Fun history for 8th grade

[Calizzy]

Well, we started SOTW in 1st grade and for a variety of reasons are just finishing in 7th 🤣. I figured we'd do the 4 year cycle again for high school, so that leaves next year (8th grade) as a 1 off. I'd love to do some fun in depth study, but I don't really want to put it together myself. Dd wants to do history of jazz, but I'm not sure how to pull that all together. Any other pre-made history 1 offs?

[domestic_engineer]

We, too, took 1-7th to get through the 4 cycles. 😆

ProfessorCarol.com has Discovering Music and other musical history classes. 
 

Other non-music based ideas that I had:

• You could pick and choose books from the Oxford University Press’s Ancient World Series if you wanted to start in on cycle 1.
• history of the country of your ancestors
• church history
• history of science 
• ETA: cultures of the world
   

Edited January 3, 2021 by domestic_engineer

[kristin0713]

Geography and Cultures -- I am using Guest Hollow with my DD for 9th, but it could be adapted for 8th. I added a Universal Yums subscription for fun.  There are other programs for this kind of study too. 

History of Science 

Music History would be really fun!  You could cycle through the time periods and major composers and also study the country and cultures of each.  And add cultural music studies aside from the major composers.    

[Lori D.]

We did a year off from history in the late middle school years and instead made our own World Cultures/Geography and Comparative Religions. It was fantastic! And turned out to be fabulous prep for then studying history in high school -- understanding the cultural and religious backgrounds, as well as the physical landscape of geographic areas, made it so much easier to understand *why* nations and political leaders made the choices they did, which created history. 😄 

[Lori D.]

On 1/2/2021 at 7:50 PM, Calizzy said:

Dd wants to do history of jazz, but I'm not sure how to pull that all together. Any other pre-made history 1 offs?

That would be super cool -- maybe that could be her Fine Arts course, rather than Social Studies?? Or -- combine and study U.S. Black history of the late 1800s through the first half of the 20th century, to get the historical and cultural aspects (social studies) that influenced the development of jazz music (fine arts study)?

Some resources:
- in doing-it-yourself, this webpage has a great outline of the types of topics to cover for a Jazz History/Appreciation course
- Teaching Company: Great Courses: Elements of Jazz, From Cakewalks to Fusion -- 8 45-minute lectures (DVD course; or, cassette)
- Fun Music Company: Teaching Jazz and Blues History -- middle school level; 14 lessons
- book: The History of Jazz (Gioia) -- looks like a new, updated edition is coming out this March
- book: Why Jazz Happened (Myers)
- book: Jazz: Introduction to History and Legends Behind America's Music (Blumenthal) 
- "Jazz in America" -- gr. 8; lesson plans for 8 lessons -- <-- my link is to #1; just click on the numbers at the top of the page by the words "lesson plan" to get the remaining lessons. Here is the overview pdf.

Edited January 5, 2021 by Lori D.

[goldenecho]

Here's a few that combine history and science, which might be a fun alternate history idea....

These are full curriculums and you could do one year of them (not the whole thing).  

The Story of Science

History of Science Series (Christian perspective) - I'm pretty sure you can start with

Science of Ancient Egypt

Experimenting With the Vikings (FREE resource)

[Calizzy]

On 1/3/2021 at 11:58 AM, Lori D. said:

That would be super cool -- maybe that could be her Fine Arts course, rather than Social Studies?? Or -- combine and study U.S. Black history of the late 1800s through the first half of the 20th century, to get the historical and cultural aspects (social studies) that influenced the development of jazz music (fine arts study)?

Some resources:
- in doing-it-yourself, this webpage has a great outline of the types of topics to cover for a Jazz History/Appreciation course
- Teaching Company: Great Courses: Elements of Jazz, From Cakewalks to Fusion -- 8 45-minute lectures (DVD course; or, cassette)
- Fun Music Company: Teaching Jazz and Blues History -- middle school level; 14 lessons
- book: The History of Jazz (Gioia) -- looks like a new, updated edition is coming out this March
- book: Why Jazz Happened (Myers)
- book: Jazz: Introduction to History and Legends Behind America's Music (Blumenthal) 
- "Jazz in America" -- gr. 8; lesson plans for 8 lessons -- the link is to #1; just click on the numbers at the top of the page by the words "lesson plan" to get the remaining lessons. Here is the overview pdf.

Wow, this is really helpful. Thank you!

[Calizzy]

On 1/3/2021 at 8:23 AM, domestic_engineer said:

We, too, took 1-7th to get through the 4 cycles. 😆

ProfessorCarol.com has Discovering Music and other musical history classes. 
 

Other non-music based ideas that I had:

• You could pick and choose books from the Oxford University Press’s Ancient World Series if you wanted to start in on cycle 1.
• history of the country of your ancestors
• church history
• history of science 
• ETA: cultures of the world
   

I would love to do an Asian or Russian history study since these are often missed in more Western based curriculum. Does anyone know of one?

[domestic_engineer]

33 minutes ago, Calizzy said:

I would love to do an Asian or Russian history study since these are often missed in more Western based curriculum. Does anyone know of one?

