Using Comparison and Continuity and Change over Time for Homeschool Writing

This is the second year of US History. If you don’t know, we start with world history with the Ancients and move chronologically through elementary school. In middle school we start with US History. Last year, we spent the year on the Indigenous peoples of North America. We studied Natives of North America generally and then zoomed in to focus on eight (if I am remembering correctly) specific nations that I tried to choose from different biological regions throughout the US.

In this post you’ll find:

• History Block Overview
• Introduction to Essay Form
• Analysis Exercises
• Comparison Activity
• Change and Continuity over Time

History Block Overview

This year, we continued the US History with first contact, the Columbian Exchange, and Early Colonization. I find even in whittling down a topic, there is still what seems like an infinite amount to talk about. I knew early on in my research that the Colombian exchange was something that I wanted to focus on. This often is overlooked but had and still has an enormous impact on history. It just cannot be overstated. 

As you can imagine, I had a difficult time finding sources, but I did come across a little gem that was full of the information that I was looking for at a grade-level appropriate for middle school -Seeds of Change by Hawke and Davis. It was out of print, but I found a used copy on Thriftbooks. You can view this book, as well as other books and games that we used for this unit, in my Amazon Favorites. 

Introduction to Essay Form

As part of our block, I did our first formal introduction to essay form. Now we have been writing for a while, particularly narrations. In the past couple of years we have scaffolded our way along this path with analyzing paragraphs and looking at the different ways that paragraphs are organized. We outlined other people’s paragraphs, and then we outline our own paragraphs. You can find some of parts of these strategies in Michael Clay Thompson’s work, IEW’s work, and Brave Writer’s work, as well as the book The Writing Revolution. I usually keep these exercises in the topic of whatever we are studying at the time. 

Analysis Exercises

As part of this, we are doing to analysis exercises that are adapted to middle school level from OER’s The World History Project, a free online highschool-level World History curriculum. These two projects are their Comparison activity, and their Change and Continuity over time. I’ve published two videos explaining each of the activities. Both of these are highly scaffolded since it’s both our introduction to essay writing and to these analysis activities. What would take a high schooler maybe a couple of days to complete these is taking us several weeks. 

Comparison Activity

The comparison activity was completed in a day with the venn diagram. However, the outlining of our multi-paragraph narration (essay) took at least two days. We started with the thesis, which was just an observation of the activity as being our last paragraph in the introduction, but we did not call it a thesis yet, but just what our paper was going to be about. From here instead continuing to work on the paragraph, we worked on the body with the points of observation from our activity. From here we filled in the conclusion because it should mirror our points and end with a reflection of our thesis. Then we went back and talked about how we could introduce the topic. At this point she started writing a paragraph at a time. 

Change and Continuity over Time

For the Change and Continuity over Time activity, it was much the same as far as pacing, though the outlining went a little faster. The activity was a little slower. First, we made a list of things that changed or stayed the same on a piece of paper. We tried to keep this as specific or localized as possible. For instance, if a change affected a few people, we would divide that change up into three sections, one for each people. This allowed us to graph the items the next day with a little more ease.

The following day, we plotted our changes on a graph. The graph has went from continuity to change for the x-axis with negative impact to positive impact on the y-axis. Plotting this alone caused so much thinking and discussion. For that reason alone it was very valuable, even if it were done alone. From here, we did the same as the previous where we made an overall observation, and then used that as a thesis to our paper. I hope this is useful to you.  

Video: Comparison Activity

Video: Change and Continuity over Time Activity

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