KeriJ Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 (edited) Following up on the SCM discussion on this thread. I refer to the curriculum guide when planning my year. I look at each subject listed and decide if I am going to use what they suggest or use something else that works better for us. So take History/Geography/Bible: I have loosely used 2 different guides in the past. At one point, I started with the guide and then quickly switched to just following the book list. Last year, we followed the book list more closely, but still didn't fully use the guide. This year I have high school, middle school, 2 elementary and K. I was feeling overwhelmed with the idea of planning everyone's history (which in the past I've really enjoyed), so I decided to try using a guide as written. I bought the new version of the Middle Ages guide. I bought all of the family books (except for a few that we already owned), and I bought The Stuff They Left Behind packet. But I'm really only using the history portion exactly as written. Over the summer we worked loosely through the Bible plans. And we haven't yet incorporated the geography plans. We only do school 4 days a week, so I wanted to tweak those plans in order to keep our schedule. For the history plans: I put my 9th grader into the 10-12 list. My 7th grader is using parts of the 7-9 and the 4-6 lists. My youngers are mostly doing the family part with me and few books off their lists. This new guide works really well for us. There are only 2 days a week of family history reading. The older kids have independent reading every day. Two days a week, they have an additional spine with written narrations, and there is a primary source book for the upper level. The plans are so simple, but I feel, effective. Write a name on the whiteboard, briefly review what was covered in the last lesson, read the new lesson, look at a map, look at a picture from TSTLB packet, do narrations if desired. I often print out coloring pages for the youngest to color while I'm reading. I love having all the reading mapped out and scheduled this year. However, I do substitute books for the individual lists based on what is at the library and what we own.(I usually check with HOD and BF for that) I checked with Sonya once about her rationale for some of the high school books, and she calmed my worries that they were truly fine for high school, and I agree with her thoughts. I can share more about that if you want. There are exam questions at the end of each term. I plan to use those as essay questions for my high schooler throughout the year. Since I can pull from each age list, it gives me quite a few topics to choose from. SCM also has links for hands-on projects if that's something you want to do. I also have a Draw and Write Through History that we may do in the spring, and we listen to the CC timeline cd in the car for the Middle Ages, and have fun recognizing names and events we have studied so far. That's my wordy explanation of how we do SCM history. :)_ Edited September 20, 2017 by KeriJ 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angie in VA Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 Thank you so much! :hurray: 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeriJ Posted September 20, 2017 Author Share Posted September 20, 2017 The one other product that I use from SCM is their Picture Study Portfolios. Love those! There are many others that I would love to use, but ....$$! :) So I just use something similar and cheaper. I also follow TWTM recommendations in some areas (R&S English, for example) which works better for us. On the years we don't use R&S Spelling, I use Dictation Day by Day instead of Spelling Wisdom since it's free on the internet. I own Visits to Europe, which looks great, but haven't used it yet. I'm not sure if we will or not. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soror Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 Thanks for sharing I've been looking at SCM for next year. I want something that schedules some books but I'm having a horrible time trying to find something that fits. My daughter, unlike my son, is not a big reader and so many of the schedules and programs I've looked at have 500 books. I want her to use living books but it can't be too heavy in reading, it looked like SCM was a good compromise. I also liked the simplicity of the schedule. I like that they have 12 wk at a time weekly overview in one place, I used BYL one year and it drove me BONKERS having to go through pages and pages to look at the week at a glance, I like to schedule 4 day weeks so I want to know what is used over the week and schedule it out myself. I liked the look of the geography too, I thought about using it when we did culture studies a couple of years ago but was too cheap to buy them. I was just looking at doing the history and geography. What do you think of their book A Castle with Many Rooms? Is it well-written? How is the Stuff They Left Behind? Is there much religious overtone/bias? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaquitita Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 Thank you so much. I've been designing our own and It's getting harder to keep our family all together and our schedule not overloaded. I've been trying to figure out how to combine different age group Beautiful Feet guides for American history next year. Sounds like maybe SCM would be a lot less work for me. Lol 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeriJ Posted September 20, 2017 Author Share Posted September 20, 2017 Thanks for sharing I've been looking at SCM for next year. I want something that schedules some books but I'm having a horrible time trying to find something that fits. My daughter, unlike my son, is not a big reader and so many of the schedules and programs I've looked at have 500 books. I want her to use living books but it can't be too heavy in reading, it looked like SCM was a good compromise. I also liked the simplicity of the schedule. I like that they have 12 wk at a time weekly overview in one place, I used BYL one year and it drove me BONKERS having to go through pages and pages to look at the week at a glance, I like to schedule 4 day weeks so I want to know what is used over the week and schedule it out myself. I liked the look of the geography too, I thought about using it when we did culture studies a couple of years ago but was too cheap to buy them. I was just looking at doing the history and geography. What do you think of their book A Castle with Many Rooms? Is it well-written? How is the Stuff They Left Behind? Is there much religious overtone/bias? We are really enjoying A Castle with Many Rooms. It reminds me of SOTW. I don't feel that there is religious bias at all. I may not be the best person to ask though, since I am in agreement with SCM's statement of faith. But I really haven't noticed any specific leaning in the book so far. TSTLB is just color photos of artifacts that are mentioned in the reading. I like to display them in our school room after we use them. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoo Keeper Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 Wonderful description, Keri! You make it sound ....peaceful. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeriJ Posted September 20, 2017 Author Share Posted September 20, 2017 Wonderful description, Keri! You make it sound ....peaceful. :)Honestly, it really has been.😊 I feel that SCM truly lives up to the "simply" part of their name. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoo Keeper Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 (edited) Honestly, it really has been.😊 I feel that SCM truly lives up to the "simply" part of their name. (inserts fingers in ears) "La, la, la, I'm NOT going to check out their website" ;) :leaving: That's me leaving the room to go put my blinders on... Tempting. Very tempting. :) I have a friend that is very enthusiastic about SCM; I'm beginning to understand why. Edited September 20, 2017 by Zoo Keeper 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wehave8 Posted September 20, 2017 Share Posted September 20, 2017 Following to read later... Thanks for the posts! Pam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wehave8 Posted September 23, 2017 Share Posted September 23, 2017 Oh, boy! Iknow what I'm doing this weekend!!! :) :lol: (Ignore that post I just wrote today about keeping me accountable to not do any switching. After all, we aren't doing history until second semester this year. :001_tt2: ) Pam 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KeriJ Posted September 25, 2017 Author Share Posted September 25, 2017 Another nice thing about the Castles book I forgot to mention is that pronunciations of difficult words are in parentheses immediately following the word. I'm sure other books do this as well, but I have been realizing how helpful this is while reading aloud. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angie in VA Posted September 30, 2017 Share Posted September 30, 2017 Just getting back around to this, but I wanted to link this post by Mommy to monkeys about SCM. It's from the thread linked in post #1. Thanks again to KeriJ for starting this thread! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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