SOW 1 & 2 in one year?

[jens2sons]

Is there anyone out there that has combined SOW 1 & SOW 2 in 1 school year?  I used SOW 1 for part of last school year but I'd like to get my ds caught up with SOW2 by the beginning of 3rd grade so that we can move in to American/U.S. history.  Is this a ridiculous task to take on?  I've been looking at Sonlight Core B+C because of this very reason but I'm not sure if it would be too advanced for my 2nd grader to take on with no older siblings.  I'd love to hear from others on your thoughts.  Also does anyone know of a read-aloud book list put together for the SOW series?  

 

Thank you :)

[My3girls]

If you figure it out let me know. lol  We spent all last year on pre-history and nomads.  We're just now ready to start ancient Egypt.  I've just about reconciled myself that Ancient History is going to take 2 years.

[RebeccaKes]

This is exactly what we are doing this year. We just moved to Northern VA and will be here for 3 years. I really want to spend 3rd and 4th grades on US history, and GENERALLY line the times up with SOTW. So, this year we are going through SOTW 1 & 2, doing 2 chapters a week. We did start over the summer, but we're scheduled to finish vol 1 the week before Thanksgiving (we are on chapter 13), and will start vol 2 in December. We probably won't get to go indepth for the most part, but at the Grammar stage my goal is to hook them with the narrative, so we won't take too much time with extra activities. We are going through the correlating bible stories, since SOTW doesn't go too far with that. We are also using the Usborne IL Encyclopedia and several children's books, as stories interest us. So far it's been the perfect amount. The activity book has suggestions for read-alouds for each chapter, but I'm sure someone out there has made a list or two if you aren't planning to buy it.

[kiwik]

I read a thread in the past where someone did all four in one year but I think it was only intended as an overview. Most US curricula are designed for 36 weeks which is only 2/3 of a year.

[Snow]

My son is flying through the audiobooks for sotw 2. The question for me becomes, how much do we do for activities and add ons? Will he retain anything if we don't do additional activities for everything? He seems to be able to narrate it well, so at least there's that. Anyway, yes it can be done but I suppose it depends on much your kid is into it, how much they retain without as much depth?

 

What are your ultimate goals for covering elementary history?

[kiwik]

My son is flying through the audiobooks for sotw 2. The question for me becomes, how much do we do for activities and add ons? Will he retain anything if we don't do additional activities for everything? He seems to be able to narrate it well, so at least there's that. Anyway, yes it can be done but I suppose it depends on much your kid is into it, how much they retain without as much depth?

 

What are your ultimate goals for covering elementary history?

This depends on the child. Some people find crafts/projects etc cement their learning. Some kids learn fine from the book and hate projects. Some like to choose their own projects I dependant of school.

[craftymama]

I don't even try to cover all of history. Unless my kid is on Jeopardy or becomes a history professor he doesn't need in depth on every topic. We cover things more thoroughly using SOTW as our backbone.

 

I think it really depends on your kid how much you can do. Without the extras history would be a fight, but letting kiddo pick the topic and dive into it makes history better. And I love history field trips so as a military family I also like to study based on the history around us instead of the order of the book.

 

And I have discovered that history out of order has its own built in review system.

[Coco_Clark]

I think its do-able if you just plan on reading the SOTW text, doing some narration, and moving on.  I don't think you'd have time to add extra reading, projects, mapwork, ect.  But not everyone WANTS to do those things.  So, like others have said it will depend on your kids and your goals for History.  

 

My goals for History are acquiring "pegs" to hang future studies on, immersion in popular times and cultures, and learning the joy of following rabbit trails.  My kids would hate history if it was always moving forward and moving on.  They like to hit the chapter about pyramids and mummies, or about Greek mythology and settle in for a few weeks of extra reading and research.  We did SOTW 1 in about 10 months, just reading/narrating/mapwork for chapters that we didn't find interesting and then spending up to a month on others before I finally called it and forced them forward.  Since the first half of SOTW2 includes Vikings, Knights, and Robin Hood (All BIIIIG hits around here) I only plan on doing half the book next year and calling it The Middle Ages, and doing the next half (and part of 3?) the year after and calling in Renaissance.  I'm pretty sure the 4 book SOTW series will take us 6 years, and I'm ok with that.  

 

So if I was in your position, and studying American History in 3rd grade was a top priority, I would be tempted to just go ahead and start American History now, in 2nd grade, and let it take 2 years.  Perhaps first colonies, revolution, and building of our nation one year and westward expansion, gold rush, civil war the next year?  Or some other division, I haven't looking into it yet so that's off the top of my head.

Other families and other children will have different goals and personalities.  And many do 2 or even 4 SOTW books in a year for various reasons.  

SOTW has a booklist in the Activity Guide.  I'm sure there are blogs that have lifted it, or created their own, as well.  My favorite history book list is All Though The Ages, though, and I cannot recommend it enough.  It would be especially useful for a family doing History out of the average 4 year sequence because each era has book recommendations for each age group.  http://www.nothingnewpress.com/books/all-through-the-ages-2/

[Tanikit]

I imagine it could be done - personally though I am not sure I could get it right unless I dropped something else (and that would probably land up being Science which gets done better here anyway). I probably could just read SOTW 1 + 2 to my child at 2-3 chapters a week, but then there would be no other read alouds or any exploration of anything else. 

 

The other way would be to skip whole sections and only touch on some of it - but I am no good at knowing what to leave out. Also I think that would involve too much planning for me and for me SOTW is a more open and go way to do history which is why I choose it. That said we took 1.5 years over Ancients and I have a feeling SOTW2 may stretch for us to more than a year. 

[73349]

I'm considering it for 6th grade. Since I never covered history before history 1492 in school at all :glare:  I don't have a problem condensing on the second time through. That will allow us to spend 5th on geography and world cultures.

[Dramorellis]

I personally would not rush through it to remain on schedule. I find it is too difficult *for us* to really get the most out of it if we are doing more than a chapter a week. I just don't think it matters in what order we do history or science so we do what interests us. We are 3/4 of the way through SOTW 1 but we stopped and really dug into topics that interested him more like Egypt and Ancient Greece. Because the topic was introduced, he found it super interesting and wanted to learn more, so we are going to do a 6 week unit on it before we do American History this year. We will still finish Book1 and hopefully move on to 2 before the end of 3rd grade but I don't want to force us to get through it. 

[mama mills]

For us we did STOW vol1 in 5 months, but we spent the first half of the year just watching documentaries about Egypt and learning as much as we could. When we started our history in January we would go through a couple chapters a day. My son still remembers the things we learned about in vol1.  We are doing SOTW vol2 this year and I expect we will be done by christmas. My son loves history.  We do the coloring page and map work for each chapter and use the tests as our review.  And we will do a few of the activities but they usually require "things around the house" and I never have those things, we are spending the little extra money we have on our science experiments which in our opinion are more fun. We follow the SOTW for our sit down schooling, but we do a lot of interest led learning on our own as well.

 

In these early years I think that a love of learning and love for the subjects they learn is the most important part of it. I don't think you should rush through a part of history he enjoys to keep on schedule. There is plenty of time to learn this stuff but only a short time to show them how much fun it can be.  As long as it is fun I think that it is certainly doable. If it were me trying to do this I would look at it like semesters Aug-Dec vol1 and Jan-May vol2. Each chapter in Vol 2 takes us about 45 mins (vol 1 was about 30) depending on how many times the younger ones interrupt.

 

whatever you choose I hope that you both enjoy it!