We homeschooled Leo for about four months when he was eight years old. School had been good for him in kindergarten and first grade, but second grade started off rough and by spring he was so beaten down that we decided to pull him out. We scrambled to put together a homeschooling plan that would let him recover but also challenge his mind and engage his heart. Knowing Leo’s fascination with all things military, I came up with the idea of building a curriculum — or at least a large part of one — around war.

The basic idea was to use war as a unifying thread to help Leo connect with a lot of different subject areas — and at the same time help him move beyond the “guns are cool!” mind-set to develop a fuller and more varied set of perspectives on war. We read historical novels set in different wars: rural Illinois during the Civil War (Across Five Aprils), Mexico in 1836 (In the Shadow of the Alamo), and Korea during World War II (When My Name Was Keoko). We learned songs exploring war from many angles, such as patriotism (“Battle Cry of Freedom”), satire (“Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major”), protest (“Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”), and lament (“Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye”). Leo filled out home-made geography worksheets tracing where armies marched and solved math problems involving numbers of soldiers and weapons and quantities of provisions. His interest in ballistics led him to David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work to learn about the physics that makes guns fire and missiles launch. A Wikipedia article on “Combat Medic” led into a discussion of first aid basics and the workings of the heart, lungs, and blood vessels. Claire’s mom, who joined us as one of Leo’s homeschool teachers, showed him photos of his relatives who fought in the Civil War and introduced him to Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

The following excerpts from our homeschooling log show some of the range of what we covered:

Leo wanted to make a new costume based on a Revolutionary War uniform. First, we found a website that features color drawings of uniforms from many different units on both sides in that war. Leo picked out one that he liked and we printed out the drawing. He identified certain pieces of clothing that he already had and others that he would need in order to make the costume. We then walked over to the thrift store a few blocks from our house, and Leo found a tan shirt and a red jacket that would work for the costume. Back at home, I found an extra martial arts belt (white) that I cut in half for Leo, and loaned him my sewing kit. Without any help except with pinning, he then sewed one of the halves into a loop to be worn across one shoulder. (The next day he sewed a similar loop from the other half and sewed the two loops together to make an X in the back.)
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Using online and print sources, we looked at war propaganda posters from World War II — mostly U.S. and Japanese, plus a couple of German ones. We discussed the images in the posters, the purposes of wartime propaganda, and how the people in the war were depicted differently by the different sides, with a special emphasis on racial stereotyping.
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Leo attended a home school learning center for a full day. He and two other kids created a museum featuring weapons from several different historical eras, from the Stone Age to modern times. (They made the weapons out of K’Nex.)
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We looked at maps of Mexico, Texas, and the United States in the nineteenth century. I showed Leo how large Mexico had been before the Texas War of Independence, and how much territory Mexico lost in that war and in the War with the United States that followed. We counted all of the states in the U.S. that used to be part of Mexico, and talked about how many of them still have lots of people of Mexican descent living in them, and how their local cultures (foods, etc.) still have a lot of Mexican influences. We also looked at how the United States grew from the time of Independence through the end of the war with Mexico.
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While I was brushing my teeth this morning Leo asked, “Dad, why did the United States and the Russians start a Cold War?” That led into a short discussion about the differences between capitalism and communism.

The war curriculum was an attempt to expand our child’s thinking about war, not channel it in one direction. It offered space for Leo to appreciate the loyalty of battlefield comrades who risk their lives to protect each other, but also imagine what it might feel like to be driven out of your home by soldiers. To be dazzled by the power of military equipment, but also moved by Eric Bogle’s song about a soldier who has his legs blown off at Gallipoli. To learn about some of the many reasons people go to war, and to think about which of them are worth fighting for and which are not.

The curriculum also gave us many opportunities to talk about how social differences and divisions shape people’s lives. In the Shadow of the Alamo, for example, compares the situations of the impoverished farmers who were conscripted into the Mexican army and the landowners’ sons who became their officers. Along with the soldiers themselves, the book also shows how women and girls traveled with their sons, husbands, and fathers as camp followers, and faced lots of hardship and suffering in the process.

Our experience with homeschooling was brief, as Leo returned to a school setting in the fall. But it helped us think much more actively about we can help our child learn and help make many different subjects engaging for him, including history. In future posts on this blog, I expect to write about a number of the specific resources we used.