Social Studies Grade 2

We use BJU Heritage Studies 2 in our homeschool now.  For a good while this year, we were reviewing "safety rules."  Our address and phone number, not to open the door to strangers, leaving the house if there's a fire, and so on.  Now I feel we're ready for a proper history curriculum.

We used BJU with Elf and Emperor years ago and they got so much out of it.  Woodjie and Rose are working on understanding basic concepts of time, however.  The Colonial days did not happen "thousands of years ago."  I'm hoping with some review of where we are in history now, and some things that happened in the past, that they will begin to put things into perspective.  It's almost as though they have nothing to compare it with and I'm not sure how to fix that just yet.  (Ideas welcome!)  So far using a timeline has been helpful, but I can tell it hasn't really sunk in.

Today, we pretended to work at Ben Franklin's print shop.  Instead of ink rollers and letter blocks, we used paper and tape and held our creations up to the mirror when we were finished.  Typesetting was rather a labourious process.  Today we just type and hit "print."  Much easier. 

The teacher's manual is the best thing about BJU stuff.  See the little boxes?  Those are pictures of what's in the child's textbook.  All around the textbook copy are the ideas for your lesson.  Most BJU stuff is extraordinarily easy to teach.  Class discussion questions and all the materials (except a few very occasional crafts) are provided.  I still have all the notebooks from when Elf and Emperor were small.

This is the older version of the curriculum, but I have some of the newer items in the third grade and aside from using colour and binding the worksheets into a glossy workbook, it's pretty much the same.