Interest-led History

Playing Civilization 3, my sons are having conversations with words and phrases like 'fascists', technologies', 'Industrial revolution', 'economics', 'The Ottoman Empire', 'natural resources', 'diplomacy', 'balance of trade'.. and well, you get the idea.

[Oh, great. She is going to talk about another computer game. Well, yes I am. So there! And this is a great one. And, again here come the good ol' Interest-led post. My favorite ones.]

Just reading the Civilization manual and website I am impressed with how Sid Meier has brought together major forces of history into this game and allowed players to build their civilizations by making decisions on what to sacrifice, what to nurture and how to strategize with other nations to succeed and prevail.

I wanted to play, but the boys said I might not get it. Them's fightin' words, young men! Some day I will take a look. After I finish my blog. lol

So, today my sons and I were talking about history. I wanted to talk about history and the world as Sid presents it, much like the Risk board game and its altered geography. My goals for history are that they will have a general idea of the major civilizations and flow of history and how our faith was intertwined. Then, have a personal connection to portions of it.

I have learned more about history in the past few years of homeschooling than I did in 18 years of formal school. Isn't that always the way?

I wanted to talk to them a little about the game and how it relates to 'real' history. We sprawled on the floor with a few books I brought downstairs:
-The DK History of the World (which is timeline style with great pictures and text)
-The Timetables of History by Grun (which has what was going on in different areas of development-- such as technology, art, religion-- by date), and..
-Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth Davis (I bought this book for me years ago - it is conversational and a fun read)

He paged through DK and Timetables while I read clips from DKMAH. We chatted about the Vietnam War, the Hittites, the Holocaust and Iran's president now telling us it never happened. He asked me about the history of the Jews and I did my best to recap from the Jeff Cavin's study I did. Wow, it is hard to narrate when put on the spot, but I did my best. He read about how the Jews got their homeland and we talked a little more about the ongoing struggles and what we are facing today, and how this is linked with our faith and heritage.

We found ourselves next hearing a quote from Crazy Horse and how he just wanted to be left alone, but "Long Hair" attacked. Wow, my son said, that is what we have to do in Civilization.

Right now in the game, he needed aluminum to progress technologically. But another country owned it. He could attack to get it as he has grown powerful, or wait for this other country to develop economicly so they could start trade. Wow! What a choice you must make, I remarked. He smiled. I wonder what he will do?

We talked about making decision in context of our faith and the topic of immigration came up, again.

Then back to the books... we talked about the Incas and Mayan cultures as he looked at a timeline chart in his book. He turned to a page that looked just like the immigrants I am reading about in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and I told him a bit of that story. Then onto WWII. I told him about a movie I watched last weekend, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) with Van Johnson where the American put bombers on ships to attack Toyko and then the pilots and crews crashed in China. The Chineese people cared for them as their own countrymen. We wondered if we would ever have a bomb dropped on us and talked more about Hiroshima, a topic we have visited often.

And then on to the cold war. The space race with Russia. Oh yeah, he had heard about that on the Monty Python tape. I told him how the big push when I was a kid in public school was science. We talked of Ronald Reagan and the 'Star Wars' strategic defensive initiative, one of his favorite topics. On to Watergate and Nixon, Carter and Bush.

More and more... I watched as he turned the pages in the DK book.. thumbing, literally, through the pages of history.

His interest led him there. But I was right beside him, learning, too.