I would consider most of the goals in the OP as critical thinking goals, and I see history as one of several vehicles to get those across. My history-specific goals are: - Ability to place current events in their historical context - Ability to interpret literature within its historical context - Ability to think about life from various perspectives and themes of history.

There is an app that gamifies walking by turning it into a goal with a sort of mystery audio story that goes with it. The app is called "The Walk" and the goal is to walk the length of the island of Great Britain I think. For a certain number of steps, you unlock various segments of the mystery story. I've never used it, but I've used and enjoyed the same company's similar app called "Zombies, Run!" (which can also be done as walking, rather than running). There has also been a challenge going around during covid about climbing Everest- someone has calculated how many flights of stairs equals a trip from base camp to Everest and people are recording their progress up the peak! I like the App Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen, which encourages eating healthy foods through a very simple checkbox system. I get a lot of silly satisfaction checking off the boxes. It involves no weighing or measuring or restriction, just trying to check boxes whenever you eat a food from one of the 12 healthy categories on the list.

Tell us more about it! Is this homemade? Colored masking tape? It looks like the yellow lines are probably 100 years each, but the others are on a different time scale?

My 6th and 8th graders do all history and some science together. I see the biggest difference in their output. My 8th grader can write a clearer, more cohesive paragraph than my 6th grader on any given topic. In terms of science CONTENT, I don't really expect a difference in what they learn. There are just some basic science concepts to be laid down before high school, and it doesn't matter if the physical science is covered in 7th or 8th, vs, chemistry or biology or whatever. You just need to build up a basic science vocabulary and understanding of large concepts so they are prepared for high school.

Kilgalon's books won't work as standalones for writing instruction, but they are an excellent warm-up exercise in sentence style to add to any curriculum. I think they can mostly be done orally, or with teacher writing things on a whiteboard while kid(s) call out ideas. They do not include a lot of "notes to teacher," you'll need to sit with the book and study its method for a bit to get a feel for it. They are essentially written as a work text to the student, but I think they wouldn't be very helpful unless a teacher was guiding the lesson a bit.

@8FillTheHeart- I agree with your dd's assessment of They Say/I Say! But the template I linked is basically everything useful form the book in bullet point and helpful for someone who has a good idea of what he wants to say, but doesn't know some of the magic words, phrases and verbs to present an argument in a nuanced way. It's a great jumping off point for a kid who has a fear of the blank page and is similar in many way to some of the other sentence-building methods out there like Kilgalon, but specifically for the argumentative essay. I think it's a good crutch or stepping stone.

Hopefully this works ok. Meetings include discussing the week's checklist work (preparatory on Mon, review/discussion on Friday, and Bible study with oldest). History for the two oldest is a major subject for us with multiple resources. History for the littles will be a family timeline, A Little History of the World, and perhaps picture books to correspond from our own bookshelves. The big kid spelling block will become Latin in 6 weeks. Small, consistent steps add up. My children are fluently bilingual, AND learning German, and Latin. but to make that happen, we had to sacrifice. You don't see handicrafts or nature walks on our schedule. But my kids are FREE, really FREE, from 3-6 each day. And during those three hours, they go outside, do crafts, play imaginatively indoors, read, draw comic strips (Each has their own "series" they have created and add to regularly), etc. My little kids have additional large blocks of freedom in the AM and PM. As 8 has said, many subjects can simply be family culture. My DH does German with the kids in the evenings. He also reads to them each evening from all sorts of books. We like to watch documentaries on the weekends, or classic TV shows in French. We don't own a car, so we talk and observe nature every single time we leave the house to walk to the store or a friend's house. The kids routinely read aloud to each other, which is truly the delight of my heart. Anyway, I'm sorry I've talked your ear off. Give yourself SO MUCH GRACE. Just keeping 6 kids healthy, happy, and fed is a big deal and it will get easier with each year. Edit- one last thing. The only reason this works is because we have built habits, over YEARS, that allow my little kids to go off and play without disturbing us when it isn't their turn, and my big kids can go off and work without supervision when it isn't their turn with mom. Without those two behavior patterns, I don't think homeschooling would be possible for us. We were able to achieve this with small steps, every day, from toddlerhood onward. I'm not a harsh or punitive mom, just a mom who greatly values peace and quiet, and is willing to play the long game to get it. 🤣

Sorry, my spreadsheet didn't paste fully.... Let me try something else...

Edited, see following posts... E&I are my 8th and 6th grader and do language arts and history together. R&J are my 3rd and 1st grader, and do some LA, history, and science together. The three oldest each have a checklist with daily math drill (computer), typing practice (computer) and map work to do and check off, plus a weekly book list to work through and the two oldest have a small amount of independent writing on their checklist as well, which will then be brought through revision with my during writing blocks. MANY small topics are covered in their reading lists, which is great about middle school aged kids, and yours will be there soon! Kids do German with dad in the evenings, as well as read-alouds by dad, purely for the pleasure, chosen by the kid.

