American history--alongside SOTW? Take a year off from SOTW? Recommendations?

[melissel]

I'm contemplating how American history will fit into our 4-year history cycle. I know that SOTW 3 and 4 have several chapters on American history, but I'd like something more in depth. I saw in another thread that MFW (I think it was MFW) has an American history curriculum that incorporates SOTW. Are there any secular programs that do this? Would it be better to take a year off between SOTW 2 and 3 (or 3 and 4) and focus on American history, or would be doable to have one history-intensive year or two where I pull US history alongside world history?

 

Also, anyone have any recommendations for a secular AH program?

 

TIA!

[Karen in CO]

I have been contemplating the same things for a while. I have decided to do American history slowly for the next two years adding in SOTW 3 chapters as we gradually move through history. Then I'm going to evaluate where the kids are. I haven't found a secular American history program that I like, but I'm no good at following directions so I can't use a packaged program.

 

You could probably use Winter Promise AS1. Most of the books are secular, I don't know how much religious content is in their teachers guide or other books.

[amiechoke]

We're doing American History alongside SOTW, as a separate subject. In 4th grade, we're doing one semester on state history and one on early America (pilgrims through colonials). Stuffed in with all this (as one yearlong topic) is US geography (know and locate all states, know capitals; also know nicknames, some major landmarks/geographical features, etc.) 5th grade is founding of the country and the revolutionary war. We may touch on Civil War in second semester but as that's a ways off, I haven't planned that far ahead.

[Susie in CA]

We did not do American History as a seperate subject. Whenever we came to a chapter regarding American History we did lots of reading, projects, movies etc. This worked out great for us.

 

Susie

[lmrich]

I have been thinking about the same thing for my youngest... I love the series of books, I think it is called the Story of US. It looks challenging but very indepth. I love American history but I worry that I will over do it.

[Cathy in IL]

I use SOTW as our history base, but I do not finish it in 4 years. There are areas that I want to go into more depth with, and American History is one of those areas. I simply slow down and read more outside sources, historical fiction, and literature when I get to those time periods. We add in projects and field trips. It works well for us this way. The kids get the information I want them to have and it stays within the "flow" of history.

[Stacy in NJ]

Your dc is 6 yos?

 

I'd continue with SOTW or CHOW for now. After you've completed the grammar stage, if you want to specifically focus on American history, I'd recommed using Joy Hakims volumns, A History of US. They are better used in late logic stage, IMHO.

 

I agree with the prior poster who suggested incorporating extra reading when you approach the American history chapters in SOTW. There are tons of good supplemental fiction, non-fiction and activity guides to use as enrichment.

[Satori]

When my daughter is older, we plan to use Joy Hakim's books A History of US as well.

[Corraleno]

I plan to lightly cover the US portions of world history (mostly in the context of the relationship of US events to world events). Then, after we finish the first full rotation of world history, I'll do a year of in-depth US history when my kids are in 9th & 5th grades. I plan to use Hakim's History of US, supplemented with the Teaching Company's US History course for my older child.

 

My state requires a year of US history in high school anyway, so this way they will each get US History in 9th or 10th grade, as well as continuing with the world history rotation.

 

Jackie

Edited May 17, 2009 by Corraleno

[swimmermom3]

After feedback from my two older dc, we've chosen to do world history combined with American history over a 3-year time period (6th-8th grade). My dc have done American history into the ground and thought teaching it to the younger one again in the context of world history would be really helpful. I'm looking forward to it. We've done American history the last two years.

[Kim in SouthGa]

We are finishing SOTW 3 and just added lots of supplemental American history books from the library, and did more crafty things for American history chapters. You could also look at the Eggleston (sp?) book that Bigger Hearts for His Glory uses, and I think Calvert may have one too. Also, a lot of readers for that age will focus on American history. How about adding in some dvds? Watch Liberty Kids? Add in a lot of US geography, like Trail Guides to US Geog., and a study of the Presidents.

 

My oldest (13) will be using SOTW 4 w/Kingfisher, but I decided use Bigger Hearts for His Glory for my sensitive 8ds. I am afraid a lot of the modern history will just worry him.

[SLH in ND]

We did not do American History as a seperate subject. Whenever we came to a chapter regarding American History we did lots of reading, projects, movies etc. This worked out great for us.

 

Susie

 

 

This is what we did, as well. Because we did so much extra reading & studying of U.S. history, we pretty much only read what was in SOTW for the other areas of the world.

 

IMHO you shouldn't have to find a separate American history program.

