Omnibus vs. Notebooking

[DidoMachiatto]

I recently came across the Omnibus series in Veritas Press's catalog. Seeing this really threw a monkeywrench into my plans.

 

Last year we studied Ancient Civilizations and the Bible with dd13 and dd15. The girls were very motivated in the interaction between research and hands-on projects which that program suggested. The program was great, (except that I felt it was simplistically preachy). Next year we are to study Medieval times, and I had prepared to do more of an historical-fiction based and webquest enriched survey of Medieval history. I came across the idea of Notebooking, where the student collects information that they find interesting about the topic, and put together a "scrapbook," creatively using the information they have collected.

 

So my plan was to do more of an open-ended research of the Middle Ages. My major was in the Social Sciences, with a lot of work in History, so I feel quite comfortable in this.

 

But in comes Omnibus, which will introduce the girls to a smorgasbord of primary document readings from the time period studied, and all the thought-provoking questions are right there for you. Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Macbeth, Canterbury Tales...

 

But the time it takes to do Omnibus is prohibitive: eight 70 minute sessions a week, not including reading time.

 

Another complication is that we are enrolled in Potter's School English classes, which I absolutely love. But 'time' is taken by this.

 

Oh, and then I have been perusing a thread from last month on the value of 'independent learning projects' http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showthread.php?t=402048&highlight=omnibus+ii

 

This makes me have to rethink all of my planning. Maybe I need to X all my history/science/skills plans and have the children research according to their interests.

 

I also saw TOG, which seems to actually approach history as doing history, not just a context for literature.

 

So as I am thinking of all this, my question for you all out there is this:

Ominibus is a heavy top-down teaching program, introducing some really amazing and valuable literature that independent foragers would seldom choose, but skimming the surface with questionable retention of anything but the philosophical discussions.

 

Notebooking has high chance of retention, and taps into the creative side that ensures positive memory, but limited in scope (if interest-driven) and questionable depth.

 

Independent (interest-driven) learning has high chance of retention, but would be depth at the expense of breadth, and very questionable direction.

 

What thoughts do you have regarding combining these, and I'd especially like to hear from Omnibus (or TOG) veterans? Try to persuade me.

[PeterPan]

Well did you have a program for ancients or design it yourself? Just asking whether you *need* a program for middle ages or whether you're just wanting something to supplement what you already have planned.

 

We did some notebooking/scrapbooking learning this summer, and it was very good. However it takes a LOT of time. We paused it to take a summer break, and we'll pick back up hopefully in the fall. You can either do that once a week (state or country study, something finite), or you can let it become encompassing. Just depends on what you want.

 

I've got Omnibus 1 and 2 and did some prereading over the last couple years to prepare to use them. I guess you could say I'm not in love, but it's largely a what fits your student thing. My dd wants history with some GB thrown in, not GB with history thrown in. Where I'm at right now with our plans for fall is that we'll do the region/cultures/religion study alternating weeks of history and geography, sort of an expansion of TOG yr 1 unit 2. Then we'll go back and start into ancients and plow forward using TOG and sort of making it work for us.

 

It's a marvel to me that people feel so compelled to take history, which is of course an infinite topic with lots of angles, and turn it into a list of MUSTS, most of which are political topics. WEM espouses the polar opposite, that there are lots of ways of looking at history and that ANY topic or angle, followed through, would give you a survey of history and make a springboard for rhetoric level thought. So I don't consider our studies this list of musts. I don't think the quality of HoAW, which is largely political, somehow invalidates another approach (Time Life series on What Life Was Like, etc.) that takes a different angle and follows it through time. And if you find that narrative and thread and pull it out and notebook it and do projects, more power to you. WEM is certainly encouraging of that, even if it's out of the norm on the boards. BTW, I haven't read WEM in ages. I'm going on what I learned in SWB's WEM talk. I should probably get WEM and read it again, now that we're at that stage! :D

 

So yes, it certainly sounds like what you were doing was fine. No need to mess up what's working. If you get that hankering for TOG, remember you can buy just a unit. That's the best way to try it. As for Omnibus, there are *extensive* samples on google books. Definitely avail yourself of that.

[laughing lioness]

We used Omnibus for ds17 freshman year. He is a voracious reader with high comprehension, understands and love theology and history. It took a full 12 mth for one semester with ONLY primary (no seconday) reading. We was still taking other classes, had other areas of interest/reading.

It's a lot of GREAT reading, but it goes so fast and tries to cover so much that I think a lot of it is lost.

