The Magic Tree House on Our Timeline: Updated August 2022

Back in 2010, I wrote this post about how my little kids and I used the Magic Tree House series as part of a history study by pasting thumbnail images of the books onto a huge timeline mural that we made in our basement. In the dozen years since, and long after those little kids are now big kids who remember Magic Tree House fondly but wouldn't dream of actually picking one up again, I've continued to get comments from readers who wish I'd update my list with all the books that have come out since.

So today, I did! This new list includes all the Magic Tree House books currently published as of August 2022.

Dishes are in the dishwasher, laundry is in the washing machine, dinner is on the stove, one kid is playing LEGOs while the other kid reads on the couch, and the house that Matt painstakingly straightened while we were gone is trashed, trashed, TRASHED.

We must be home again!

We left a few projects in the lurch for our trip--our bat house, the thankful tree, the Disaster Dioramas of Pompeii and the Titanic, a whole slew of Spanish flashcards--and every now and then, as the kids decompress and I continue my manic run through the holiday craft fair season, we're picking them all back up again.

For instance, we finally finished a project that we've been working on for a while--putting all the Magic Tree House books in their proper spot on our huge basement timeline. Because the kids listen to the Magic Tree House audiobooks over and over again, they've gained quite a bit of historical and geographical knowledge, but it can be tough putting that into a wider context, and wider contexts is what I am all about.

So I sent Matt thumbnails of every Magic Tree House book cover for him to lay out and print, and I made a list of where each relevant book belongs on our timeline. Want to see my list? It's pretty great:

• #1 Dinosaur Before Dark--Cretaceous period
• #2 The Knight at Dawn--Middle Ages
• #3 Mummies in the Morning--2630 BCE to 2250 BCE
• #4 Pirates Past Noon--1690-1730
• #5 Night of the Ninjas--1336-1600
• #7 Sunset of the Sabertooth--Late Pleistocene period
• #8 Midnight on the Moon--2036
• #10 Ghost Town at Sundown--1850-1900
• #13 Vacation under the Volcano--79 CE
• #14 Day of the Dragon King--first century
• #15 Viking Ships at Sunrise--9th century
• #16 Hour of the Olympics--776 BCE-393 CE
• #17 Tonight on the Titanic--1912
• #18 Buffalo before Breakfast--1850-1900
• #21 Civil War on Sunday--1861-1865
• #22 Revolutionary War on Wednesday--12/25/1776
• #23 Twister on Tuesday--1870s
• #24 Earthquake in the Early Morning--1906
• #25 Stage Fright on a Summer Night--1558-1603
• #27 Thanksgiving on Thursday--1621
• #28 High Tide in Hawaii--11th century-1777
• #29 A Big Day for Baseball--1947
• #30 Hurricane Heroes in Texas--1930
• #31 Warriors in Winter--100s CE
• #32 To the Future, Ben Franklin!--1787
• #33 Narwhal on a Sunny Night--975-990
• #34 (old numbering--now it's Merlin Mission #6) Season of the Sandstorms--prior to the 8th century
• #34 Late Lunch with Llamas--15th century
• #35 (old numbering--now it's Merlin Mission #7) Night of the New Magicians--1889
• #35 Camp Time in California--1903
• #36 (old numbering--now it's Merlin Mission #8) Blizzard of the Blue Moon--1938
• #37 Dragon of the Red Dawn--1185-1603
• #38 Monday with a Mad Genius--around 1500
• #39 Dark Day in the Deep Sea--1870s
• #41 Moonlight of the Magic Flute--1760
• #42 A Good Night for Ghosts--1916
• #43 Leprechaun in Late Winter--1860
• Merlin Mission #17 A Crazy Day with Cobras--1500-1600
• Merlin Mission #18 Dogs in the Dead of Night--1600s
• Merlin Mission #19 Abe Lincoln at Last--1861
• Merlin Mission #20 A Perfect Time for Pandas--2008
• Merlin Mission #21 Stallion by Starlight--340 BCE
• Merlin Mission #22 Hurry Up, Houdini!--1915
• Merlin Mission #23 High Time for Heroes--1849-1850
• Merlin Mission #24 Soccer on Sunday--1970
• Merlin Mission #25--Shadow of the Shark--before 1511
• Merlin Mission #26 Balto of the Blue Dawn--1925

Some books aren't included in the list because they don't take place in any particular time--wait with bated breath for our big geography project later on. We're also still reading the latest Magic Tree House, the one about Charles Dickens, and then we'll put that one on the timeline, too.

