Study America Saturday

A great blogger friend Nicole at Journey to Excellence invited me to link up to Study America Saturday weeks ago.  And since I get so much useful info from it, how could I not???

Well, because I don't have anything super exciting to post about our studies right now...I don't know WHAT to post!!  We are really enjoying our American History study of the American Revolution, but really haven't done anything out of the ordinary yet that would be picture worthy!!  So what could I post about???

What I thought I would do is share a great tool with everyone who is studying American History.  That tool is Liberty's Kids.  If you haven't heard of this wonderful series, please go check it out here.  This show was on PBS for a while, but I don't think it is any longer.  Lucky for us and the wonder of You Tube, we have access to all of the episodes, or most of them any way. 

 

I love them for so many reasons but here are my top 5 for including them in our studies:

1.  

Last year we used something similar and sometimes my girls still ask to watch those episodes or will talk about them, so I know they were memorable.

2.  

My youngest is a very visual learner.  Although she does comprehend what we read and does lots  of reading on her own, I know that these help her tremendously.

3.

While reading lots of good books is very beneficial and definitely my preferred choice of instruction for history studies, sometimes I feel like my kids just don't get the most out of big events because they can't visualize what is going on and have nothing to pull from to help them understand how critical things like the Boston Tea Party or the Battle or Paul Revere's Ride were.  

These videos show them that in ways that I never could.

4. 

The videos are on YouTube and so are broken up into 2 ten minute episodes usually.  I love this because it doesn't take up all of our allotted time and also gives them a perfect cliff hanger for the next day.  I love when the video ends and they both just fall out begging to watch part 2!!!

5.

THEY ARE FREE!!!  I am all about free resources and this is a great one!!

I hope that you can find use for these episodes in your homeschool and enjoy them as much as we have.  You can go here and scroll down to read about each individual episode and then just type in "liberty kids episode # {whatever}" in the you tube search box and there you go!!!