SOTW4 for K/1st

[laurarams]

I'm part of an once a week academic homeschool co-op that cycles through SOTW for K-5th graders. Next year we are doing SOTW4 and the steering committee is trying to figure out the best way to do this for the younger classes like K and 1st grade since it's geared towards the older students. We like all the grades doing the same time period/cycle because it's easier for families at home to all be reading/listening to the same book. Any suggestions on how to best gear the SOTW4 to the younger elementary ages?

[Laura Corin]

I'd honestly do something else - that's a tough period of history. 

 

Have the younger ones do some unit work on their own and have them join in when the cycle repeats next year.  If it were my kids, I'd do a big unit on the prehistory of the planet, including the Big Bang, Plate Tectonics, Evolution....

[73349]

I don't think it'd make a lot of sense to kids that young with no history background. Why not do a year of geography with them?

[Farrar]

I think if you want to keep them on the same track as their siblings, a year of "20th Century Heroes" where they look at people like Gandhi, MLK, Susan B Anthony, both the Roosevelts, Churchill... and important cultural figures and artists... that makes sense. But the idea of having them reading the same books as the 4th/5th graders feels to me like it robs the older kids of the material they deserve and skips too much.

 

I really second the idea to just do something else for a year instead. US history, Geography... I'm so glad we did modern history and I absolutely think you can do many aspects of modern history with younger kids - but the way you'd do it is just radically different. For a mixed age group like that, making a topic like ancient history or geography scale in one group is so much easier.

Edited October 12, 2017 by Farrar

[2_girls_mommy]

I would keep them in the same cycle. But I would just do like above said: focus on people from the time period. There is plenty that they can do at that age, plenty of biographies. 

 

We once did an "American Heroes" class at co-op for around that age range. Basically I used the What Your 1st Grader Needs to Know as a guide, and we learned about the peoples in the book (and added some too.) We focused on America that year, and the WYFGNTK had a good selection of peoples for that age range, and as I recall it is from the same time period as SOTW4 basically, but its been a good 7 years so I could be off on that. We got videos of them from the library on the person when we could and do a craft or an activity each week. Some of the activities from SOTW4 will probably  be appropriate. 

[nixpix5]

Agree with everyone else. I would do something else. It is a more challenging read and comprehension level as well. My L and 1st couldn't do it, I know that much. Plus the content is so heavy.

[blondeviolin]

I'd just do geography, probably.

[SoCal_Bear]

ditto on geography or a level appropriate US History. It's just too heavy. They really aren't missing anything getting looped in when in 3/4 which is the earliest I would do this book.

 

 

[Spryte]

Another vote for doing something else entirely.  Then let them join in when the cycle starts over again.  SOTW4 is really geared to slightly older kids.

[EKS]

I would not do that part of history with little kids and I also wouldn't want to do it with kids who have no historical context for it.

 

For that group, I'd do a combination of world geography and American history.  Having a bit of American history early on is good because there are so many wonderful children's books for the K-3 crowd that assume some knowledge of American history or are made better by it.

[Hunter]

Are the ages combined in the same classrooms? Or just studying the same time period at the same time?

 

With the assumption the little guys have their own classroom:

 

– I would absolutely keep the little ones in the modern time period. 

– On paper, I would use SOTW 4 and pull a little SOMETHING from each SOTW chapter

– I would supplement heavily with more literature, hands-on, and geography, and cover less history

 

The modern period produced more literature for children than any of the other time periods. It should be pretty easy to find a book set or written in even the darkest periods that gently focuses on the daily life of the small child. For World War 2 you could focus on rationing and victory gardens, and cook a dessert without eggs and milk. You could do a lesson on secret codes. You could map an area and show border shifts. You could focus on the new medical science and technology developed. 

 

I don't see what the problem is.

 

I like consistency and am big-picture focused, so I'd stick with SOTW chapter by chapter. But another very sensible solution that I often see is American history for K-1, and ancient history held off until grade 2 or 3 or even 4.

[Hunter]

This isn't any different than a church that reads though the Bible together. When the church gets to King David, the little ones don't learn about Bathsheba, but they have a grand time learning about Goliath.

[73349]

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Edited October 2, 2020 by Carolina Wren

[Hunter]

There are educators that think a child cannot understand a foreign culture until they are grounded in their own. So they start with modern because it is the most familiar, and then compare the foreign to the familiar.

 

My opinion is that there is no starting place that doesn't require previous knowledge. So we just plop in somewhere and spiral upward the best we can. And the younger siblings often get plopped and pulled the worst, but...the world is a big diverse place and needs different skill sets and the yanked around little ones have their own unique skills BECAUSE they experienced this.

 

If the cycle is in place, and working as a big picture, I think it is equal to any other plan that could be attempted.

