Around this same time, as the children grew older I worked to broaden the types of reading that they were doing. We had read a lot of children’s literature and historical fiction but we hadn’t done as much non-fiction reading or much reading of adult versions of the classics. I began using an assignment sheet for each child to fill out for each history unit we did during the year to help them choose a variety of types of books. They each had to read first from a book that gave them a general overview of the time period we’re studying - usually that’s a textbook. Then they each had to choose a minimum of one non-fiction book to read, and they had to indicate whether it was a primary or secondary source . They also chose  at least one historical fiction book or a work of literature that was either written during the time period or written about the time. They also have to write down any encyclopedia articles or websites they used for their assigned research topic. 

Over time we have incorporated many elements into our study of history. Many of these ideas led to the writing of a curriculum that attempts to integrate several subject areas around the central core of history as we have done in our own homeschool over the years.  Our experiences gave birth to the Connecting with History program.  We hope that our ongoing journey will inspire and encourage you in your own adventure of discovery of the truth of history and the joy of the Catholic Faith.

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