Sydney helped me cut out all the book cover thumbnails, then Willow glued them onto the wall as I showed her where each one went. She coated each in an extra layer of glitter glue, just because, and then I went back and wrote in the timeline info:

I had no idea, until we actually started placing them, how many books Mary Pope Osborne had set in the latter half of the nineteenth century or so. If we ever move and thus need to do our timeline over again, remind me to set aside more room here just for her.

For a while the girls listened to this book over and over and over again--I think they found the part with the ghost thrilling:

 

But last night they listened to this book as they fell asleep:

I was going to encourage them to listen to Thanksgiving on Thursday, but I don't seem to have ripped the audio copy from a library CD yet. Fortunately, we own a paperback copy of the book, so perhaps we'll find time to read it out loud together today.

Interspersed with making Pilgrim paper dolls and the thankful tree and the dinner roll dough to freeze for Thursday, that is...

Homeschool Art History: A Timeline of the History of Photography

 

The kids and I are doing a short art history study on the history of photography, so it's a fine time to bring back our absolute favorite homeschool staple: the DIY timeline!!!

We still speak often about our big basement timeline, and I wish so much that we'd continued it in this house. But its magic lives on, I suppose, in the kids' happy memories, and in their eagerness, even at the ripe old ages of 15 and 17, to DIY this photography timeline with me.

I used A Chronology of Photography as my main resource for deciding upon the photos to include. I added in additional photos of LGBTQIA+ history and the history of People of Color, but looking at our finished timeline I can clearly see that I need WAY more non-Eurocentric photos, too, yikes. I also added in photos of important events, like the first Moon landing, World War 2 events, etc., because I want the kids to remember that photography, along with its artistic value, is an important way to explore and analyze history. Photographs are also cultural artifacts that speak to the time, place, and culture of their creation, so it's helpful to also source photos where those aspects are easy to identify.

 To get a high-quality image of a photograph, do a Google Image search, click Tools to reveal a set of filters, then filter the Size for Large:

Anyone else obsessed with the Cottingley Fairies? The kids and I talk about these world's greatest pranksters ALL THE TIME. 

Even though the photographs that I'm printing for this project are only about a quarter-page at the widest, if I'm going to the trouble to find and download an image, I like to get the largest size possible.

Because what if next year I need a wall-sized version of the Cottingley Fairies photos, hmm? What then?!?

I rename artwork images Title Artist Year, and put them in folders that I'll hopefully be able to make sense of later, ahem. 

Once I had a good selection of photos representing the history of photography, I sent the images to Matt, he put them four to a page for me, and I printed them onto cardstock and cut them out:

On the back of each photo card, I wrote the work's title, artist, and year, and that was our stack of photos all ready to go!

To play a game with these, deal out a few photos to everybody, and leave another stack of photos as a draw pile. Take the top photo from the draw pile, read out its title, artist, and date, then place it down to start your timeline.

The goal of the game is to place your photos in their correct spots on the timeline. You put your photo where you think it goes, then turn it over and read out the title, artist, and date. If your photo is in the correct spot, your turn is over. If your photo is incorrect, correct it and then draw another photo. The first person to correctly place all of their photos is the winner!

The game gets harder as it goes on and you fill in all those big gaps in time!

Look at that lovely, long timeline, chock-full of fascinating moments of history and interesting artistic interpretations:

I wanted to leave our timeline on display--maybe the kids will memorize some dates, and maybe it'll allow us the space to have more conversations about some of these images--so Syd and I tacked twine to the front of our big bookshelves, then the kids transferred the completed timeline to it:

We're slightly overlapping the map for our Meso-America study--oops!

The result isn't quite the big basement timeline of our memories, but it IS chaotic and messy enough to remind us of it!

The kids are currently working on a separate photograph analysis project, so we'll definitely add those photos to this timeline, and now that it's up I might as well keep adding more photos relevant to our other studies. You know how much I love context!

And then we'll take some photographs of our own!

