anyone use sotw for history just like in wtm

[iona]

starting in first grade with ancients and cycling through then adding in kingfisher and moving on to great books in hs.

 

How have you liked it? What changes/alterations did you make?

Thanks

[iona]

anyone?:)

[lionfamily1999]

Well, Luke will be my only child that hs from the beginning, so I haven't done it from the start but...

 

Older ds started hsing halfway through second grade. We had to catch up in history, but are finally where we should be. He's finishing up book four. We've both loved history and he seems to have kept a good bit of it, but I missed out on the memorization (how I missed it, I don't know).

 

Dd just started hsing this year (8th grade) and she has been using KF and SotW. She LOVES it. Granted, outlining is not the most exciting thing in the world, but she has enjoyed seeing how much of modern culture is borrowed from the middle ages.

 

Except that I think KF is light on content, I've enjoyed TWTM's method for history. Ds has grown into modern times and so the modern warfare isn't as ... unsettling as it might have been otherwise. He has a wider view of American history and (imo) a better understanding of it that most adults I know. I attribute that to his learning about America in context (rather than year after year after year of USA centric history). I don't think I will have the same issues with KF's content with ds, because he has the background from SotW already. For dd, it's like she's only getting a glimpse of the picture, so we supplemented with SotW. I may do the same thing with ds, even though he's already been through the books. It depends on how well he recognizes what he's reading about.

[mcconnellboys]

I do it this way. We add in lots more books than the recs in the SOTW activity guide. We don't do narrations. My son does outline, keep a timeline, does mapwork, and does write on some topics. We sometimes do a few of the activities suggested in the guide, but not too many.

 

I occasionally change the order of chapters if I think that will make my flow better and I occasionally add in a topic here and there that I think needs to be covered, but other than that, I pretty much follow her topics.

 

I've enjoyed it and my son loves SOTW.

[iona]

thanks for responding, i hope you don't mind a few questions

 

 

Dd just started hsing this year (8th grade) and she has been using KF and SotW. She LOVES it. Granted, outlining is not the most exciting thing in the world, but she has enjoyed seeing how much of modern culture is borrowed from the middle ages.

 

Ds has grown into modern times and so the modern warfare isn't as ... unsettling as it might have been otherwise. .

 

is your dd doing the sotw4-modern times-along with your son? Will you have her start ancients in 9th along the wtm recs?

 

how did he handle the previous three books, did the reading recs seem to match up well with his age and maturity level?

 

I do it this way. We add in lots more books than the recs in the SOTW activity guide.

 

I've enjoyed it and my son loves SOTW.

 

what lists or sources do you get ideas for your other books from?

 

thanks

[lionfamily1999]

is your dd doing the sotw4-modern times-along with your son? Will you have her start ancients in 9th along the wtm recs?

 

how did he handle the previous three books, did the reading recs seem to match up well with his age and maturity level?

 

Well, we started late, like I said, so he didn't read the Ancients or Early Middle Ages on time. I know that some people have had problems with maturity, but we hadn't really sheltered the older kids. Lots of tv and video games :blush: The reading recs that we could find went over pretty well. He is a strong reader, though (even with our laziness regarding tv).

 

Jocelyn is going to do the four year cycle for high school. We are not doing the reading to go with it, though. Instead, we've started TWEM together (she is another strong reader). So, she'll be reading chronologically, but we're hoping to do one type of reading a year (novels this year, biographies next year &tc). For now, because she started late, we're doing SotW 3, which was the starting at 8th grade rec. In TWTM, she changes the whole order if you start in 8th, but we're just going to go with the 'starting in the middle' rec for this year and then switch back next year. :lol: It sounds more complicated than it looks on paper. We're going to use SWB's books for adults for high school history and Christian Liberty Press for government. I have to have one year of US History for High School, but I'm thinking we'll double up on history one year. She's a year ahead for math anyway :p and looking at the expected credits (I know, all good plans and whatnot ;) ) she'll have all her required credits by 11th grade.

 

:lol: That got rambly didn't it!

[IsabelC]

We've been doing SOTW but definitely not the WTM way. I read through the whole book, finding the places on the globe and doing a some of the suggested activities (and a few of our own) as we went. Then we had a break from it and went through about 100 supplementary books on the various topics. Later in the year we read the whole book again, this time going over the review questions and doing lots more activities. We've also done a time-line. (The other thing we changed was that we secularized it by doing prehistoric time back to the formation of the sun and planets, and omitting the Bible-as-history sections.)

 

Even though I tweak it a lot, I still love it :001_smile:

[Cabertmom]

We just started using SOTW in earnest this year with everyone from 9th grade down through kindergarten. We're using the Jim Weiss audio, and the older children are taking notes while the youngest two are coloring the pictures. We're doing modern world as that is where we were in our history cycle. Has anyone ever considered grouping things by country and going chronologically by country rather than throughout the world?

 

It's something I have been pondering for next year when we go back through to ancient history, but I'm wondering if it's just too complicated. Or is it possible that SOTW I is already set up that way?

[redsquirrel]

We are starting our second time around the history cycle. My ds1 is on his second trip through the ancients and my ds2 is just starting.

 

For the first trip through, we did pretty much what SOTW laid out. We do narration, activites, read books, mapwork, line up our nighttime fiction reading by the history cycle.

 

Now that ds1 is a 5th grader we are using Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World and a combination of K12's The Human Odyssey and Oxford History of the Ancient World books. We use that for lists of facts, deeper reading, narration and outlining.

 

The boys like to be together with history topics so I line up DS1s reading with SOTW chapters. So far, it hasn't been difficult at all. Ancients is his favorite year in history so I am allowing him to do some deeper reading, along with outlining and narration, on Egypt, Greece and Rome.

 

I plan to continue the history cycle in high school but I am not making any promises.

[Halcyon]

This is how we do it, although we go more slowly than recommended. We just started SOTW 3 and DS is in mid-third grade. We read outside lit, do narrations, questions, quizzes and lots of discussion. We like it! We're doing less of the activities right now due to time constraints, and more of the quizzes and discussions, but we'll always do lots of extra books :)

[Heather in WI]

My oldest did SOTW Ancients with the Activity guide for first grade and now is doing SOTW Ancients + Kingfisher and Usborne World Encyclopedias for fifth grade.

 

My second oldest is in 3rd grade and this is his first time through SOTW Ancients + Activity guide. (I folded him in with oldest ds, so he covered Early Modern in 1st grade and Modern in 2nd grade.)

 

My third ds will join us for Middle Ages/Renaissance next year when he starts first grade.

 

We love SOTW. I have tried other things (TOG and Winter Promise) and hated them.