Our Current Study

I really ought to be cleaning my house right now, because we had a pretty good day of school yesterday - and whenever that is true, it is also true that my house becomes a disaster area. I keep trying to find a solution for this, and I haven't yet! In any case, I will put off the necessary clean-up until after I've posted a little.

We are one week (and two days) into our Civil War study, and in case you missed my Facebook post about this, it is one of my favorite time periods ever. When I was a girl I bought a set of Civil War paper dolls (from the SC State Museum - such fond memories of those homeschool field trips!), which survived well enough for me to bequeath them to Aimee, who plays with them now. We might even display them somewhere for the rest of our study. Anyway, around the same time, I also did extensive research at our local library in the hopes of writing my own Civil War story. A friend of mine (a boy, no less) who had moved to Missouri (Carrie, YOU know who I mean!) was working on it with me. We would develop characters and write parts of the story, which we passed back and forth via those old-fashioned things called letters. I abandoned the idea only after my dad pointed out that it wasn't just a story, but rather an epic - and THAT sounded just a hair too big a project. I wonder, though, if I have those stories tucked away somewhere. They were such great characters (if a trifle over-romantic, and probably smacking of Gone With the Wind).

My only point is that I really, really, love this time period and am so excited to be studying it with the kids! Conversely, I am dissapointed with the treatment The Story of the World gives it (other users please give me your opinion, by the way). I understand there's a great deal to cover in "Modern Times," but I wonder if Susan Wise Bauer, in attempting to cover a wider range of geography (Eastern as well as Western history) and to address a wider range of students all over the globe, has left us with a somewhat diluted version of modern history. I expected at least a good number of literature recommendations, as well as lots of activities to choose from in the activitiy book - but both areas were rather scanty, in my opinion. It's a good thing I had scoured both the Sonlight and the Veritas Press catalogs for literature ideas a couple months ago. It enabled me to develop our own timeline for studying this particular time period, to which we will devote 4 or 5 weeks (I intend to do the same when we hit the other major wars and significant events).

So we are taking the Civil War (or the War for Southern Independence, or the War to Supress Yankee Arrogance, or whatever you want to call it!) one year per week of study. Last week, therefore, upon tackling 1861, we studied the concept of state's rights, secession, Lincoln's inauguration, the attack on Fort Sumter, the Battle of Bull Run, and the blockade. I am trying to hit the major events and record them on a timeline I found the timeline information here. We're also keeping a list of the major battles, who won them, and the generals and/or heros who were highlighted in each.

Some books we're currently using, with many more coming, are: The Boys' War: Confederate and Union Soldiers Talk About the Civil War (a great overview of the War, filled with accounts from actual soldiers), and Across Five Aprils (a fictional story that does an excellent job of expressing the conflicting feelings and opinions of the common folk). There are more, which I will post about later, as we are getting ready to go to the State Museum with some friends to look at some SC Civil War history!