Here are the resources that we've used so far:

I Turn Quizlet Flash Cards into Physical Flash Cards because I Am Stubborn and Ridiculous

 

And because the kid already has quite enough screen time without also studying her French vocabulary on one.

I am SUPER old-school to be so weirded out by this, I've learned. Syd doesn't even have a single physical, paper textbook in any of her public high school classes--actually, she only has a textbook at all in two of her classes! The other three classes just have... teacher-created lessons. And YouTube video links. Worksheets of unknown provenance. 

Don't tell her textbook-less algebra teacher, but I checked out a high school algebra textbook (and teacher's manual!) from our local university's library, and I've been referring to it quite a lot as I help Syd with her work.

I also print out most of her biology and French readings from the digital textbooks, which I know is the most appalling misuse of my personal resources, but you know what? The print-outs don't crap out in the middle of a timed open-book test, or refuse to load when an exhausted kid is coming up on a deadline, or lag when three other members of the household are in simultaneous but separate online meetings.

Flash cards, of course, don't have nearly that level of urgency, but I like having them physical. I like having them portable, so I can torment the children with them in the car, and I like having them readily available, so I can pester the kids with a couple whenever they randomly walk by.

So here's what I do to make my kids' lives more annoying. I take a Quizlet (you can often find Quizlets already made for whatever you're studying, even for specific chapters of specific textbooks)--

--tell it that I want to print it--

--and then set it up as 3"x5" index cards that print 16 to a page:

I use a guillotine paper cutter to cut the flash cards into rows, then cut each row in half, leaving each French/English word pair connected. To finish each flash card I fold it in half and glue it with a glue stick. It becomes the perfect, pocket-sized, double-sided flash card!

So yes, super old-school and resource heavy, but to be fair, I've been happily using flash cards with the kids since they were preschoolers. Here are just some of the things that we've done with them from preschool on up:

• Laminate them and trace words with dry-erase markers.
• Print two copies and match them or play Memory with them.
• Print them tiny, add a pin, and use them with pin flag maps. 
• Print them full-page and let the kids color the line art. 
• Print them full-page and use them as display posters.
• Leave them in the car and declare the first ten minutes of the first car ride of every day "memory" time--we did this for several years!

Here are some of my favorite flash cards that we've used:

• addition, subtraction, and multiplication drill. I absolutely used these with the kid when they were memorizing their math facts. Yep, they LOATHED them, but you know what? Review only took a couple of minutes every school day, and it 100% helped seal the facts into their little-kid brains.
• Chinese vocabulary flash cards. For a couple of years, the kids took a Saturday morning Chinese language class. The next week, I'd find flash cards for the vocabulary that they were studying so that we could review for just a couple of minutes daily.
• European countries and capitals. We used these a couple of years ago when Will was studying AP European History and Syd was studying European Geography. Now that Will is studying AP Human Geography, I'll probably bring them back out!
• French alphabet flash cards. These are pretty enough to print full-page and display on a wall--which is what we do!
• sharks of the world. We used these a few years ago when we did a summer shark study, and since then I've brought them out a couple of times for Girl Scout badgework.
• Story of the World timeline cards. Unfortunately, the original source for these no longer exists, but you can still find bootleg copies (ahem). We used the SNOT out of these when the kids were elementary years! We glued them to our big basement timeline, as well as laminating a set to use as memory drill. Once upon a time I even found a bootleg set of all the comprehension questions from the Story of the World books set up as flash cards, and we used the snot out of those, too!
• zoo fact cards. I made these during the couple of years when Will's obsession led us to nearly every zoo in the land. It would be extra useful to make a set for a zoo or aquarium that you went to often. 
• insect flash cards. We used these steadily for several summers in a row when the kids were younger, and I still pull them out at some point most summers, because we always end up swinging around to entomology.
• sight word caterpillar. Syd has fond memories of the caterpillar that took over our walls and taught her the dolch sight words!

Work Plans for the Week of May 30, 2017: Let's Try That Again, Shall We?

Last week was not a successful week, schoolwork-wise. For a variety of reasons, the kids got very little done. They did keep up well with their math, and Will kept up with grammar, but I have to create and enforce a different system for finished work this week, because both kids have begun to simply set their finished work next to their work areas, instead of bringing it to me. If I don't see it, I don't mark it, and they blithely move on the next day, and if they've made errors, those are compiled the further they advance, sigh. Will, in particular, is not going to be pleased that she somehow forgot what a linking verb is between Lessons 11 and 12, and Syd refuses to understand that drawing her angles on a separate page, and then "losing" that page before I had a chance to see it, has the same result as not drawing the angles at all--she's doing it again today!