My friend is doing Omnibus - all 4 years and her dd won't graduate until she is almost 20 because the mom just thinks it is that good and wants her kid to get through the program that much.

 

I'm doing notebooking with a horse lit unit this summer with a group of girls and re-thinking how to incorporate that into school for fall- maybe not so much for my Sr.- he has a clear trajectory but for my 5th and 7th graders.

Interest- driven, we try to cram as much of that in as possible. It squishes stuff sometimes, but worth it.

I overplan in summer and then try to flow once we get into it.

[TechWife]

So my plan was to do more of an open-ended research of the Middle Ages ...

 

Notebooking has high chance of retention, and taps into the creative side that ensures positive memory, but limited in scope (if interest-driven) and questionable depth.

 

Have you seen the History Scholar notebooking pages? They might be a good option. This way, she could do the notebooking that she enjoyed yet still have a guide of important topics to cover. The depth to which she completes the pages would be up to the two of you and you could certainly vary it according to her interests.

[jibaker103]

I used TOG for the first time this past spring with 10th and 7th grade boys. It is a wonderful curriculum because it has a lot to choose from with many trails to explore but wheels you back in to stay on schedule. We are notorious for getting off schedule - we took 1.25 years for ancients and another 1.5 years for medieval. For TOG Yr 2 I incorporated notebooking based on the people and timeline events listed but this year I would like them to choose a person, discovery, art, or event to research and notebook on each week.

[DidoMachiatto]

And if you find that narrative and thread and pull it out and notebook it and do projects, more power to you. WEM is certainly encouraging of that, even if it's out of the norm on the boards.

 

I would like you to elaborate on what you mean by 'out of the norm'. Also, what is HoAW as an abbreviation? Thanks.

 

I appreciate everyone's replies. Thank you.

 

Answers to questions. First, I do not have a program for Middle Ages yet. I have to make a final decision this week so I can order the materials. Ancient Civilizations & the Bible from last year was Diana Waring's program. Loved the projects.

[PeterPan]

HoAW=History of the Ancient World

 

Does DW have a middle ages level of her curriculum? You don't like it enough to keep going?

 

The boards here are pretty diverse. I find it helpful to find people with kids who seem to learn or think like mine and look at what they're doing. That way I don't get confused by pulling what works for some other type of kid and putting it on mine.

 

Just for your trivia, the search function on the boards *used* to work with multiple words and no longer does properly (or at least didn't last I checked). To do a multi word search, you can use google. Type your search terms and site:welltrainedmind.com and it will pop up hits for you. You can also use the search engine here and search by user, limit it to just their replies on a particular board, show only their posts (not the whole thread), that sort of thing. It can take a whole Friday night to read one person's experiences on geography or whatever that way, but that's how I do a lot of my research. So if you find someone's Ommibus post intruiging, then you might do a search of the high school board using their name and the term history, hit posts, and see what pops up. Then you see where their thought process went. MtnTeaching isn't using Omnibus, but she's one specifically who has done that more crafty scrapbooking style notebooking. I imagine Kfamily has, not sure. You might find Alte Veste Academy's posts interesting also.

 

If you totally don't like what you have, have you thought of doing the Pilgrim's Progress unit study from AIG and expanding it out to a year? They give plans for that. They correlate it to Teaching Company courses on the history of england, etc. etc. Might be right up your alley. :)

[Sebastian (a lady)]

I recently came across the Omnibus series in Veritas Press's catalog. Seeing this really threw a monkeywrench into my plans.

 

Last year we studied Ancient Civilizations and the Bible with dd13 and dd15. The girls were very motivated in the interaction between research and hands-on projects which that program suggested. The program was great, (except that I felt it was simplistically preachy). Next year we are to study Medieval times, and I had prepared to do more of an historical-fiction based and webquest enriched survey of Medieval history. I came across the idea of Notebooking, where the student collects information that they find interesting about the topic, and put together a "scrapbook," creatively using the information they have collected.

 

So my plan was to do more of an open-ended research of the Middle Ages. My major was in the Social Sciences, with a lot of work in History, so I feel quite comfortable in this.

 

But in comes Omnibus, which will introduce the girls to a smorgasbord of primary document readings from the time period studied, and all the thought-provoking questions are right there for you. Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Macbeth, Canterbury Tales...

 

But the time it takes to do Omnibus is prohibitive: eight 70 minute sessions a week, not including reading time.

 

Another complication is that we are enrolled in Potter's School English classes, which I absolutely love. But 'time' is taken by this.

