Black History Month

2023-24 School Year–Week Twenty

Ladybug worked with composite functions in pre-calculus. She read about vitamins and minerals in health (and we got to discuss one of my favorite topics…scurvy!). In history, she read about the last of the Crusades…finally! She is almost done with The Divine Comedy. In physics, she started a chapter on periodic motion by learning about Hooke’s Law and springs. She read about the ascetic movement in the early church in religion.

Chickadee continued to work with measurements in math, and learned how to convert from temperatures in degrees Celsius to degrees Fahrenheit. She finished the extended chapter on the nervous system in science. In grammar, she learned about constructing sentences and avoiding run-on sentences. She met Smaug in The Hobbit. In history she read about the Bubonic Plague (I personally think it’s still too soon!).

Today we went to the Missouri History Museum for the February History Exploration Day, which focused on Black contributions to health and medicine in St. Louis (and the wider world). Ladybug and Chickadee got to make their own hand sanitizer, we got to handle some actual surgical tools, they made herb sachets, and we learned about a lot of interesting people we were unfamiliar with. While we were out, we also swung by the Science Center to see the TARDIS.

Next week isn’t just the middle of February…it’s also the beginning of Lent. I can only hope that it goes by quickly!

What We’re Reading–Black History Month

I have a confession to make…I’ve never really done anything for Black History Month, or even black history, in school. Sure, we’ve learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, and we’ve studied slavery and Civil Rights in relation to American History, but it was more of a blip than an in-depth study. After we learned about the Negro Leagues last year, and following local events here in St. Louis, I realized that I was doing my children and history a disservice. So I resolved that this February, we would add black studies to our history lessons every week. I looked for books from familiar series (If You Lived, Hero of the Faith, and Childhood of Famous Americans, for example), biographies and autobiographies, and award winners in the Newbery and Coretta Scott King categories. The reading list I came up with starts at the beginning of America as a country, and goes through the Civil Rights Movement. It includes books for early elementary through adult reading levels. Of course it doesn’t cover everything (we only have a month!), but I think it’s fairly comprehensive, and will give us a better understanding of black history in America