 

That is just my crazy opinion, and certainly not a fact. LOL. 

 

Thanks for the welcome back!

[Hunter]

It is harder to teach than it is to be taught. I think cycles and scope and sequences benefit the TEACHER more than the student.

[drjuliadc]

Ooh ahh Hunter. You just handed me the "epiphany ball" regarding cycles, scope + sequence.

[2_girls_mommy]

I am with Hunter on this. It isn't a big deal to not go completely chronologically on this. WTM even talks about it. It is easier to keep the whole family on one topic than all on their own separate chronological path from the beginning. We study history chronologically in our house. But when my 2nd child started K we were already in SOTW 3. I surely did not start over with her. She jumped in there and had SOTW4 in 1st grade. I did as Hunter is talking about. I actually did read all of the chapters at home aloud, since I was reading them to the 4th grader anyway. She was there for that. But her main history was from the picture books I picked up at her level and from the classes she had at co-op where they explored projects based on people from American History.  At home my kids did age appropriate work. Little one colored or drew, did narrations and mapwork. 4th grader was on to written narrations, was starting a picture timeline (cut/paste in 4th grade,) and even started some of the beginning outlines from the SOTW4 AG. 

 

The issues in SOTW4 are no different from wars and things going on in the younger grades' ancient times. The book itself is written in a more grown up voice, but like I said the younger children are getting the meat of their lessons from the picture books written to them. The events of the time period aren't different than any other brutal wars, slavery, and all from the ancient times. 

Edited October 18, 2017 by 2_girls_mommy

[Farrar]

Look, I think you can absolutely do modern history with younger kids. But I do see a difference between looking at slavery in ancient times vs. slavery as practiced in the American South where we invented modern racism. Or looking at the campaigns of Alexander the Great where we only know so much about the life of the everyday soldier vs. the horrors of life in the trenches. Or looking at mass deaths that we only have storybook-like accounts of vs. the Holocaust or Stalin's gulags for which we have ample photographic and video evidence and even living survivors. These horrors are much more vivid because they're closer. Also, many of them deal with issues that are much closer to current events. There is also a difference in how something like the Holocaust was carried out, using the machinery of modern times. I think all these things make this stuff genuinely harder for adults and kids. I find it oddly tone deaf when people on this board try to say that horrors that happened in living memory are "the same" as horrors that happened two millennia ago.

 

And the way I would approach them with 6 yos is different from how I would approach them with 10 yos. On the other hand, the way I would approach ancient history is a little closer together for that same 6 and 10 yo. I could more easily, as a teacher, have them in the same room for the Roman Empire than I could for the Civil War or Colonialism. For me, that's the root of my suggestion that they do something else.

[luuknam]

Look, I think you can absolutely do modern history with younger kids. But I do see a difference between looking at slavery in ancient times vs. slavery as practiced in the American South where we invented modern racism. Or looking at the campaigns of Alexander the Great where we only know so much about the life of the everyday soldier vs. the horrors of life in the trenches. Or looking at mass deaths that we only have storybook-like accounts of vs. the Holocaust or Stalin's gulags for which we have ample photographic and video evidence and even living survivors. These horrors are much more vivid because they're closer. Also, many of them deal with issues that are much closer to current events. There is also a difference in how something like the Holocaust was carried out, using the machinery of modern times. I think all these things make this stuff genuinely harder for adults and kids. I find it oddly tone deaf when people on this board try to say that horrors that happened in living memory are "the same" as horrors that happened two millennia ago.

 

 

I don't think anyone was suggesting going into graphic detail, showing photographs of the holocaust or w/e. 

 

I'm not sure that to a 6yo, it really matters whether something was 75 years ago or 2000 years ago. My almost 7yo is just beginning to have a sense of how recent stuff is/isn't, and I think that's mostly because I keep adding stuff like "this happened when my grandparents were alive, this stuff happened when my parents were little, this happened when I was your age". Because realistically, he asked quite recently whether mommy was alive during the Great Depression. Um, no. Of course, when kids are even younger, they might even ask if their parents were alive during stuff that happened 2000 years ago. K-ers and 1st graders may or may not have a good grasp on how long ago things are, and therefore not care whether horrible stuff happened 'recently' or a long time ago.

 

Wrt SOTW4 (we're on the last disc of the audiobook), he seemed to like it less than the other books, and ended up reading others books instead a fair amount of the time we listened to it in the car. Though he seems to be a bit more interested now that we're in "opa and oma were your age when this happened"-territory (actually, we're past that now... we're at Chernobyl, so, "I was your age when this happened"). Quite frankly, I thought at least some of SOTW4 was kind of hard to follow at times (obviously, I can't pay as much attention when I'm driving, but I mean compared to SOTW1-3, which we also listened to while driving). My listening comprehension while driving is probably no worse than a 5-6yo's listening comprehension, so, SOTW4 might just be too hard to follow as-is.

