Civil Rights on the Big Basement Timeline

Although, as I mentioned before, we're not going into many explicit details of the Civil Rights struggle in America in our study of Martin Luther King, Jr., the kids are familiar with several key dates now. 

Instead of memorizing them, one morning I asked the big kid to comb through our many reference materials and collate several such dates; she and her sister then helped me search Google Images for appropriate imagery. The kids divided the images, dictated a caption for each, then wrote the caption with the image. They cut everything out, grabbed our big jar of sparkly Mod Podge and a foam brush, and headed downstairs with me, where I helped them place each date in its correct spot on our big basement timeline and they glued them to the wall.

So that's reading and writing, research skills, US history, and art--not bad for a single day of homeschooling, and we definitely got some math in, too!

For the events that the big kid picked out, let's see...we've got King's birth and death, of course, but also the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Gandhi, George Wallace (I wasn't thrilled about including him, because I didn't want to have to see him every time I walk downstairs, and I flat-out refused to permit the kids to include images of segregation--I told them that I just didn't want to see pictures of people acting ugly on our wall), and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

I am growing ever unhappier with the lack of foresight that I showed when laying out our basement timeline--the amount of room that I allocated for modern history is critically tight. I have long harbored dreams of moving to some little hobby farm or other outside of town--let the need for a much more spacious wall timeline be added to my list of reasons to move (along with a sunny yard to garden, a creek, space for a flock of chickens and two dwarf goats, and a second story to the house).

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!