History Lesson

As some of you know, the core of our schooling this year is our history program. We absolutely LOVE Mystery of History. And with the help of another curriculum Illuminations I am able to have our reading and writing, etc. center around what we are learning in history. It is a chronological history, taking in biblical and secular at the same time. What a marvelous tool it has been to help the children grasp a biblical worldview. Now when they read in the scripture of the Philistines, or Tyre, they have a cultural education of where those pagan nations were coming from. When they learn of the Israelites going after the false gods, they have more details to make the Scripture come alive. Why the prophets used certain phrases or terms might be because of the local culture, etc. Why was Rome such a world power by the time of Jesus' birth etc? History is His Story, so all must center around the work of the Lord in the lives of His people.

I thought that I would from time to time give you an update on what we are learning in our history program. I will title these posts "History Lessons". If you are not interested, you can just skip the posts, but if you are like me, you might realize that history is a lot more exciting than you thought it was as a child. :) Did you know that Elisha, the prophet Joel and Homer lived around the same time?

As you know from the "Olympic Night" posts, We just were studying the beginning of the Olympics as the Greeks would have originally had them. Did you know that was around the time of Jonah? Less than 10 years after Jonah was in the belly of the fish we now have the beginning of the Roman City. So this week we will be focusing on how Rome first built their city. Remember the Roman City and the Roman Empire are two different things. At first they were just a city only in part of Italy. As time went on, the Romans actually created the empire. Did you know that the first Romans were Latins and named their new settlement "Roma"? The children and I discussed different latin words that we recognize in our own language. So today we are learning about how they built a roman city. It really is quite fascinating to see how our modern towns are patterned after the early roman cities. Our main streets, blocks and grid are very much the same. Of course we do not have great walls around our cities nowadays as they did then.

As I am typing right now, my children are watching a video called Roman City by David Macaulay. It is giving them alot of details of how a roman city was built. I don't know about you, but I get excited about learning and passing on these things to my children...I sure hope that enthusiasm can carry over into their own passion for learning.

So there you have your first "History Lesson"!