[Farrar]

I don't think anyone was suggesting going into graphic detail, showing photographs of the holocaust or w/e. 

 

I don't think it's about doing SOTW4 per se. (And, yeah, it's harder to follow and more jam packed with stuff, but that's just the time period, I think.) I think it's about all the accompanying stuff. I presume that they don't sit in the class and listen to SOTW4 and then leave.

 

I'm not totally sure what you're thinking in terms of "graphic content" but we read picture books that were explicitly about children who died in the Holocaust when we covered it when my boys were in 4th grade. We visited the children's exhibit at the Holocaust Museum. We read children's books that did have some dark photos of the whole 20th century in 4th and 5th grade when we covered it. I think we were right to do that. I would not have wanted to do that with second graders, much less kindergarten kids. It's not that we dwelled on it... but these were children's books. And reading this stuff was how we covered it - that's the stuff that's on the supplemental book lists for SOTW4. And I would open up harder conversations and questions than I would with kindergarteners and do it in a different way.

 

Again, I think you can do this era with younger kids... maybe even with SOTW4... though it certainly wouldn't be my first choice for some many reasons with that age. And maybe in a family where you only have a couple of kids, it's easy to moderate content and decide on a moment by moment basis. But I can't imagine how I could run a class that would do the time period justice for either group if I had K/1st graders in a room with 5th/6th graders. Nearly any other historical era or social studies topic would be easier to cover with that age span. I think the OP is long gone from this topic, but if it were me, I'd either choose another topic or I'd break the class into two groups and let parents decide where to put their kids and how to handle supplemental materials.

[Hunter]

I think people reared in a church sometimes approach teaching history a bit differently than entirely secular people.

 

I think ancient history feels more relevant and less abstract. Many of us do not see the sharp divides between ancient, medieval, and modern times.

 

If we were reared in a church where very difficult portions of scripture were continually summed up into something appropriate for children, like chapters of the law, including bits about venereal diseases, becomes a lesson on washing your hands more often.

 

The bookshelves might be full of one type of book, and SOTW might be centered on those topics, but it doesn't mean that a family/group needs to prioritize those parts of the chapter. The follow up books can be based on a single sentence from SOTW. For example, as I said earlier, victory gardens.

 

The textbook is a buffet for us to choose which parts of it we want to cover. It is a suggestion, nothing more. I am SOOO used to not reading all of a chapter, or at the very least editing some part on the fly as I read it aloud. 

 

If I truly DO see little difference between ancient and modern slavery, for the older children, I will tend to teach it that way with a discussion of the declaration of human rights and newspaper accounts of modern slavery, to tackle the topic of slavery as a whole. The younger ones might just get a biography of a child that lived on a plantation, and a taste of fresh sugar cane and molasses. 

 

Am I oddly tone deaf? LOL. Seriously, I am only quoting and responding because I'm being light and am hoping it will be received in a light way. The odd part I have down for SURE!!!! LOL. That was the part that stuck out to me, and made me laugh. I am ODD, and am okay with that. 

 

More seriously, now that I did start responding to this, I'm not sure it is tone deaf to be immersed so profoundly in a subculture worldview that it dictates how we teach and use textbooks and maneuver though life in general. Worldview seeps into us, good and bad, and is displayed in ways that can look very odd to those just as immersed in their own worldview. Worldview differences affects how we teach every subject, but maybe most blatantly and noticeably in how we teach history.

 

For me, I have sometimes taught history just like I was taught the Bible. I cover and emphasize what I want, skipping and supplementing as needed, while making steady progress through the book. And doing it pretty oddly, I'll bet. LOL. And yeah....I'll bet downright deaf to what is the current trend. Is being deaf to the cacophony around you always a bad thing? 

 

I hope I have not been offensive! This post is a bit of a step farther than my usual type of post. I'm not trying to debate. 

Edited October 19, 2017 by Hunter

[luuknam]

But I can't imagine how I could run a class that would do the time period justice for either group if I had K/1st graders in a room with 5th/6th graders. Nearly any other historical era or social studies topic would be easier to cover with that age span. 

 

I agree that it'd be hard to make it age-appropriate for all kids K-5 in one room (though I'm not sure I agree that it matters all that much that it's modern history). I just didn't read the OP as saying they were in one room, just as that they have classes for K through 5 at their co-op, and that they want to keep each of their classes in the same time period if at all possible:

 

I'm part of an once a week academic homeschool co-op that cycles through SOTW for K-5th graders. Next year we are doing SOTW4 and the steering committee is trying to figure out the best way to do this for the younger classes like K and 1st grade since it's geared towards the older students. We like all the grades doing the same time period/cycle because it's easier for families at home to all be reading/listening to the same book. Any suggestions on how to best gear the SOTW4 to the younger elementary ages?

