Discovering Texas is lots of fun in a group setting, whether you get a few families together for unit study days or teach in a co-op like Carla Cooper. Bulk discounts let her students place an order easily at a big savings.
Carla’s co-op group meets each Friday for 9 months, September through May, so she plans to double up on the last two volumes.
Before the first class of the month, each student receives a reading guide Carla finds in the Teacher Tips section. She saves it to her desktop and creates a header to remind students to write their names on their papers, and a footer reads “My project for this month will be ___________________.” When the students bring their completed guides to class, Carla knows they have read the material at home and are ready to discuss the new volume.
In class the first Friday, they talk about the major events of that period of history. Carla uses the Thinking More questions to help the students see why history matters. A few visual aids keep the discussions varied and lively. For example, when they studied Indian cultures, Carla made pemmican for the children to taste while they talked. A costumed docent from one of their town’s historic homes came to talk to the students for the Civil War volume, and one of the students had a grandfather who worked cattle. Carla plans to see if he’ll be their guest speaker for the industrialization unit on Ranches, Cotton, and Oil.
The second Friday of the month is reserved for group activities. Sometimes Carla reads aloud from one of the suggested books, or she might choose one of the Doing More activities that no student has selected. When they studied the Civil War, she had the students put their shoes on the wrong feet and march around the campus to see how it might have felt to march across several states in the days when left and right shoes were exactly the same. For the Statehood and Constitution volume, she divided the class into a House and a Senate. They held a mock Congress so the students could see how a bill becomes law. (That week things got a little loud!)
It’s a big class, so Carla decides they will need two class days at the end of the month to show and tell about their projects. Everyone loves the show-and-tell days, and the students learn so much from each other’s projects and book reports. Occasionally someone will ask to do a project that’s not listed in the curriculum, and that’s okay too. Carla’s glad they’re making the study their own.
During years when the Texas Congress is in session, the Texas Home School Coalition hosts Capitol Days. Carla’s students, with their parents and siblings, caravan to Austin. The folks at Discover Texas helped them find a candle maker who produces Texas scents: bluebonnet, iced tea, cotton, yellow rose, and leather. The students earned enough from their fundraiser to cover their entry to the Bob Bullock Story of Texas Museum while they’re there. On other years, they pair their field trip to the Bob Bullock Museum with a trip to Inner Space Cavern just up the road. Either way, it’s a grand finale to their year of discovery!
On the last day of class, Carla prints a Certificate of Completion for each student and sends them home with a Family Tree Chart (a local office supply store made copies from the PDF in the program) so that over the summer they can learn their own unique place in Texas history!