Home schooling children should be a daily adventure. It has been quite an adventure, to say the least, with our energetic boys, who are now 14, 16 and 19 years of age. When they were little, it was usually pretty easy to keep their attention and make learning fun. Subjects like science, history, music and art can be taught in fun ways.

Take history, for example. We mostly have taught history using a unit study approach. We study different periods of history in a chronological order. One of our favorite periods of history that we covered was the medieval period. The boys were young, and we were doing this particular study with a small group of friends.

We covered topics like life during the medieval time, castles, knights, medieval weaponry, and many other topics. To end the study, we put on a medieval feast, complete with period costumes (which we put together ourselves) and foods of the time period.

It was a lot of fun. We had the king and queen, knights, princesses, and of course, the jester. After the interesting, but tasty meal, we enjoyed entertainment from the jester and a jousting tournament. We had an awesome time, and the children seem to remember more from the hands-on learning. One resource that was very helpful was KONOS curriculum.

Another period study that was fun to teach and to learn was ancient civilizations. We started with the old testament of the Bible, learning all about creation and early civilizations. We used Diana Waring's Ancient Civilizations & The Bible for this part of the study.

When we moved on to the study of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, we used a lot of good literature for the boys to read on their own and to read aloud together. We found many books at the library for this study, especially for Ancient Egypt. Some had useful information, while some were fun and entertaining, like Mrs. Frizzle's Adventures -- Ancient Egypt, and You Wouldn't Want to be an Egyptian Mummy!.

Greenleaf Press and Beautiful Feet Books are two good resources for teaching history with literature. Using good literature is so much more enjoyable than dry text books. We have never really used text books to teach history, not even during the high school grades.

We still read real books, like historical fiction, for all our history studies. The boys usually read a history related book on their own, and we also read history related books together. Sometimes the book may be historical fiction, but sometimes it is a good biography. We love biographies, and we learn so much from them. Our favorites are written by Janet & Geoff Benge and are published by YWAM Publishing. I highly recommend these for all ages.

Teaching our children is very rewarding and also fun. We can keep it this way by being creative with the resources that are available to us. Subjects like history, science, art, music, and others can be very fun, while also being educational. Be creative, and learn with your children.