My Chronological History of the World; Unit Study for Secular Homeschoolers

This is our first-official year homeschooling our first-born son, in that I have to notify the state, since he will be turning 7yrs this school-year. We've been doing just the three-R's before now, 'unofficially'; but this is the first year I'm to be held accountable to my home state of Maine for my son's education.

I'm ready for the challenge.

We'll continue with our three-R's. But this fall I'll be adding a combination unit-study of history and science. I thought it would be easier for both my children, and myself, to just start at the very beginning, with how the Earth came to exist, and how land masses formed, and how life came to exist and evolve into life as we know it today.

I didn't realize what an undertaking it was going to be when I made the decision.

I had thought I would put the whole entire planetary time-line on one squidoo lens; that was silly. There's just so much to cover, and there are a surprising amount of free resources on-line to pull a program together! Obviously nothing beats good books, both fictional and non-fiction, but to fully flesh out the unit-study, you need to find resources somewhere to create activities, and projects, to ensure that that information gets embedded in those little brains for a life-time. You need printables, worksheets, graphics, pictures, diagrams, timelines, charts, visual aids--aargh! It's a lot of work! And sifting through the innumerable christian-based materials out there can be tedious.

But I've taken all the "leg-work" out of it, and put all of the quality links related to the chronological history of the earth, and incorporated science into a unit-study that will carry you, and me, through at least the next four years. I'm so pleased with it! This is the first in the series, as I mentioned, there's just so much to cover, and so many quality links to utilize, that I've decided to chunk the units into time-periods. I hate to divide them into periods of time defined by civilizations, because this is not meant to be a study of man-kind, but more an investigation into the Earth.