Would any Omnibus veterans be willing to share a loose schedule of how you

[imeverywoman]

implemented it in your studies? I'm looking over the reading schedule and Session questions and boy, oh boy, I'm gettin' nervous! I still need to add in the Spielvogel reading.

 

Any help you may be willing to share is more than appreciated! :)

[Beth in Central TX]

I've posted my Omnibus I & II schedules before:

 

Here are the books that my son has read from Omnibus I this year:

 

Genesis 5

Exodus 5

Samuel I & II 5

Kings I & II 5

The Last Days of Socrates 10

Luke & Acts 5

Julius Caesar 10

Revelation 5

The Magician's Nephew 6

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 6

The Horse and His Boy 6

Prince Caspian 6

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 5

Isaiah 3

Jeremiah 3

Minor Prophets 3

The Silver Chair 6

The Last Battle 6

Galatians 3

Romans 3

James 3

The Eagle of the Ninth 6

The Screwtape Letters 6

 

Total Lessons 121

 

The numbers to the right are the number of sessions assigned to each book. With 121 lessons, it took us just over 30 weeks to finish; I would schedule 1 week for the books with 3 or 5 sessions and 2 weeks for the books that had 6 or 10 sessions. This gave us a little wiggle room for those assignments that took a little longer, or when I saw that a break was needed.

 

I scheduled an hour for each session; sometimes it took longer. My son would read the assignment, we would discuss the questions, and then he would work on essay or paragraph (if assigned). Generally, he would write at least one essay or one paragraph per book. For some of the later books, he wrote an essay and a paragraph. In my weekly preview, I would reduce an essay to a paragraph depending on the question. Our daily discussions can last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. As the year progressed and my son became more analytical in his reading, the discussions did get longer. Some of the session topics lend themselves to deeper discussion too while some are not as open-ended.

 

All in all, I'm very happy with the Omnibus work we've accomplished this year. At first, I wanted to tie it in with his history work, but he since he was working on the Renaissance/Reformation time period this year, it didn't work out. This wasn't a huge problem since I skipped a majority of the ancient books in Omnibus I due to mature themes; we'll pick those up in high school.

 

In addition to Omnibus I, we used Streams of Civilization for history and Classical Writing Homer B & Poetry for Beg B. There's not much writing instruction in Omnibus, so I plan to continue with the CW series as we move through the Omnibus books. Next year my son will be in 8th grade, and he will do Omnibus II, CW Diogenes & Intermediate Poetry, as well as finish up Streams of Civilization Vol II.

 

Here are the books I plan to use next year for Omnibus II:

 

Beowulf

The Song of Roland

Macbeth

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring

The Gospel of John

Winning His Spurs

The Two Towers

Henry V

Ephesians

The Return of the King

 

These books have 114 sessions planned in the Omnibus book. Basically, we will do Omnibus 3 days a week with 2 "floating" days to finish up any reading or writing assignments. Each session usually lasts 1 to 1.5 hours. It depends on how much reading is assigned and how long we take during our Socratic discussion. The writing assigments can be challenging, so I usually allow an extra day or two depending on the assignment.

 

Please let me know if you have any more questions. I use this program differently from others because I don't use all of the primary books (in Omnibus I we mostly focused on the secondary books), but I'm happy to help if I can.

[Cedarmom]

Year 1 Ancients: We focused on the primary books. We did not even finish all of those because we took some time off to do Teaching The Classics. We spent more time than they suggested on writing. We took days off of reading to do the writing assignments, because the progymnasta exercises were difficult for him

 

Year 2 and 3- We did medieval. We did all the primary and many of the secondary books. We did not do much discussion on the secondary books. There was only so much talk I could pull out of my son.:001_smile:We supplemented with Teaching Company.He did the writing assignments and tests at the end of the book. The longer writing assignments we took time off from reading so that he could concentrate on writing.

 

Year 4- Modern We got a little over half way through primary. We supplemented with America The Last Best Hope, and Teaching Company. We did discussions 3 times a week (he was doing a couple of community college classes so we were working around that)The writing assignments we followed the schedule. We plan to finish next year.

 

So, you can see from my schedule we are much slower than the book suggests. My son took about 45-60 to do the readings. We did all the discussion orally, that took about 30 minutes. I also had him do some WEM mind stuff, such as a character list and writing a summary of each reading. If we listened to a Teaching Company lecture (something I reccomend) we added about 30 minutes.We took time at the end of each book to do some WEM and Teaching the Classics questions, which is another reason we did not get all the readings done. We used Spielvogel History for ancients and medieval. I just had him read chapters and work through the text. At the end of the chapter (which took him about 2 weeks) he did the online multiple choice questions, or wrote a 1-2 page report on readings. I also had him do time line.That sounds confusing here is an approximate time breakdown of what we did:

 

45-60min Reading great book 4 days a week

20-30-Spielvogel-or Teaching Company-4 days a week

20-30 min.discussion 3-4 days a week

20 min- timeline , chapter summaries 3-4 days a week

45- writing assignments- we didn't do great books reading the days he worked on assignments

 

Don't be afraid to change your schedule as you go along. One thing I noticed is that some of the readings were longer than others(or had more difficult text) So sometimes we followed their reading schedule exactly and sometimes I told my son he could be done at an hour even if he was not techically done.

[imeverywoman]

Beth,

 

Thank you for sharing this! I'm going to spend the afternoon looking it over and figuring out how Omnibus will best work for us. I may very well be contacting you again!

 

Kindly,

:)

[Guest prairiemomma24]

What Teaching Company program did you use with Omni III?