Tips ‘N’ Tricks

This Friday’s Heart of the Matter meme is homeschooling tips and tricks.

Reading through some of the tips from other bloggers, I begin to realize how different we all are. I am definitely not the person to come to for scheduling and curriculum tips. We can’t even wake up at approximately the same time each day, much less start ’school’ at the crack of dawn. Reading some other homeschooler’s tips and their schedules from last week’s meme makes me feel like a slacker.

Anyway, here’s my tip: Desecrate an atlas

Buying an atlas to rip out all the pages has been one of my more inspired ideas. We bought a discounted (but still accurate) atlas and an oversized three ring scrapbooking binder. Each atlas page got ripped out (neatly) and put in a plastic sheet that was then placed in the binder. Every time we read a book, we find the atlas page where the story takes place, mark it, and add a page about the book, including  the place and historical period, into our customized atlas.

If a book goes into a lot of detail in one particular city, we print off a Google Map with the general area included, mark off as many landmarks as we can, and put it in our book in the most appropriate place.

We first tried this on a wall map, but found that places like England got lots of marks and became too squished. The ever-expanding atlas is much more functional, even though we can’t hang it on the wall.

Tags: homeschool, tips-and-tricks, atlas, literature, geography, history

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Homeschooling. 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.