Family Tree

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is that the girls have the opportunity to explore whatever they want.

Think about it. Think about having the opportunity to explore anything. Would you learn vegan baking? Car maintenance? Yoga? Embroidery?

Perhaps, like my daughter, you'd get really, really good at Zoo Tycoon. Perhaps, also like her, you'd read every single Nancy Drew novel ever printed. Perhaps you and she could spend some time together studying another of her interests...

human evolution.

I did predict this somewhat--years ago I drew a learning map trying to discover where Willow's passion for dinosaurs would take her, although I didn't know about Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs then, either--but I'm confident that it, along with Nancy Drew and zoo engineering/animal husbandry, does not appear on many standard first-grade curriculums.

But it's apparently what first-graders do in our homeschool. We've had human evolution books, human evolution documentaries, human evolution web sites, and we spent a morning last week putting human evolution on our big basement timeline:

All the info comes from the Smithsonian web site, printed in color, cut out by me and the Sydmeister, and glued straight onto our wall:
 
 And then, of course, the Very Important Signpost:

If you'd like to add human evolution to your first-grade curriculum, here are some of our favorite resources...so far:

Books



Film

• Ape to Man from the History Channel
• Becoming Human from Nova
• The Human Family Tree from National Geographic
• Walking with Cavemen from the BBC

Web Site

• Interactive Human Evolution Timeline from the Smithsonian

And if I ever found a hundred dollars lying on the street, I'd get Willow's mitochondrial DNA tested to determine the migration paths that our ancestors took.