One of my favorite things to do is search the internet for “what happened on this date.” Ben and I do this quite frequently. Sometimes it’s a complete bust, but other times it leads to some amazing discoveries (National Smores Day anyone?).
Imagine how excited we were to receive a one-year subscription to This Week in History, the brainchild of Rachel DeMille of A Thomas Jefferson Education. For just $10/month, you, too, can receive a weekly email chock full of information about events that happened during the week in history.
Now I don’t have to go searching for these fun little nuggets, I have it all, right there in my inbox.
This is not just a calendar with a few notable birthdays and event anniversaries. These are daily adventures across the curriculum (history, science, geography, math, language, art, music), great for entire family, including lesson plans — activities for writing or disccussion, printables, craft ideas, poems, videos, photos, and links to explore even more. It’s like having a mini unit study tied to current events and past events of historical significance every week! You can also view each week’s content on their website, and the content for each week is searchable by date, topic and key word. The entire year’s archive can be accessed by subscribers at any time.
View sample weeks.
While I love the spontaneous study that the weekly lessons provide, I think my favorite part is the search option. Ben had fun searching for what happened the week of his birthday (Thomas Edison made the first recording of the human voice, reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb and both Delaware and Mississippi became states, among other things). We also enjoyed searching for everything we could find about the Civil War and the state of Kentucky, since that’s what we’ve been studying this summer (we found a Kentucky state quiz, among other things!).
For a cost of $14.99 per month, This Week in History is a great deal for any homeschool. Use it as a springboard for spontaneous history or cultural studies, a way to just add interesting information to your day, or as a supplement to your usual curriculum. You could easily develop more complex unit studies around these topics! And since subscribers have full access to all of the archives, you can actually plan ahead to gather any resources you need for a full day of “learning along with Rachel.” The uses for this resource really are endless. It’s definitely going into my arsenal of “things Ben can do independently” for days when I need for him to do so. And since it’s a web-based service, we can easily take it with us on the road. In fact, I would not hesitate to use This Week in History as a primary curriculum source.