Regardless, the week as a whole was full and happy. The kids spent loads of time preparing for a Girl Scout meeting that was an outdoor cookout feast--


--Will has been working with Luna several times a day on their homework from obedience school--



--we spent a full day at the Children's Museum, volunteering and playing, the kids spent another full day at their wilderness class, and then we spent the weekend visiting family in Michigan.

Yesterday we took lots of naps.

Because of that, you'll find the annotations for most of this week's assignments in last week's post, where they were first assigned. And honestly, we may not be much more productive this weekend--summer activities, such as this afternoon's trip to the public pool and tomorrow's all-day trip to the zoo, are peppered throughout the coming days, but heck. Why homeschool if it's not so we can go to the pool with friends, and spend the whole day at the zoo just because we want to?

Memory work for the week consists of the first eleven lines of Beowulf recited in Anglo-Saxon, standard conversions, and Greek vocabulary. Books of the Day include some sneaky selections from the kids' MENSA reading lists, a biography of Juliette Gordon Low, a leftover book on the Celts, and the rest of the One Crazy Summer trilogy for Will. Other daily work includes creative writing for Syd and cursive copywork for Will, typing practicing on Typing.com and progress on their MENSA reading lists for both, Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, a Greek language lesson or review and a Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson or practice for both, and SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will.

And here's the rest of our week!

TUESDAY: At least hiding their work from me until I find it while tidying over the weekend lets me give them exact assignments for Math Mammoth and Analytical Grammar this week--usually the kids just correct the latest lesson and complete the next lesson. Notice that for each of these, I've also instructed them to give their work directly to an adult to mark. They put their completed assignments in the face of an adult, or their work plans for the day aren't complete--mwa-ha-ha!

Most of the rest of this day's work is reassigned from last week, although Will has some extra time to work on a Girl Scout badge, and Syd has big plans to run a bake stand in our driveway before the drive-in movies this weekend (it's kind of genius, because almost every car headed to the drive-in will have to drive by her bake stand first, and if it's a nice weekend for an outdoor movie, traffic will be stalled, meaning that every car will have plenty of time to just sit there and look at her mouth-watering treats), so she'll be working on that every school day this week, in preparation for her Friday debut.

WEDNESDAY: Day at the zoo! If there's one thing that you can guarantee about my kids, it's that they're game for any and every trip to any and every zoo and aquarium that you offer them. We're going to have a wonderful time.

THURSDAY: The only new assignment on this day is more work on Girl Scout badges--with so much make-up work to do this week, we're not really able to progress in most of our units, so Girl Scouts is filling the few gaps in the school week. Good thing there's ALWAYS something to do in Girl Scouts!

FRIDAY: Since our only Medieval history assignment last week was our field trip to look at Medieval manuscripts in the Lilly Library--which was AMAZING, by the way!--we actually are free to move on in our Medieval history unit this week. I didn't spend a ton of time looking up enrichment activities or projects for this week's chapter in Story of the World v. 2, but at least the kids can get it read and get the quiz and mapwork done, and I'll have a chance for more research this week.

One of the few flaws in our Story of the World spine is its lack of dates in the text. The author doesn't want the kids focusing on memorizing dates at the expense of understanding the events and their context, but it's just one more thing that I have to add to the curriculum to better suit my older children. I'll be printing one nice copy of this timeline, and for use in a binder or as a pull-out, and the kids can help me order and construct it and then add timeline figures for what we've already studied this semester. It's no basement timeline, but I'm hoping that it will be a suitable replacement.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: No three-day weekend this weekend! Luna has obedience school, but thankfully that's our only scheduled activity, because summer extracurriculars begin next week.

And we'll have a five-day school week for a change!

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Civil Rights for Kids

We first studied Civil Rights back in 2012, in preparation for a trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta (and we have to go back again, because they have a Junior Ranger program!), but it's been a regular component of our curriculum since then.

My methodology has remained consistent, because it seems to work well for my kids. We memorize dates, because they make a good scaffold for whatever context we later add, we explore biographies and living histories, and through those, we unpack a particular issue or event.

