Welcome to my homeschool blog, which offers insights into loving learning, loving your family, loving history, loving homeschooling, and enjoying your life! With your cup of coffee in hand, take a break to laugh with me, to have your heart refreshed, to be reminded of how cool your kids really are, and to consider the amazing adventure of being a homeschool mom. AND, if you are interested in the History Revealed curriculum, be sure to check out my Teaching Tips!

Teaching Tip 5—Different Tastes

Teaching Tip 5—Different Tastes

If you were only allowed one kind of taste in your cooking, which one would it be?

Categories of Taste

You’ve probably taught your kids about the four basic taste categories in food—sweet, sour, salt, and bitter.  (Note: There is a fifth and sixth category, too—umami and piquant— but kids may not understand these flavors as easily.)

If there were only one?

Now, with all those flavors floating through your mind, let me ask you a bizarre question:  What one flavor would you serve your kids day-in and day-out? Really, which ONE would you choose?

The reason for asking?  Since we know that all four of these tastes are needed to create varied and appetizing food, it’s easy to see how uncomfortable and restricting it would be to only use one taste category.  And, there is undoubtedly someone in your family who doesn’t like it.

It’s not a very pleasant thought, is it?

Different “tastes” in learning

Here’s the deal.  It’s the same for learning as it is for taste. Some prefer hands-on learning while others enjoy group activities, some love to imaginatively create while others thrive on discovering answers.

Just as we don’t say to the coffee lover, “No, no! This is not allowed!! You must only have things that are salty!!!”, so we should not say to a student who loves to talk or move or dramatize, “No, no!  This is not allowed!! You must only sit quietly and study the book!!!”

And, just like in cooking, when we use four different approaches, we provide our kids a varied and appetizing learning experience.

So, that’s what we did. As I described in Teaching Tip #4, in the History Revealed curriculum we use a four-week learning cycle—one week per learning style—in every chapter. This means that every student will have the opportunity to learn history in their own style AND from other approaches throughout each year’s curriculum.

In each Teacher’s Guide introduction, we talk about this four-week cycle—where each of your kids will have the opportunity to “taste” each of these different approaches. The following is a brief description.

4 Different Approaches

Week #1 will appeal greatly to the students who love the “people perspective.”  It includes listening to whirlwind audio recordings, reading the unit’s article, Scriptures, and other history materials, interacting briefly with the new information through one of 8 activities, and discussing with you what they are learning.

Week #2 is designed to capture the interest of students who love knowing the facts. We invite students to choose an interesting topic to explore, see the chronology through a timeline, and learn new vocabulary. Since each one selects what they would enjoy learning more about something in this the historic time period—and how to share what has been learned—there is great self-motivation!

Week #3 allows students that love hands-on learning opportunities to thrive. From making maps and crafting art projects to doing science experiments and cooking food, students will be able to learn about the culture and era. This week also includes exposure to great art, architecture, and music.

Week #4 gives the idea-loving students a platform and an audience for creative expression.  The possibilities include creative writing, journalism, poetry, short stories, political cartooning, posters, illustrating, sculpting, skits, puppetry, music performance, role playing, pantomime, dance, conceptual design, and more. Each student has the opportunity to be creatively involved as deeply or as casually as their interests take them.

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