Civics Class 1 & 2

Wednesday, 07 October 2009

• Civics Class 1 & 2

  On September 18th, the homeschool coop that we are involved in, called HIS, had it's first class day.  This is a fairly large group and the children are divided by grade levels.  This year Dave committed to teaching Civics/History to the older children.  Our (I am helping Dave) class consists of 11 students from the ages of 11-17, 6 boys and 5 girls.  For the first class we went over 2 class rules that Mr. Dave had established.
   1.) Do all you have agreed to do
   2.) Do not encroach upon another person or their property.
  We talked about how societies have changed all through history.  Man's social and economic conditions have changed - liberty and tyranny, poverty and prosperity, safety and terror.  What are the conditions that cause these changes?  A small example of this that was brought up was:  our grandparents never locked their doors at night.  Why do we lock ours now?  What caused this change? 
  We did a small representation of society by assigning each child a different role.  We had a farmer, banker, retired person, pizza shop owner, etc..     Then Mr. Dave gave a scenario of a severe drought.   We had a lively discussion as the drought effected more and more people besides the farmer.  Example:  price of food goes up, farmer can't pay bank, which effects retired person's investments, etc..       We had a good time!
  

  

  

  

  
  
  
  Class 2 - Talked mostly about how governments got started in the early days of mankind spreading across the earth.  How class distinctions arose among peoples.  Talked about man advancing from family-clan-tribe to village-city-citystates.  We began to talk about 2 of the most famous city-states, which were Athens and Sparta.  We began to discuss how some of the ideas of Ancient Greeks effect us today.   We had 2 students give current events and 1 student gave a report on Sparta.
  

  

  
  
  
  
  Next class is October 16th.
  Until next time............