Russian History - No personal experience, but Professor Carol offers a course

Asian -

• Farrar's GPS curriculum has an Asian unit
• Oxford University Press has an Ancient China book and Ancient SE Asia book (Each textbook has a corresponding teacher manual and a student workbook.)
• Great Courses has some courses, but I would not classify these as fun history by themselves

...BUT if you thought getting through a cycle was tough in one year, studying Chinese History could have you covering 5000 years of history in one school year.  (Just sayin' .... from a BTDT perspective that I didn't have until I was committed to the plan and knee deep in planning.)  😛

[Lori D.]

11 hours ago, Calizzy said:

I would love to do an Asian or Russian history study since these are often missed in more Western based curriculum. Does anyone know of one?

We made our own World Cultures/Geography & Comparative Religions study.

We focused on Eastern hemisphere nations and areas of the world for that very reason you list above. Over 80% of the world's population lives there, yet throughout the school years in the U.S. and Europe, you get a Western Hemisphere / Western Cultures focus. Even in high school, what with the typically required Social Studies credits being 1 credit of U.S. History credit, just 1 credit of World History and/or Geography, and 0.5 credit each of Economics and Government. So we wanted to be sure to at least touch on vast areas of the world and the people groups that are usually skipped over...

10 hours ago, domestic_engineer said:

... studying Chinese History could have you covering 5000 years of history in one school year..... 

This is what happened for us -- we were trying to cover East Asia, India, Middle East, and Africa in one year and could only manage a very general "fly-by". We managed to spend a bit of time on 18 countries, and took just a very brief look at another 2 dozen or so. It was still WAY worth it though, as you do automatically get some history into the mix as you study culture and religion of an area.

[EKS]

When he was in eighth grade, my older son and I did a geography course where we studied landforms, weather and climate, cycles in the biosphere, population and migration, cultural geography, language and religion, the human food supply, resources and environmental protection, cities and urbanization, political geography, economic growth, and globalization.  Instead of comprehension questions, we discussed.  Instead of tests, for each unit he did a paper or a project.  For example, for the unit on language and religion, he interviewed his grandmother, who grew up in a Yiddish speaking household.  For the unit on the human food supply, he wrote a paper on genetically modified crops.  And for the unit on cities and urbanization, he created a video about suburbia.  In addition to reading the textbook (Bergman and Renwick, and I don't recommend it), we read the books Longitude (Sobel), Salt (Kurlansky), Fast Food Nation (Schlosser), Material World (Menzel, Mann, and Kennedy), and Hungry Planet (Menzel).   We also watched several documentaries.  It was a good year.

[2_girls_mommy]

For me, that would be a great time to do state history and government.  It would be a perfect year to go really in depth.  Then when you get to needing it for a high school credit, you have really done it in full, and just need to refresh a little for that credit, which is nice when high school can be so intense.  

But for a cool, something different, if your child is into theater or costuming or fashion, we just did a year (really more like a year and a half!) of the history of fashion.  We did start with a premade, amazing unit study that covered the history of fashion, fine arts, We found it on Schoolhouseteachers dot com, and it is one of the best courses we have found on that site.  It was designed to be an 11 week half credit, but we paired it with history, with a funschooling journal, with reading an additiional text (one suggested in the course for high schoolers wanting English credits with the course...) and a final year long project, plus we watched a video per decade of films to see the fashions and to experience some classic movies or lit made into movies along the way.  It made for a great year.  I added in a funschool fashion history journal.  I believe there may be some funschooling dance journals that might help guide you through designing your own jazz history course.  We could have used just the funschooling journal, but the predesigned unit study made a lot of the research into what books and projects to do much easier, plus included worksheets and vocabulary and all of that, even some Word tutorials to get the student working in Word a bit more.  That was good for this particular student who doesn't teach herself those functions on her own like my other did 

[cintinative]

There is a fantastic Ken Burns documentary on the history of Jazz. I don't know if LoriD. mentioned it or not. It's worth checking out.

[Lori D.]

1 hour ago, cintinative said:

There is a fantastic Ken Burns documentary on the history of Jazz. I don't know if LoriD. mentioned it or not. It's worth checking out.

Great addition! I actually was thinking of that one, but forgot to add it, so thanks for adding that one!

Ken Burns: Jazz

[cintinative]

17 minutes ago, Lori D. said:

Great addition! I actually was thinking of that one, but forgot to add it, so thanks for adding that one!

Ken Burns: Jazz

It's also free right now on Amazon prime. I am not sure when the OP is running the class, but for anyone else listening in.  😃  https://www.amazon.com/Jazz/dp/B002P3OCUE

 

Edited January 9, 2021 by cintinative

[Margaret D. Brown]

5 minutes ago, Cama1992 said:

Wow, thank you for such awesome recommendations! I am now also preparing interactive activities for my class. Recently I asked them to write essays on culture and many of them wrote about jazz music in their essay examples. Perhaps this is the because of the Christmas holidays?) That is why I am preparing a lesson for a deeper study of culture in general, and jazz music as well. But I want the students to be really interested in learning this. I think your recommendations will help me a lot!

Wow! They must be very advanced children or music lovers)) In my class, for some reason, the children do not like jazz music very much. What class are you teaching?)