 

Sheri :)

[SonshineLearner]

I have to say, that I love my kids listening to cds that are good about history. We checked out many cds...and also listened to Jim Weiss' cds (and though I like SOTW cds by him.... I hear that his stories are a much easier listen!) I also had my daughter read and listen to books/cds about famous people in America... If I did it again, I'd check into the Memoria Press' Modern Men...(but it may not be the right time period)

Here, they do American History for 2 years....4th and 5th grade. We're done with it...and moving on to Ancient:-)

Carrie

[Dirtroad]

I use Pledge of Allegiance Series by Gary DeMar & This Country of Ours by Marshall for History. We are spending 2 years studying King Henry VIII (exploration beginning) to the Civil War. We will spend another year on Modern history but later.

 

I have always felt the Colonial - Civil War histories are greatly neglected & really want my kids to understand the foundation of this country.

 

I use SOTW to take quick glimpses of the rest of the world during the same eras. I want them to get a view of the workings of the entire world & how it influences everyone around them, etc. However, I want them to have a strong foundation in our Republic, ideas of Anti-Federalist & others (ignored by modern historians), and our Constitution.

 

Love SOTW... but we keep it in the car & use it as supplementary to our core study.

[the floating cottage]

For my little ones we do AH in the summer and on breaks. When we go on vacation we are usually doing stuff that would pertain to US History so I will have them study about where ever we are going. My high schooler we do AH with our world history rotations.

[whitestavern]

We just use SOTW and take lots of extra time on anything that I want to go into more depth with. We started SOTW3 in September, but are only at around chapter 22 because we took more time for American History at the time of the pilgrims and now we have been stopped doing the American Revolution. I actually kind of used the Liberty's Kids series to plan my Am Rev studies around...we're taking a couple of months, reading LOTS of books, doing some activities, taking some field trips and watching correlating episodes of Liberty's Kids (I'm getting them all from Netflix) as well as lots of other great educational videos of this time period.

 

I'm kind of glad it turned out this way, because I was concerned about doing SOTW4 in the 2009/2010 school year with a 2nd and 4th grader. Now because we have taken so much time going through SOTW3, we'll probably wait until the following school year to do SOTW4.

[skaterbabs]

With my DD (6 in Oct) we're supplimenting SOTW 1 with picture books about US history. There are actually quite a few, if you look for biography picture books. Talk to your local librarian for some suggestions.

[melissel]

I wanted to come back and say thank you to everyone. I've been thinking hard about this for the last week or so, and I think I've decided to do American history alongside SOTW and just draw both out as long as I need to. I forgot to say in my initial post that I'm thinking ahead to 3rd and 4th grade, but I wanted to start thinking about it now so I could be prepared in case it affected the next year or so. For some reason, how we would work AH in just never occurred to me before!

 

Anyway, as some of you mentioned, I'm hoping to use WinterPromise's American Story 1 for 3rd grade, because we happen to own a number of the books already, and I really like their format. I know I could add in the supplemental reading myself, but unfortunately, my nature is such that, if it's not written down and handed to me, I never seem to be able to coordinate it on my own. I keep hoping that will change as my tenure as a HSer grows, but so far...not so much :lol:

 

Anyway, thank you all for helping me figure it out!

[Suzannah]

Well it looks like you've already got it figured out, but I was just going to add that we just do SOTW but spend extra time on some subjects, particularly AH. For instance, when making my plans for 4th grade, I had us take a month for the Civil War (lots of field trip opportunities in this area) and left about 2 weeks at the end of the year for Virginia history. Since Virginia is so central to AH and by that time we had already visited about every historic site there is within the state, I decided 2 weeks to make a lapbook was enough.

 

I intend to do the same for the upcoming years with a small exception. I noticed this year that I wasn't enforcing the history outlines and writings for DS as much as I should have. We've been very good about narrations and outlines for history in the past. This year working through CW Homer, however, I just didn't push it. So we'll be doing IEW's U. S. History Themed Writing next year with DS. As a result he will get a little more time on AH. But if IEW offered a Early Modern History Themed Writing we'd do that. I make sure my kids know AH, but we love history so much that we see it all around us. There's not much need at this point to make it a whole other subject. High school may be another matter. :)

 

Blessings.

[Coffeetime]

I've been thinking about this a lot as well... we started our History rotation late so my ds will be in 5th (beginning logic) and my dd will be in 3rd when we reach the Early Modern period. I think I've decided I'll just use SOTW as my spine, but when I reach the US history parts I'll just take however much time I want/need to go more in depth. There are so many great resources to use for Early American history, I'll probably use excerpts from History of US, and focus on logic stage type study with my ds and include lots of biographies etc. :)

[melissel]

I've been thinking about this a lot as well... we started our History rotation late so my ds will be in 5th (beginning logic) and my dd will be in 3rd when we reach the Early Modern period. I think I've decided I'll just use SOTW as my spine, but when I reach the US history parts I'll just take however much time I want/need to go more in depth. There are so many great resources to use for Early American history, I'll probably use excerpts from History of US, and focus on logic stage type study with my ds and include lots of biographies etc. :)

 

Coffeetime, have you seen this:

 

http://www.redshift.com/~bonajo/SOTWmenu.htm

 

And more specifically, this:

 

http://www.redshift.com/~bonajo/sotw3hakim.htm

http://www.redshift.com/~bonajo/sotw4hakim.htm

 

If my DD was going to be older, I'd probably do the same thing you're planning.

