Before I was “all in” on homeschooling our three kiddos, I was a public school teacher in Summerville, SC. During my student teaching, I was lucky enough to get to teach four classes per day of science and social studies. My favorite of the two was social studies, because the third grade social studies standards then covered South Carolina history. The rich history of our state has always been fascinating to me, and I was excited to make it come alive for the students I taught.
The only disappointing thing to me was that I couldn’t load them in buses once a week and take my students to see the places we were learning about. UNTIL NOW! Getting to homeschool means getting to embrace a life that is so different from the public school way of things. We enjoy at least one homeschool field trip every single week, and this year, our field trips match up with everything in our new curriculum, Passport to South Carolina!
The Curriculum:
In this curriculum, we will be exploring prehistory all the way through modern times in South Carolina. We cover South Carolina regions, three branches of the US Government and the SC Government, and the other weeks focus on a new time period. While the curriculum covers important events in American history, it does so from a South Carolina perspective. Each week suggests multiple field trips, from museums, to South Carolina State Parks, to off-the-beaten-path South Carolina adventures that I’m so excited to explore with my kids!
We’ve worked our way through four weeks so far: Prehistory, The First South Carolinians, and two weeks on South Carolina Regions. This week, we will begin studying Colonization. Homeschooling allows us to ask questions that might not always go over well in public school, or there might not be time for. With the great foundation we have on who the first people in South Carolina were, we will be able to tackle the difficult ideas of European exploration and colonization of the “New World” with an understanding that conquering new land for their kings meant taking something important from someone else. I love that home education allows us the ability to face these issues head on and have our kids think critically about important historical events that have not always been presented fairly or accurately in our school system.
Check It Out:
If you’d like to explore the curriculum in greater detail, please check it out in my TpT Store! You can purchase each week individually if you’d like to try out just a portion of the curriculum, but if you purchase the curriculum bundle, you’ll save over $50, and get the South Carolina Homeschool Field Trip Database absolutely free!
The field trip database includes many more amazing South Carolina places to explore! While we’ve seen many of them, there are so many more we can’t wait to visit. Will you be joining us on our South Carolina adventure?
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