Looking for a fresh new way to approach highschool history? Here’s an idea – family genealogy! Have your kids trace your family back as far as you want to go in history. Not only will you cover history, you’ll learn some fascinating information about your family that can be passed on to future generations! Who knows, you may even discover a few “black sheep”

As you begin to put your family tree together, use it as the springboard for history. For each member or family group make pages on your computer to document such things as:

• Wars that were going on, who was involved why it started, etc
• What was happening in the country
• Cultural, political, fashion trends
• What kinds of work people did
• Famous people from that era
• Anything else that’s important or interesting to your teen

Not required, but a wonderful, wonderful resource is a book entitled Unpuzzling Your Past: a Basic Guide to Genealogy by Emily Anne Croom. Inside this treasure you will find the road map to researching everything you want to know about your family’s history. This book is not only loaded with resources for research, but also includes chapters like:

• Charting Your Course
• How to Begin
• What’s in a Name?
• Hand-Me-Down Traditions
• History as the Family Lived It
• What Were They Like
• Many more

There are many, many free online resources as well! To get you started, here’s just a few:

• Misbach Enterprises offers a number of variations of free downloadable family tree charts
• Free Family Tree Chart also offers a chart for up to four generations
• Jelly Jar offers family tree charts plus forms and genealogy templates
• Family Tree Magazine offers MANY charts & worksheets that would be invaluable in your family tree quest
• Year by Year is a website where you can find out all kinds of interesting things that happened in a year covering the years 1990-2007. Also provided is a decade-by-decade section, complete with quiz.
• What Happened the Year You were Born? Is another fun site giving information year-by year covering 1920-2007. Fun to watch videos are also included.

Software can be a huge help, with the researching, collecting and organizing of information. Here’s a couple of highly recommended programs:
Legacy Family Tree – one of the top rated programs
Family Tree Maker
Roots Magic

Your highschooler can really have some history fun with this and don’t be surprised if the whole family ends up involved!

Be sure to make note in the comments section of any good resources you come across so that others can use them.

Sue

Tweet This Post  Stumble This Post 

Related posts

• Teaching Teens Real Life Money Skills: What We’re Doing (2)
• Welcome to the Real World, Son (0)
• Remembering Memorial Day (0)
• Is Homeschooling Too Expensive in Today’s Economy? (2)
• Highschool Graduation Ideas for Homeschooled Graduates (0)
• What About Driver’s Ed? Recap (0)
• Teach Your Teens Real Life Money Skills (6)

 |  Email It  |  |  Subscribe to It!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 9:39 am and is filed under Home Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.