 

And Suzannah, thanks!

[Kristiana]

Chiming in here...

 

I've thought and thought about this too, as I really like SOTW and getting to know what's going on around the world. I don't recall ever learning any European or world history from Columbus until about WWI except for England and only its part in the Revolutionary War. So I'm excited for SOTW3! However, I do want to focus more on American history since we are, after all, Americans.

 

One idea (that I believe I got from someone on this board) was to spend 2 weeks on every American history chapter and then spend 1/2 week on each of the other chapters instead of spending a week on each SOTW chapter. This way you still get through 3 chapters in 3 weeks but can spend more time on American history. I haven't sat down to schedule it out and see if it will work out that way, but it's a plan. My main goal is just to survive 3rd grade next year with a new baby coming!

 

I also bought (and may shelve) the Time Traveler cds from Homeschool in the Woods to supplement colonial life and the Revolutionary War and will probably make most of our extra reading relate to American history.

[linders]

Because we just moved back east for a couple years, we are going to switch focus to American History. I think I'll just read SOTW as we go along for "world background" but keep our extra reading and projects focused on American. I just wish there were a book like SOTW for American!

[Coffeetime]

Melissa, those links are priceless information!! Thank you! Seeing it all laid out like that totally made my picture of what we're going to do and when complete! :001_smile:

[sagira]

I guess I'm in the minority here as I'm planning on dedicating third grade to American History (while studying state history as well). I have much to learn about American History, as I moved to the States in 1996, and I'm interested in ds getting a good taste and good knowledge of this in a time where he can synthesize a lot.

 

We'll be doing SOTW1, SOTW2, then AH using Mara Pratt's American History Stories as our spine, then continue with SOTW3 focusing on the rest of the world (and reviewing AH a bit) and do SOTW4 in 5th grade.

[KarenNC]

We've mixed it in. Since my daughter was reading well by the time she hit kindergarten rather than starting SOTW early we did a lot of unit study-type things with American history---major holidays, major symbols, etc. In part this was because we were doing a lot of traveling that year, including St. Louis (Lewis and Clark), Boston, etc and I wanted to give her some background.

 

This year we've been doing SOTW 3 and I've been beefing up the AH portion. We do field trips to historic sites (a good many colonial, Rev War and Civil War ones in this area), historical fiction from the Sonlight list, some of the "If you lived at the time of....." books, Jean Fritz books, Story of the USA workbooks from EPS, Liberty's Kids, some basic biographies, electronic field trips from colonial Williamsburg, etc. We are doing a lot of what another poster mentioned, doing more on the AH chapters of SOTW and going lighter on the other chapters.

 

I came across a nice book on children who were involved in various portions of history (http://www.weweretheretoo.com/ --plan to pull this back out when we hit this period again as it's aimed at 5th-8th grade). Other things I have pulled in include some Native American biographies from Steck Vaughn, a series of individual basic African-American biographies, a two volume book "American Adventures: true stories from America's past" by Morrie Greenberg and "Journals from the Past: a historical look at African American figures" by Marilyn Foster. The last one will be more involved next year for SOTW 4, as it focuses mostly on more 20th century African Americans.

 

I haven't decided what to do for state-specific history, which is typically done in 4th grade here. We've learned a lot about our state in the context of studying AH, as I've tried to choose books and resources that are more geared to our area. For instance, as a read aloud for the Rev War period, we read "Black Crows and White Cockades" by Christine Swager rather than reading "Johnny Tremain". "Black Crows" is about a young girl who helped spy on the British in Camden, SC---written specifically to give children in the South something that showed that the Rev War also happened south of Philadelphia ;).

 

I'm going to spend some time this summer working through a combo history/geography/science focus, involving the Native American "if you lived with the ....." series of books. I want to take those and correlate them with some books on biomes and animals that live in them---Alaskan Territory with study of tundra, Sioux with plains, Hopi with the desert, Cherokee with the deciduous forest, etc. If we have a chance, we're going to head up the the Museum of the Cherokee Indian this summer. Luckily we also have a local natural history museum with a good display on Native Americans in various areas.

Edited May 30, 2009 by KarenNC