SOTW 1 - supplemental reading ???

[mlktwins]

Hi all! I am starting SOTW 1 with my boys in September (1st grade). I spent the morning on my library's website bookmarking recommended reading for the first 10 chapters. My goodness. How many extra books per chapter do you guys get to? How do you decide which ones to use? I am fortunate that between my library and my dad's library I can get many of the recommended books - both additional history reading and corresponding literature suggestions. I know we cannot get to them all though so I have to decide what to check out and what to let go.

 

Thanks so much!

Mendy

[2_girls_mommy]

I check out all that they have. Then we take them home and put them in the library box. I look through them, picking the best ones for our bedtime reading. For us that is usually the good picture, storybooks. Reading one a night means we get through 6 or 7 of them right there.

 

Dh and I read through several of the history ones just for our own additional familiarity on a topic. I assign any that are appropriate through the week for assigned reading. And my girls are welcome to pick through the box for their own reading whenever they want. Sometimes the additional history reading makes some good reading when we need something to look at any old time.

 

We by no means make it through all of them. Sometimes I end up with several on basically the same topic like in the case of biographies. In that case I flip through and pick the one that looks best for us.

[Mert]

:bigear:

[boscopup]

I get whatever my library has (usually 2-3, but sometimes there are 5-6), then I put them in a book basket. DS picks whatever he wants to read. They are not assigned reading in my house.

 

I also try to get books on different topics. We don't need 10 books about Alexander the Great. One or two is plenty.

[Carol in Cal.]

Usually we did 2 per SECTION, not chapter. Sometimes more. But we tended not to do all the other extra stuff, like hands on projects and tests. Also I wanted to make sure that we read widely, not just history related books, so we always had LOTS of books going and available, in general.

[KrissiK]

I do not read extra books for every chapter. For one thing, some chapters you won't find extra books. I also tend to go by my kids' interest. The chapters on Ancient Egypt obviously got a lot of attention. My boys loved mummies and there are some good bios on King Tut and another good one on Queen Hatshepsut (did I spell that right?). Some chapters you just go through, read SOTW, do the map work and call it good. As you go through the book you'll just kind of get a feel for things, develop a routine. Don't worry about it right now. For us, it just kind of came together. Just wait till you get to the other SOTW books where there are tons more extra reading to do. :D That's where I'm getting hung up on - the Renaissance. If I had my way, we'd spend a month just studying the Renaissance. And as it is, I think we will!

[ChrissySC]

I heartedly agree that you should keep a book box or basket. However, I do not think checking out everything is a great idea either. At this age, it is not so much the reading as the pictures and the general discussion. Remember that you already read from SOTW. :) Get some picture books!

[Milknhoney]

I usually pick one or two from the Additional History recs and one or two from the Literature recs. I base my choice on what looks the most interesting and whether or not I think my son could read it on his own. I try to pick books that can be read in one sitting, or at worst, that can be finished over a week's time. We are onto something new each week so I don't want to get bogged down with anything long. If necessary, I'll request extra books and select the best once I get home. That also helps because most everything comes through interlibrary loan and if it doesn't arrive at my library by the time I need it, it's good that I had backups requested too. Sometimes there just isn't anything out there on the lower elementary grade level. In that case, we look through it together and read the photo captions.

 

It took a while to develop this routine, especially since at the beginning of first grade my son wasn't reading much on his own yet. I would say err on the side of getting too many books at first until you have grown a sense of how to pick based on the catalog description.

[NanceXToo]

I, too, take out whichever ones the library has. And the ones that they don't have, I request via interlibrary loan. And then when we get them, we read most of them (but my daughter is 10 so I don't have to worry about most of them being too advanced or whatever).

 

Occasionally one just seems too dry or too repetitive and we might skip that one, but we do read most of them.

[fatfishes]

:bigear:

We have just started this and I was wondering this too

[RahRah]

I do SOTW a bit differently than most - we listen through the entire book first (CD's), then dig in by area or major civilization in chunks. Basically when we do the activities and projects for Egypt, it's for everything Egypt in one unit, not broken up by chapters coming and going and coming back to Egypt as it does in SOTW if you read a chapter and do the activities, read a chapter, do the activities. While we did start SOTW that traditional way, we stopped and started again this other way and I feel DS retains a lot more doing it this way at his age.

 

That said - with each major area or cilvilization covered as a whole, we typically did no less than a week on any one, sometimes up to two or more weeks. For each, I pick at least one book that will be a bedtime story - so right there is seven per unit. I also pick books that focus on something we'll be doing projects on, or something to read as the start of an activity we'll be doing....so that often means another 3-5 books for the unit. And we use the encycopedias for our overview and review of what we heard in SOTW to reinforce learning and vocabulary.

 

Since I break up SOTW into units, I also incorporated world geography into the units since that works nicely with the SOTW activity book maps and adds just a bit more to our work by including a geography section in the unit. For example, when we did Egypt, we followed that with the rest of Ancient Africa since that allowed us to also do our geography of Africa and see how, throughout the ancient period the maps changed and what Africa looks like today.

 

With timelining, instead of going linear across the wall, we do vertical time chronology within each area, side-by-side each other, so by the time we end, we'll have the chronology done, it'll just look a bit different as a timeline than if we did it horizontally as one long timeline.

[RootAnn]

We did 0-7 per chapter depending on the topic & length of books. I used to pick from both the history & literature sections. I found based on the ages of my kids & their interest, that the literature ones were the ones we enjoyed the most. So, we average three extra books per chapter.

 

However, we spread out the readings so sometimes we read an outside book before we get to the chapter in SOTW & sometimes we are still reading library books on a topic two weeks after we've finished that chapter. It really helps my kids link topics and time together. It also helps retain the information longer because it isn't just ONE week or ONE span of time for that area/time.

 

We had WAY too much outside stuff the first year & just the right amount last year (SOTW 3), so it took me awhile to figure out our style. :-)