What you have described is beautiful, and most importantly DO-ABLE! You know what you want your days to look like, you just need the confidence to embrace it and align your schedule with your priorities. I still think there is too much here. Is citizenship really something that needs to be explicitly taught? Most aspects of citizenship will come up naturally with your history and book discussions. There is very little transition time. On Thursday, you have a science reading, experiment, and an older child doing his own thing (if I'm reading correctly), all to be set up, done, and cleaned up in 30 minutes. Not realistic, in my opinion. You have a half hour nature walk, but that slot will include getting shoes, hats, coats, etc, possibly including quite a bit of assistance for babies and toddlers. Then taking it all off again, putting away, potty break... These are just a few suggestions to further simplify: Others have mentioned loop scheduling, and here's where I think it would come in handy for you, as opposed to a MTWThF schedule. Life happens, OFTEN, when there are babies and toddlers and pre-schoolers in the house! If you need to change a diaper and clean up a spill during the Heroes of Asgard block... you suddenly need to double up the next day, run late on the schedule, not see Asgard again for a full week, or. .. ? With a loop, you just do it the next day, no big deal. For your afternoons, I would do loops like this: 12:30-1pm: Nature walk (Keep your ideas for observation on an index card in your pocket if you like, but don't insist on them. Nature doesn't work on a schedule, so you don't need to schedule certain observations for certain days of the week.) 1pm-1:30: handicrafts (The other advantages of loops is that kids sometimes really get on a roll. When my kids are in a clay modeling mood, they are in it all week, or even 2-3 weeks in a row. They would NOT be happy to have to put aside a clay project and not touch it again for a week. With loops, you can stay with something until the kids are ready to move on to another thing, or you can simply explore a particular handicraft for 4-6 weeks, the move on. This greatly reduces the number of supplies that need to be available and put away each week, especially since this is only a half hour slot on your schedule.) Also, I cannot imagine doing handicrafts in 30 minutes. It would take my family of four relatively independent kids 5-10 minutes to take out and distribute supplies and 10-15 minutes to clean up, depending on the material. 1:30-2:15: Spanish sing along and picture book basket. (Again, put those books on a loop, rather than scheduling them by day. Take advantage of natural interests in the kids by staying with a high interest book, rather than putting it to the back of the basket until the following week. As a child and adult, I would go absolutely bonkers having to wait on a favorite story for a full week!) 2:15-3:00 : Quiet time and history basket. As above, being on loop avoids any feelings of "We missed a day!" when a child is unwell, misbehaving, or baby has kept you up all night. 3:00 : Snack and music. I'd drop any "learning" here. If you want them to absorb some music in the background, great, but snack should be a moment when the mind can wander. 3:30 Piano 7pm : Bedtime book basket loop. Again, when there is a spark of interest, run with it. Read Shakespeare for the whole week if that is what happens to catch the children's interest this week. I see you have a note on unfinished work. There is no unfinished work at these ages, when the lesson is done, the work is finished, unless you are dealing with a behavior issue that involves a child refusing to do age-and-level-appropriate work for an appropriate period of time, in which case finishing something up could be a very short term form of natural consequence. If it doesn't result in immediate behavior modification during the next day's lessons, it probably isn't going to be an effective consequence, so forget it and find something else. None of this is meant to sound dictatorial, just trying to help you out with additional ideas. I am going to try to link a spreadsheet that has my schedule on it for my four school aged kids, who are vaguely the same age as your oldest kids.

I discovered, by accident, that the SAT essay prep prompts available online seem to all have the student reading an argumentative piece, then writing about how the argument is constructed. I am hoping to use these sample prompts to segue us into argumentative writing- spending a while analyzing the construction of other people's arguments before moving on to constructing it ourselves.

This is what I am doing with my ds13 8th grader for first semester: - First, ds has a beautiful writing voice, so luckily we are not dealing with lack of style per se. But we are dealing still with run ons, awkward phrasing from time to time, lack of commas, and other details. At what point in the writing process are you finding run-ons? I find we have the most problems when ds is under the mistaken impression that he is supposed to just write and then hand it to me, without once going back through to read it over. So we're going to be working hard on revision this year. - We're going to focus on paragraphs for the semester. - I am having him read A Little History of Economics and A Little History of Philosophy independently, one chapter a week. I am reading ahead of him, and pulling out key vocabulary and concepts, which I use to create a study guide. It's just Chapter Name ----> List of vocab and concepts. His job is to read through my list, read the chapter, then hand write a paragraph summary of the chapter that hits all the points on my study guide list. We are then taking those paragraphs all the way through the process- that is, revision and editing- on the computer, together. I have printed out a few lists of things like transition words and the "they say/I say" templates to help during revision. My goal is to remove scaffolding in the following order: - Have him choose the important vocab and concepts without my study guide, jotting them on a post-it as he reads, then comparing to mine. - Complete handwriting and first revision on computer without my assistance, which should include reorganizing into the best flowing paragraph. Final corrections together. - Removing study guide completely. He will read, highlight/note, and write his paragraph from his own list of key terms/concepts. The two books I mentioned are part of a series by Yale press, and they (so far) have a great format for this. The chapters are quite short, so a paragraph summary is usually the right length (sometimes it takes two), they are written simply and accessibly, but not dumbed down- perfect level for middle school, in my opinion. We're about three weeks in, which I realize is early times! But they seem to be a perfect fit for writing across content areas with minimal parental prep work.

