First Report: History

So, part of New York's homeschool rules is filing reports about what is being covered. I figured that since I had to do all this work, I may as well share it here, so that interested parties can follow along with what she is doing. The full report is due next week, so I need to get busy!

Here is what she has covered in History to date--

We started US History at the beginning of the August, using Joy Hakim’s The Story of US, books 8-10. Book 8 begins with the Reconstruction, and she has been studying the end of the 19^th Century—Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and some of the major people, events, and things from that time: Carnegie, Rockefeller, the Statue of Liberty, Helen Keller, technological developments like the Otis elevator and the Flatiron Building, Presidents Johnson-Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan. By the end of the month, she had covered ten chapters of her textbook, worked through vocabulary, identifications, and discussion questions, and taken one exam.

From 9-12 August, we spent time in New York City, which allowed for some great hand-on activities. On our way down to NYC, we stopped at the Vanderbilt mansion in Hyde Park, so she could see Gilded Age architecture up close. We toured the house and walked through the formal gardens. In NYC, we also stopped at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, which is the former Carnegie Mansion. While we didn’t pay for admission, we were able to see the outside and the entry areas. We drove down to Battery Park to get a look at the Statue of Liberty—unfortunately, we couldn’t make the trip over this time.

In September and October, we continued moving through time, and, by the end of October, Phoebe will be well into World War One. Other topics covered included The Haymarket Riots, Great Fire of Chicago, Labor Struggles, Reformers (Mother Jones, Jane Addams, John Muir), the Muckrakers and the Growth of the Fourth Estate, the Rise of the Progressive Age, Theodore Roosevelt, the Spanish-American War, the Annexation of Hawai’i, Technological Developments (Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers), William Howard Taft, the sinking of the Lusitania, and Woodrow Wilson.

In addition to our regular History class, the week of 12 September, Phoebe started taking an online class called The Race to the Presidency, which focuses on the election process and the Constitution. She watched portions of the Democratic Convention, the first Presidential debate in its entirety, and clips of the second and third debates. We also watch CNN Student New regularly, and she watches the local news, CNN, and MSNBC to stay up on current history and world events—as well as more about the election. 

On election day, she came to the polls with us, and the night of the election, she stayed up to see at least some of the election results come in. And the next day, we watched Clinton's concession speech and began the conversation about how History will remember this moment.

We have started watching the first season of Downton Abbey to give her a visual sense of the early 20^th century. The first season ends with the start of WWI, and the war is a focus of the second season, so it will be an asset to her study of the war—even though the show is British. We also watched a 45-minute documentary about submarine warfare during the war and the feature film Flyboys. To round out her study of the First World War, she read the novel War Horse and will watch the film based on it.