What does WTM method history look like in your homeschool?

[TexasTea]

Oops. I don't know how I posted this twice.

[Laura K (NC)]

History is my high schooler's favorite subject, but I have not often participated in his learning in the past. He is very much enjoying Sonlight's 20th century history this year. We're having him do a few papers on specific topics of his choosing and we're pulling articles out of some good magazines and the newspaper to give him a current-events aspect.

 

He's a freshman, and next year we're going to do the ancients, which I will couple with Bible history. We'll do medieval/renaissance his junior year and I plan on teaching him church history then. In his senior year we will cover government and econ. plus the pre-modern period. I'm thinking about having civics and history cover two credits his senior year. I plan to become more involved in the next three years.

 

We did not do the best job with a classical presentation of history during his earlier school years. I took more of a unschooling approach since he loves history and is very willing to take up topics on his own. I want to make sure we really do a good job in the high school years filling as many gaps as possible.

 

Our literature will follow the schedule above. My son is much more fond of non-fiction than fiction, so I won't push him quite so hard in the interpretive lit. area, and use some of his lit. time for biographies, short stories, original sources, and historical fiction.

[Ruth in Canada]

and we'll do 1/4 of it each year. We use the "focus questions" for short answer responses and the website that goes with the book. We add in good documentaries (PBS has quite a few) and other stuff of interest. Usually she writes something at the end of each chapter in the book--often on something she's particularly interested in. I'll expect more as she gets older. The book was a bit of a stretch at the beginning of the year, but she seems to be getting the hang of it.

[Nan in Mass]

We went through Kingfisher, outlining the sections and doing whatever extra reading the child felt like, occasionally writing a report, in middle school. Now in high school, I have given my son Western Civ (Spielvogel) to read to himself as we do great books. They nest beautifully. He looks at the questions and tries to answer them to himself and occasionally writes something, but mostly he is just reading it. We also have various videos and Teaching Company tapes to look at, as he wants to. I'd just find a nice spine to read and then continue to unschool it. That way you won't risk ruining it for him. ;)

-Nan