I think it's important to consider historical context as well with CM. Writing at the turn of the century, it is entirely possible and probable that school books were the only books her students had regular access to, same with art supplies, and perhaps even time out of doors. For a modern homeschooling family, opportunities to read across all content areas and interests, opportunities to engage in art projects... are all natural, normal parts of unscheduled time. I think the biggest take home message from CM is that habits matter. Cultivating habits is our number one job as parents and educators. You've got a lot of small children, and investing time upfront in sibling harmony will pay huge dividends later. Put school aside if necessary and really dig in to where the friction points are. Could the rooms be assigned differently so that bookworm kids are grouped together and lego maniacs are grouped together? Can spaces be designed to meet more needs with less friction? Does early morning exercise help to get the wiggles out and result in more peaceful concentration and play in the house? CM wasn't infallible. She was innovative and thoughtful, and most importantly, she looks kids seriously. But you don't have to be reading a US history, Bristish history, and World history curriculum simultaneously. At your children's ages, that would be nearly impossible for anyone to sort through and understand. You also don't need to limit yourself to vintage materials. There are wonderful, engaging books that have been written more recently. You've gotten some great ideas here! Break free of the labels and embrace your family and meet them where they are!

My son literally just wrote a paragraph on Socrates today because we're starting a philosophy course this year! I'll look into this, it looks like a great addition.

I came in to leave a recommendation, the very under-loved, under-appreciated, better-than-Harry-Potter-says-my-kds (and me): The Underland Chronicles, by Suzanne Colins. Similar or just slightly below HP in reading level, very similar in content, with books getting more mature as the series advances, on par with HP. But I'm also happy to find a series to try- Catwings. I've been looking for a series for my dd8 to read in French, and these have been translated and seem just right.

My plan for after SOTW with a teen is another chronological history text to be read independently, while simultaneously doing some student-selected deep dives with Great Courses and associated reading chosen by me. At this point, I know I'd like to do a deep dive in China's history and Russia's history with ds, since they are "big players" in current events. For my younger set, we'll probably just keep cycling SOTW, but I do have a second plan, it just depends on who combines with who, who is ready for deeper dives, etc. The plan is similar to my plan for teens above, but instead of Great Courses, I'll have to find a middle-school appropriate book or video list- possibly the "World of ..." books by Foster.

As others have mentioned, her geology apparently does not take the current consensus on age-of-Earth as the only option. I think she might have a FAQ about it on the product page, but I'm not sure. We have used The Elements, Carbon Chem, The Cell, Mapping the World, and Excavating English and I have not seen anything non-secular in them. They are excellent. As a Christian, I think we have a fine line to talk when presenting science. I lost my faith for a number of years, as I was raised YE and then went on to get a STEM degree. When the YE legs were knocked out from underneath me, I found I couldn't hold on to the other aspects of my faith, and I turned pretty radically atheist, having felt I was sold a pack of lies. I came back around to Christianity much later, from a very different perspective and much more solid apologist base, which has nothing to do with the mechanics of biology or geology. As much as I hate the terms "secular science" and "secular history," those are the programs I try to use, as I don't trust other people to combine these topics with Christianity as I want to present it to my kids.

This sounds more like us, LOL. We've started Blood, Bones, and Bit and Bloomin' Rainforests, and I've been assaulted with constant factoids over the last two days, so it seems like they are a hit at our house, too!

Another vote for Kilgallon

I just finished Dracula, and it's probably now on my top 10 list of favorite books. I was not expecting to like it, as I don't do horror or "dark", but it was actually so full of light and human virtue that it was just beautiful.

I do think I'm letting the amazon reviews freak me out. I'll maybe just read a couple and see how I feel about the tone and overall content. My kids aren't typically ones to pick up bad habits from books or films, so probably ok. My extended family got SO UPSET when I sent my nephew some Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales books that included Donner Dinner Party. My dad is a Donner party buff, and was absolutely appalled at the title. 😂

Words to live by!

This thread has already been helpful. I am making a mental shift here- I don't consider myself a newbie so much as a homeschooler who is ever-evolving, a lifelong learner myself. I am comfortable with our schooling philosophy and general direction, and the fact that I'm regularly wildly adjusting our day-to-day has more to do with personality than inexperience. I can occasionally be intimidated by posters who post about their methods, schedule or routine, because it feels that they have "arrived". And perhaps some have, but more likely, they are expressing the current iteration of a series of systems that have served over various ages and stages. It would be interesting to start a thread on homeschool evolution and have people describe their ongoing changes in method or routine to meet various demands of an ever changing family life.

I wonder if it relates to how quickly a person settles into a routine. I'm still not settled into a long-term one!

Title says it all, really. I'm not opposed to using these books because they are engaging, but I do feel like I'm going to have to pre-read them for appropriateness, which is a pain. My reading list is getting about this tall (she says, holding hand above head)! This is for an 8 year old mostly, but probably also an 11 year old. I guess I could make the 11 year old pre-read them and report back...