What does History look like at your house??

[kwickimom]

Regardless of your program, what does your weekly schedule actually look like? How many days and about how much time do you spend?

 

For example...if you do history 3 days a week, how much of that is reading, narrating, notebooking, mapping, projects etc???

 

I am doing my own Am. History for my DD8 and DS almost 5. I dont want it to be boring, but I also dont want to do a million "projects." I was thinking of doing around 15-20 mins of reading on each History day and then doing either a written or oral narration depending on what other writing we have for the day. I want to have an ongoing lapbook going for different time periods and maybe do a project once every 2 weeks. I am also doing a timeline and basic mapping. I am working on our schedule.

 

I think this sounds OK, but was just interested in seeing how your time is filled :)

[2_girls_mommy]

We do it 2 days a week, for about an hour each session. Extra reading at bedtime, maybe 30 min. an evening.

 

Each session involves me reading aloud, girls coloring, painting, or working on a project while I read (most often coloring.) Then narration to me, and they copy it. 1st grader only copies the most important sentence from hers.

 

One session a week we add in mapwork to the above. Extra projects may take more time outside of regular work.

 

One dd has an hour of another history class at co-op once a week, and one does extra reading assignments on her own aside from my bedtime reading to them.

[TXMary2]

Typically with my first grader, we do history about twice a week. It consists of me reading aloud, lapbook activities, coloring sheets or projects. I do a lot of reading aloud and we discuss things as he asks questions. I will sometimes ask him questions to see if he is listening or absorbing. The last couple of projects we did were making a mini-teepee and making butter. With the coloring sheets, I mostly give those to him to have something brainless to work on while I read aloud - otherwise he is doing cartwheels or break dancing.:tongue_smilie:

[anneofalamo]

2 days a week, one hour each day...we do mon and tues...and this is including the fun hands on! We do movies during lunch or on rainy days....and field trips well, those are an all day adventure

[woolybear]

I used to do a lot more history--mapping, hands on projects, historical fiction and non fiction. We probably did history 4 days a week then. I am now doing about 1 day of American history and 1 day of world history. We do timelines approximately once a week, sometimes less. I read history aloud far less than I used to and I am rarely doing a hands on history project these days. Mapwork I do generally separately ,though we sometimes find the place that we are reading about on the globe or map. The reason I have cut down on history this year is that I am bumping up other subjects--language arts, math, and hopefully science soon.

[FO4UR]

1 Chapter of SOTW per week. *Very* few projects...the kids have to beg, whine and plead.:tongue_smilie: I use SOTW as a tool to light some fires...and let delight led learning follow.

 

They enjoy coloring maps and Dover coloring books. I don't plan much of that. They just do it for fun. We have maps on the wall, and even my 4yo will draw/color his own and pretend he's a pirate LOL.

 

My 7yo loves history, so we get in more than enough without me scheduling it in. If the books are on the shelf, they will be read. I checked out the Kingfisher Encyclopedia from the library to see if it's something I want to purchase, and it ended up being the bed-time story tonight.:lol:

 

In short, I don't know how much time we spend on what, and I don't schedule any of it. The only exception being a SOTW chapter, 20min one day per week. Things will likely change when they are older, but they are getting more than I would have planned anyway and we have bigger fish to fry (3R's;)).

[charlestonmom03]

We do 1 or 2 days of the formal lessons with HO. This includes reading from Usborne and CHOW, doing map work, copy work and coloring pages. But usually we have related literature that we read daily 5 days per week. For example, the next couple of weeks we'll be reading Robin Hood, but I count that under reading not history, even though we are reading at this time b/c this is the appropriate time within the context of our history studies. We do pretty much no crafty projects, my boys are fine without them and I cannot handle doing that stuff. That is why we go to co-op -- I'll gladly work in the nursery every week so another mom can do the messy art work!

[MaMa2005]

We do SOTW twice a week. I do the complete lesson - listening to the selection on CD, answering questions, completing the narrative and finally, completing the map work and one coloring page. I rarely do the extras as I use Discovery Streaming to go more in depth when DS has free time. It usually takes us an hour to complete the lesson.

[TracyP]

Our schedule was 2 days a week.

Day 1 (20-45 min): read aloud with narration, mapwork, start project (about half the weeks I planned a project)

Day 2 (20-45 min): I read aloud while they work on project or coloring sheet on weeks we don't do a project

 

This is probably the schedule I will go back to next year (we are just focusing on the 3 R's for now) but my dd will be 8 and I will probably add in some history reading for her to do on her own.

[DragonFaerie]

I used to do history twice a week but I found that it kind of broke up the 'flow' of the lesson so now I do it in one long session, usually 2 hours or so. We read several pages from Usborne Internet-linked Encyclopedia of World History. I read aloud while the kids look at the pictures (they like the pictures and photos in the book). Then we visit any internet sites for the lesson followed by any additional reading (I supplement with the You Wouldn't Want to Be.. series). After that, we do any map work (Knowledge Quest Blackline Maps) and then any activities or projects (I'm using History Pockets Ancient Civilizations). Lastly, we do narratives (depending on how much other work/activities/projects we've done).

 

Next year I'm looking at adding World Geography to our curriculum but I'll do that as a separate lesson on a different day, though I'll probably follow the same general plan.

[2squared]

History is unscheduled at our house. I usually have some history read alouds in my read aloud rotation, and my 8yo usually has some history readers. We are slowly progressing through American history. My 8yo has a timeline that we add to when we discover an interesting person or event. We look up places on the map as we discover them in our readings. We don't do mom-designed projects, but we will add in activities that the kids dream up. If Laura Ingalls Wilder made maple sugar candy, dd will too.

 

My kids love history, and their knowledge from our history readings make up the majority of their free time play. They will be pilgrims exploring the new world, Native Americans hunting, and pioneers going westward. They dig in our garden to lay provisions for the winter. My dd has made her own rag dolls, and her own pioneer costumes.

 

Our history is unscheduled and unstructured, but it is rich.

[2cents]

We do it 5 days a week. We're using the AP US History from Open Courseware. Then we watch videos from Unitedstreaming. These days, history is taking about 3 hrs daily because we're concentrating on it more than usual.

[SailorMom]

We have always done history 5 days a week, about an hour or so a day. When the boys were younger, we used History Pockets, watched videos, and read aloud from books like The History of US.

 

Now - we use Trisms, so it is very different. Not project oriented at all. Usually the work requires reading about and researching a civilization, their music, art, religion, lifestyle, etc and then filling out questionaires, filling in maps, writing essays, and drawing detailed replications of the art and architecture.

 

Depending on what you consider "history", the above can take about 2-3 hours a day - but to me that all includes music, art, geography, and even some science depending on the civilization.