[laurarams]

Thank you everyone for your posts. We are currently looking through the SOTW4 and figuring out if we can pick and choose things that would be good for K/1st OR to just do unit type studies of American History. Our co-op does separate out in different classrooms so each grade is their own classroom of 8 students and a teacher. We do 1 hour of history and 30 min geography related to history. Students read or listen to 1-2 chapters ahead of class and classtime is spent on read alouds, notetaking (as age appropriate), an activity and then the geography time is for the maps. So for us getting read alouds and activities for the younger age is hard since the activity guide isn't geared towards the youngers for Vol 4. It was ideal for us to cycle through K-5th SOTW and 6th-8th switch to Mystery of History but covering the same time periods so when we are in SOTW 1 we are in MOH 1, so they point is if they are in co-op K-8th grade they will cycle through the time periods more than once. Since I have kids spanning K-6th, I'm trying to help make it so we are all covering the same things for my own sanity.

Edited October 19, 2017 by laurarams

[Hunter]

I wouldn't limit yourself to just the resources listed in SOTW 4. I would invest in another reading list or two, or find free lists, or ask here, and pull from them, too.

 

The first thing I would look at is what is available for the American Girl series.

[Hunter]

Here is a list of some of the American Doll books and resources that can be used to cover some wars and harder topics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Girl_characters#BeForever

 

Some of the books were made into movies. I used the Felicity one with one student who had no historical knowledge at all and didn't even know that George Washington was a president. I kept stopping the movie and asking her to take notice of the dress style and technology and architecture, so that this movie could be a peg in time to hang other lessons on.

 

She told me years later, that she now automatically does this with any movie that has a date, and how much it has helped. Before that, all history was just random bits with no flow. 

[Hunter]

Here is a list of the dolls with unit studies

 

http://www.girlsofamericanhistory.com/time-periods

 

This seems to be the time people are most worried about. I think there is a newer Hawaiian doll also set in WW2, now. Hawaii, while barely mentioning Pearl Harbor, would make a great lesson for the little ones.

 

1904: â€“ Samantha— – Turn of the 20^th Century in America (Unit 6)

            This unit helps to understandcovers child labor, orphan trains, women’s suffrage, and more.  Some things to consider including in this study would be the transcontinental railroad, tThe Gilded Age, the Iindustrial Rrevolution, inventions, innovators, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Susan B. Anthony, and more. Craft and field trip ideas from the time period are included in the unit to help enhance the study.

 

1914: Rebecca – New York Life in 1914 (Unit 11)

            This unit is an excellent look into the life of an immigrant – the transition into adjusting to life in America, work conditions and school.  This unit is from the perspective of a young Jewish girl, yet does not impose one belief over another.  Many Jewish citizens made significant contributions to the United States.  This is an excellent opportunity to discover those contributions and study those citizens.  This was an exciting time in history.  People were hard workers and busy much of the time making a way for themselves.  Movies were beginning to be quite popular, as were amusement parks.  Biography and research opportunities include Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin, Tsar Nicholas II, Pearl White, Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, early movie making, labor unions, immigration and more.  Craft and field trip ideas from the time period are included in the unit to help enhance the study.

 

1934: â€“ Kit— – The Great Depression (Unit 7)

            This time in history helps teach us so much about values and morals.   Some things to consider including would be the crash of the stock market, the Dust Bowl, living during the depression, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, and more. Craft and field trip ideas from the time period are included in the unit to help enhance the study.

 

1944: â€“ Molly— – World War II (Unit 8)

            This is a time in history that is filled with information. During this time period you might consider including some background of WWI, countries involved in both WWI and WWII, the Nazi Regime, Anne Frank, the occupations of Germans, Italians, and Japanese, the Holocaust, and more. Craft and field trip ideas from the time period are included in the unit to help enhance the study.

 

Edited October 19, 2017 by Hunter

[Hunter]

The Hawaiian doll is brand new. Info about it is here.

https://www.today.com/parents/story-behind-nanea-american-girl-s-hawaiian-doll-t115434

[SeaConquest]

We are doing SOTW4 right now, and, even putting aside the horrific aspects of modern warfare, it just doesn't seem all that interesting for a Ker. I mean, today we did the Suez Canal, and battles between Bolivia, Peru, and Chile over mining rights in the desert. The day before that it was about the Japanese Meiji Restoration. It's just not all that entertaining, to be honest. 

Edited October 19, 2017 by SeaConquest