Story of the World, Vol. 4, Chapter 40 covers the 1980s in the USSR. I remember when Chernobyl happened and my dad warning us to really wash our apples well. As if radiation can be washed away from an apple.
Nuclear Warning Sign
Meanwhile, over in the US, my husband says they used to do bomb drills when he was in school. The lesson was, you go under the table. As if being under the table will save you from a nuclear blast. Living so close to Oak Ridge, my husband and his friends actively engaged in speculation that a Russian attack would hit Gatlinburg as well as other parts of East Tennessee.
The end of the Cold War is the second story and I could not make it through without crying. My children are used to it by now. Mom cries at certain bits of history and that’s just a fact.
For our craft, I told them to draw a nuclear warning sign – the kind that would warn people 50,000 years from now that nuclear rods are buried there. My daughter did not respect the rule that there should be no words on it, just pictures. Oh well.
I cannot believe we are so close to the end of volume 4. We want to start through the entire cycle all over again, but this time around we will work more on the timeline and extra reading materials. We might even pull out the encyclopedias and look through them. They are still young and I do not want to impose a whole lot of hard facts on them. The most important thing is that they get names and locations and connections.
Tears of injustice—those are right for your children to see. There’s a little known documentary about the ladies of Chernobyl (grandmothers now) who refused to leave and somehow continue to live there, all alone except for their little community.
Congratulations on pratically finishing the SOTW series! How wonderful to be able to go back through it and catch more details, and supplement with other reading and stories. What a blessed education!