Our Twist on History and Geography | Peppermint Stick Learning Company

To read about “Our Twist” in general, please click here.

Young children can enjoy the socials, beginning with what they know (e.g. home, family, local community) and building more knowledge and wisdom on foundational lessons and then exploring other topics about our world in other grades. Some “character education” is included in our social studies curriculum. (You may also be interested in reading Our Twist in Teaching the Bible and Character Ed.)

We encourage both notebook skills and project-based skills for history, geography, and social studies. Here are some details on our approach (“our twist”) for these subjects:

We value visual learning! So, students learn how to make well-organized notebooks and do projects such as posters, a scrapbook, non-paper activities, oral presentations or discussions, map-making, drawing for a timeline, using charts, etc., depending on the curriculum title.
Grow with independent research skills and presentation skills as well as learning the topics! Put reading skills into practice – learning to scan, skim, pick out, and jot down relevant information.
Materials for researching topics are generally YOUR choice!
- We make suggestions under the menu tab “LISTS” or sometimes within a curriculum title but we have tried to make learning flexible for families, including those who might not have the same titles we use, available to them.
- If you have some general reference resources (e.g. access to encyclopedias, information books), you should not have to make countless trips to a library or purchase numerous single titles.
- We also encourage multi-media sources for information, not just books.
- There are no long lists of literature (aka “living books”) to have to search for with our curriculum. When history is studied, it is history, not a novel study. You can supplement your studies as much or as little as you desire with extra storybooks and novels.
What our curriculum is not:
- It is not based on a “read-this-answer-the-question” worksheets or textbook questions.
- It is not “reading comprehension-narration” based (e.g. read a chapter and regurgitate it).
- It is not based on integrating language arts skills/activities (e.g. sorting pioneer life vocabulary into phonetic groups). PSLC curriculum tends not to integrate subjects together as much as other unit study approaches. (Vocabulary meaning is, of course, important to understand in any subject-area.)