Free Internet Sites to Help you Learn History

There are a lot of great websites for teaching history. I would begin with The History Channel first because they have a lot of resources, like videos you can watch and interviews with the people who made the documentaries, plus they also have games to play that help you memorize and understand things learned in history lessons.

Use the websites linked above to find lesson plans for history and history video games.

When i was in school, we jumped around through history, learning everything in absolutely no order.  I never really understood much of history, even though I had gotten good grades.  From what I remember, getting good grades in history was all about memorizing the dates and the names, and the general order of events.  I didn't remember any of it, though and when it came time to homescfhool my own kids, I decided we'd take a different approach.  I read The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and that influenced me to take a chronological approach, so that we'd have some context, and a better internal timeline.  i also decided that instead of focusing on memorizing dates and names, we'd take a more storybook approach, so that the lessons inherent in history aren't trivivialized into lists of random facts.

i have all daughters, so we do a lot of dress-up for history.  I don't know if boys would be the same, from what I've heard they really enjoy the war-play, but my girls just roll their eyes at all the war stuff.

We also prefer, instead of the History program written by Susan Wise Bauer of The Well-trained Mind, to use the History Odyssey program as an alternative Classical History Curriculum.  We felt that Susan's program was too repetitive and war-focused, and that the History Odyssey program included much more interesting activities, more art activities, more political discussions and a more well-rounded overall theme that we really appreciated.

I hope you enjoy these History resources, be sure to right click on the links before you click so that you can open them in a new tab or window so that you don't lose this article!  i'd love to hear some of your homeschooling hints and experiences.  Sign up to write at Bukisa so we can help eachother today.  Right now I'm wondering about how to set up our school room in this new house.  We havent' had a school room for ages.  If you write about that, please share the link with me.  Much appreciated.