driver comes through her neighborhood — she sees the bus go by her house each day while she munches her Marshmallow Wheetos.
If you want to cover community helpers in the first and second grade, be my guest. It certainly won’t hurt your children, although they may be bored out of their minds. You could spend the time talking about your town or city, state, and region of the country instead. Take the children to look at the nearest river. If they’ve never seen a river up close before, you’re sure to get a wow reaction when they see how big it is. And a good river view gives them a basis for understanding those squiggly lines on the globe.
Social studies generally begin with the local and move out; so you start with the interesting facts about your hometown and then, as your students progress, teach about your state, your country, your world. When you throw the history aspect of social studies into the mix, you also move through time, teaching from now to the past or from the past forward. But don’t worry — you have 12 or so years to cover all this stuff, and several publishers create curriculum to make the task easier.
Early elementary homeschoolers often take advantage of community field trips to avoid the community helper text and still introduce their children to the world. Most local homeschool support groups schedule trips such as this every year for the younger elementary students. Either join an organized field trip through a support group or organize your own. Consider asking another family or two to join you on your expedition. It adds to the fun and maximizes the company official’s time.
If you decide to do your own field trip, call the establishment well ahead of time to find out the organization’s rules for field trips. Some of these options are extremely popular, and you may find yourself in for a several week wait. Identify yourself as a homeschooler, and if you’re available at virtually any time, be sure to tell the company official so. They appreciate it when you bend your schedule to fit theirs — especially when you visit a building whose main occupation is something other than providing field trips to students! With that in mind, you may want to
Drop by the main post office. If you send packages and letters even on a semi-regular basis, you can probably explain what happens inside a post office from your own experience. But some branches offer tours. Call your local post office for details.
Pick apples or pumpkins. If you happen to live within driving distance of an apple orchard or pumpkin patch, these businesses usually welcome small batches of homeschoolers, especially when compared to the huge busloads they usually receive. Although such a field trip also counts as science — because the fruit grows — the facility often includes some information about what happens to the fruit after picking. This gives your child a frame of reference for that apple cider he sees on the store shelves.
Visit a local bakery. Small bakeries often give tours — as well as fresh, yummy samples.
Visit the fire station. Firefighters are used to giving tours to groups of small children, and they stress safety at the same time that they show the kids around their huge fire trucks.
Determine the country’s longitude and latitude.
Find out about its people. Who are they? What do they do for a living?
List or describe the country’s major produce or production — from corn to cars, almost every country produces something.
Name and give examples of the language or languages spoken by the population.
Name its nearest oceans and outstanding topography (mountains, valleys, and such).
Locate its continent.
This, in essence, is social studies — learning about the world and its people. A nice portfolio or report on each country tracks your progress and proves to anyone who may be interested that you are actually covering social studies in a logical manner.
Several publishers produce social study guides, both in unit-study form (which is basically what is outlined in the preceding section) and in grade-level-textbook form, should you decide to use them. For more information on unit studies, see Chapter 15.
Firing Up the Bunson Burner
Science is everywhere. Especially when you’re four feet tall. Gazing at the clouds counts as science, particularly if some helpful adult (that would be you) identifies them by type for your child. Watching a favorite plant grow and flower is science. It’s also science when you forget to water it and the plant dies — a way of redeeming all those plants I kill.
Although you can purchase elementary science books for your child as she passes through each grade level, you may want to concentrate on the real world and its offerings for the first six years or so.
Go outside and explore nature.
Conduct experiments with household items. I don’t know how many times we’ve done the old baking soda-and-vinegar-volcano project, but it’s still a family favorite.
Create a kite from a sheet of printer paper and fly it. You learn much about wind this way.
Find a plastic can or honest-to-goodness rain gauge and set it outside to measure the rainfall. If you remember to measure and then empty it after each good rain, you get a good idea of the precipitation in your area.
Hang an all-weather thermometer outside and graph each day’s temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
Try raising an ant farm, brine shrimp, or mice. This, of course, depends much on your general pet tolerance — your children will survive if they only see ants outdoors.