 

Oh, and then I have been perusing a thread from last month on the value of 'independent learning projects' http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showthread.php?t=402048&highlight=omnibus+ii

 

This makes me have to rethink all of my planning. Maybe I need to X all my history/science/skills plans and have the children research according to their interests.

 

I also saw TOG, which seems to actually approach history as doing history, not just a context for literature.

 

So as I am thinking of all this, my question for you all out there is this:

Ominibus is a heavy top-down teaching program, introducing some really amazing and valuable literature that independent foragers would seldom choose, but skimming the surface with questionable retention of anything but the philosophical discussions.

 

Notebooking has high chance of retention, and taps into the creative side that ensures positive memory, but limited in scope (if interest-driven) and questionable depth.

 

Independent (interest-driven) learning has high chance of retention, but would be depth at the expense of breadth, and very questionable direction.

 

What thoughts do you have regarding combining these, and I'd especially like to hear from Omnibus (or TOG) veterans? Try to persuade me.

 

I hesitated to comment on Omnibus, because I decided not to use it. It was introduced a few years after we started homeschooling and it seemed like such a wonderful goal for us.

 

There was a lengthy discussion last year about one of the authors of Omnibus. I won't link because I think that many of the posters would have objected to anything written by anyone who took Christianity seriously. However, it did make me dig a little more into how Omnibus presented slavery in the US.

 

You can see a lot of the Omnibus pages on Google Books. The pages for The Slave Narratives aren't in the preview, but if you ask the info point of contact at VP, they will probably send you a .pdf of those pages (at least they did when I asked recently).

 

I read a lot and I also have the type of personality that asks a lot of questions and looks for exceptions. I'm often discontented with the footnotes in a standard study Bible either because I don't think they are detailed enough or because I feel that they pick and choose which interpretation to present without mentioning that there have been areas of debate and conflict within the church over the meaning of certain passages.

 

This is just to point out that I tend to be a quibbler.

 

I was disappointed by the way that antebellum slavery in the US was presented. It felt to me as if there was such a desire to back up an anti-federalist states rights point of view that slavery had to be excused as not that bad. (I also didn't notice that the Omnibus pages discussed the limitations of the Slave Narrative texts, collected in a small number of states in the 1930s by WPA folklorists. The Library of Congress pages linking to the texts of the narratives discuss many of the limitations. I've also seen mention of a study that compared the reports given to white vs black interviewers. The former slaves (who would have been in the 70s or older) tended to be harsher when describing their lives to a black interviewer.)

 

And having just finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I'm especially disappointed that Omnibus didn't spend more time grappling with the themes that Stowe addressed. Did the existence of "good" masters enable a system that also permitted whipping a slave to death, sexual abuse of slaves, selling children away from their parents and wives away from their husbands? How does a citizen in a slave owning society respond to Matthew 25:31-46? How does slavery get excused in light of the Parable of the Good Samaratan? How does one weight the Slave Narratives collected by strangers in the 1930s with the writings of slaves written closer to the war (for example The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas)?

 

I agree that there are some great books on the Omnibus lists. I'm still working my way through many of them and will have my children read a wide selection of them. But I'm not planning on using Omnibus as a guide for reading them. I'm not condemning anyone who uses Omnibus. There is probably a lot of thoughtful content. But having poked a stick into this particular question, I found that I just wasn't satisfied.

 

What we did end up using this year was an older, used edition of TOG. We mostly used it as a jumping off point and as a schedule to keep me from spending three months on the causes of the American Revolution. I have tendency to want to dig in and dwell long on historical themes. But I have to balance that with the need for a broad survey too.

[Chris in VA]

My opinion is that the time for projects that don't involve a ton of writing is probably limited to the first two years of high school and below.

I'm hesitant to say this, but from multiple people's experiences, the last two years of high school work best as heavy writing years, because writing papers prepares students for college better than scrapbooking/notebooking/"making something" projects. In general, that is. Depends on what you are going for in college, to a great extent--but IMO, rhetoric stage is all about research and then expression, through writing.

Historical fiction is wonderful, too, but I view it as more a supplement, and more for the logic stage years. Getting into primary sources and books written at the time of the period of history being studied is more of a high school level exercise.

 

Just my opinion, based on my research. Ymmv. :D

 

(PS--we did use Omni 1 and 2, for high school. We did not do all the readings, adding and subtracting--we didn't do Narnia or some of the theological stuff in 2. It also did not take us 70 minutes a session, either.)

Edited July 13, 2012 by Chris in VA