Because this study is mostly memorization, conversation, and reading, it works well both for my kid who will do anything that I ask her to, and my kid who will do nothing that I ask her to. The contrary kid has the gifts of a sharp memory, a passion for books, and a love of philosophy and debate; she can't help but learn this way. The amiable kid will power through anything that doesn't have a "correct" answer for her to freak out about, loves stories, and couldn't stop talking if I paid her to; she'd be happy adding in lots of hands-on projects, but this is also a good way for her to learn.

The first time that we studied dates (and put them on our big basement timeline--how I miss you!), Martin Luther King, Jr. was the perfect biography to explore, because, of course, he was present at so many of these crucial events. We read plenty about his life, but our main emphasis was on his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with this book in hand to help us unpack and understand that speech:
Since then, we've studied the Civil War (crucial for understanding racism and the need for Civil Rights), Native Americans (another historically disenfranchised people), and other African-American scientists and inventors (remember Will's prize-winning essay on Patricia Bath last year?), but recently, we all found ourselves in the middle of a unit on school segregation and desegregation. It started with this audiobook--
--part of the Dear America series. I've found that series spotty in how well it can keep the kids' interest, but this one enthralled them. We listened to it in the car, and even Will, who prefers books about animals to books about people, and books about magical people to books about real people, was an avid listener. So this was the living biography that inspired us.

For the dates and facts, I turned to our very own town, which sports two former colored schools. One of them, the first colored school in town, is located downtown, blocks from campus. It's now our county's history museum, so we've visited there often. Kids attended this school until the local university moved to its current spot. The Powers that Be didn't want a colored school so close to the university, so they built a new school further to the west, on the far side of the furniture factory that employed quite a lot of the town, reasoning that with the school way over there, African-Americans would have no reason to approach the university's campus.

Nice, huh?

This second colored school, the one that non-Caucasian children attended until desegregation reached our town, is now the community center that my kids, like many other homeschooled kids in our town, are in and out of multiple times each week. In fact, we're there right now--the kids are in math class, and I'm in the library getting some writing done.

A few weeks ago, I set up a time for the community center's program coordinator to talk to our homeschool group about the building's history. She discussed segregation in our town, described the layout and conditions of the school, and walked us through the former classrooms (which we've seen many times before, as one room is the library and the other is the math classroom!) to show us the surprising number of original features that still exist. The blackboards are the same blackboards that were used by the colored school! How cool is it that my kids are now part of their history?

We've very lucky in that the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, a place that we visit probably once a month, also has what I imagine has to be the world's only Civil Rights exhibit that's geared specifically to a child audience. It's called The Power of Children, and although it was a little too scary for the kids when they were younger, it's now perfect for them.

The exhibit focuses on three children famous for their experiences of discrimination. We haven't yet visited the Anne Frank section (although now that we're studying World War II, we will), but recently, the kids spent a long time exploring the sections on Ruby Bridges and Ryan White.

The Ruby Bridges section did a wonderful job personalizing discrimination for two little white girls who've never personally experienced it:

It also had plenty of artifacts that I was interested to see. I'm racking my brain, and I don't think that I've ever seen artifacts like these on display before:

Much of the exhibit focused on the inequities of segregated schools, and the inequities that Bridges faced in her first year at the integrated school:

The unfairness was abundantly clear.

The kids seemed to feel less in response to the Ryan White exhibit, partly because they were distracted by White's truly epic amount of 80s era swag. Alf! Star Wars! Max Headroom! But they had a LOT of fun filming this news report!

I, however, adored the Ryan White exhibit. First of all, I remember hearing about White when I was a kid; he was a few years older than me, and I was struck by his story. This exhibit also makes his story very real, because, of course, he's from Indiana, and the school that he was driven out of and the school that he was made welcome in are both Indiana schools. White's mother donated most of the artifacts that make his exhibit so vivid, and she's also a regular visitor and speaker at the museum.

While there are clearly people in Indiana who need to relearn the anti-discrimination, anti-bigotry ethic, as evidenced by the RFRA nonsense that my state is now undergoing, I hope that my kiddos will never be the kind of people who dehumanize another, or who stand by and let it happen.

Here are some of the other resources that we've been using in our Civil Rights studies: