Those who truly love a certain subject or hobby usually enjoy talking about it to other people. If genealogy is your favorite activity, then you may find it both fun and inspirational to show your children a little bit about what you like about genealogy. There are many academic lessons that tie nicely into aspects of genealogy. Genealogy itself could be a great subject to be taught as part of a homeschooling curriculum.
Genealogy is the study of your relatives, your ancestors, your family. These people are all related to your children, as well. Children may become really interested in the storytelling aspects of genealogy. It can be exciting to learn what your ancestor did for a living, and what they did on a typical day. What did your ancestors eat? What did they do for fun?
There are plenty of little family stories that can make genealogy feel more real to children. If you are lucky enough to have access to a diary of an ancestor, now is the time to share short, age appropriate, experts from it with your children. For homeschoolers, sharing these stories can provide inspiration for a journaling exercise.
Where did your ancestors live? What was going on in the world at that time? Genealogy connects directly with history. Select an ancestor from your family tree who lived in a particular historical period that matches the one that your child just learned about. Do you have a relative who was alive during The Great Depression? Was one of your ancestors someone who was involved in the Gold Rush?
Or, you can work a homeschooling lesson the other way around. Start by learning the birthday of an ancestor, and see if you can figure out what important world events were going on when he or she was a child, or around the time that the person got married.
If you know the birthdate and the death date of an ancestor, then you can make that into a math lesson. How many years did that person live? The more information you know about an ancestor, the more math lessons you can create. How old was that person when he or she got married? What is the age difference between the husband and the wife? How old where the parents when their first child was born?
Genealogy can be used to make a lesson about geography. What country did your ancestors come from? Can you find it on a map? Is the country still called by the same name today as it was when your ancestor was alive? If not, what is it called now, and why did the name change? The country an ancestor was born in could inspire a lesson in a foreign language. See if you can learn some nouns, greetings, and short phrases in the native language of your ancestor.
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