I'm afraid I won't be of much help, but I did talk with the wife last night about integrating history. What she told me seems simple for a classroom setting and with somewhat older kids (though it sounds like H is not far off the kids my wife taught in her 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade class). She just said that there's "many" books that are fun and enjoyable to read, and that they'd do read aloud as a method of integrating history with reading. She also emphasized many projects; I remember one such project where Greek History was divided into sections such as homes, myths, government, or what life was like for the average person. She would then subdivide these to groups so that one group would go out and research a particular section, and then come up with a presentation on it. At the end of the unit, each group would present to the rest of the class.
Obviously, very little of that would applicable to H at this stage, but maybe somewhere in there you might get an idea or two that would be useful.
Looking forward to the next update.
Thanks PokerDad. Well, obviously I can't subdivide H. and assign different topics to different personalities. :-) I am frankly not a big fan of projects. I do like meaningful experiments and field trips and other things that really do help with learning. Doing models for history, or other suggested projects we occasionally see in history books, not so much. For history, reading books (The Story of the World, A Little History of the World, Usborne history encyclopedia, and Kingfisher history atlas--and various other shorter books we do at mealtimes) is where it's at.
One project I've proposed, which H. was pretty keen to tackle, would involve him making PowerPoint presentations about each of the countries we've studied so far. He's more or less taught himself ppt by watching me, and it would be easy to teach him the rest. That's the sort of project I can see us doing, because it would practice new computer and Internet skills with useful review/consolidation of what we've learned so far. Besides, he loves making "books"...
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