History- what approach to take?

[mbrady]

I was never exposed to much history in high school or college, so I am learning with my kids. I have noticed two ways of studying history.

 

The first being a very detailed approach, such as SOW, MOH, and SWB's high school level books. There seems to be a lot of information, and I have a hard time keeping everybody straight. My fear with this approach is that they will forget a great deal of what we've studied.

 

The second approach seems to be learning major events in history, and then spending most of their time reading biographies, historical fiction, great books. I see this with Veritas Press (timeline cards and Omnibus) and Sonlight. With this approach I worry about them never being exposed to the more minor events in history.

 

What is better in the long run? Through the elementary years, we have done a good job of incorporating both. However, it seems that you have to focus more on one or the other in junior high and high school, or it would be easy to spend half the day on history. Any thoughts?

[Cynful]

Well, I think if you follow the 4 year history cycle all the way through (1st-12th grades), you'll get both. The first cycle is exposure, the second digs deeper and the third goes even further or involves study of the great books of history. If you've already exposed them to the major events early on, then you can spend more time reading between the lines, so to speak.

 

Now if you are just starting out in the logic stage and they haven't gotten that major event exposure beforehand, I think you have to compromise a bit and settle for what works to get the most in without overload.

[HollyDay]

Now, that my oldest is in high school, we have found that this cycle of history goes into much more depth and critical thinking. The foundations laid in elementary and middle school are acting like a platform to launch some wonderful discussions.

[PeterPan]

You might find it easier to look at how your *dc* think and tailor the approach to them. It might be that you are a big-picture person who needs to see the flow of things with the VP cards, timelines, textbooks, etc. Some people are the opposite and like getting lost in the details. You're right that up until mid-junior high it really doesn't matter. And in fact, I don't think it ever really matters. It's not like you're going to do either approach to an EXTREME. We've done VP history from the beginning, and my dd, who is very rabbit-traily with history, LOVES it. She gets some structure with the cards (which she enjoys) and she gets to pursue lots of rabbit trails via all the historical fiction, biographies, etc. etc. I don't really see your point about minor events not showing up as a valid criticism. VP is focused in *western* and *european* history, as opposed to the broader swath SOTW takes. But even that is no bigger. Many people who do VP will throw in other cultures over the summer or as a few weeks at the end. It's not like you have to be exclusive and do one or the other.

 

So I go back to my original point. The only issue is matching your history approach to the way your kids learn best. How old are your kids? For your own purposes, it sounds like you need more structure. You can bring that into SOTW and MOH by doing the timeline activities they include. Or maybe you're like me and realize you secretly hate history and would like to abdicate. This is dd's 2nd year of doing the VP online history (after she did the cards through with me in previous years), and it has been FABULOUS. They do such a great job of giving all those details and rabbit trails but making it connect and have structure and flow. They include lots of games for review. It's everything I would have wanted to do for her but couldn't.

[Maureen in Hawaii]

Hi all, I'm new to the forum, just started homeschooling this year, and want to find a good place to start history with my 7th grader. I'm not familiar with the abbreviations VP, SOTW and MOH. Can someone spell them out for me so I can research more? We'd like to just get a general overview at this point. He went up through the Egyptians last year in public school and hates history, so I want just a broad brush approach to keep him happy with school while being exposed to the overarching story. Any suggestions are welcomed! Thanks.

[Lily_Grace]

Hi all, I'm new to the forum, just started homeschooling this year, and want to find a good place to start history with my 7th grader. I'm not familiar with the abbreviations VP, SOTW and MOH. Can someone spell them out for me so I can research more? We'd like to just get a general overview at this point. He went up through the Egyptians last year in public school and hates history, so I want just a broad brush approach to keep him happy with school while being exposed to the overarching story. Any suggestions are welcomed! Thanks.

 

VP - Veritas Press

SOTW - Story of The World

MOH - Mystery of History

 

I think in order to find a good fit, you might want to ask him what he doesn't like about history and go from there.

[PeterPan]

Hi all, I'm new to the forum, just started homeschooling this year, and want to find a good place to start history with my 7th grader. I'm not familiar with the abbreviations VP, SOTW and MOH. Can someone spell them out for me so I can research more? We'd like to just get a general overview at this point. He went up through the Egyptians last year in public school and hates history, so I want just a broad brush approach to keep him happy with school while being exposed to the overarching story. Any suggestions are welcomed! Thanks.

 

Hi Mocombes, welcome to the boards! You might want to start a new thread so plenty of people see your post. Do you know *why* he hates history? If he hates history because his reading comprehension is poor and he couldn't understand the text, that's totally different from saying he's a big-picture learner or a science guy. You want to know WHY before you can solve it.

 

In general, if there's no reading comprehension or LD or attention issue (ADHD) giving him problems, then there are several options for history haters:

 

-go the literature route. Sonlight or another literature-based option can turn around some kids who just don't yet know they like history because they've never done it their way. Sonlight has a core 6/7 that uses SOTW (Story of the World) as the text and fills in with lots of literature.

-do history in a way that you can do together, with read alouds and discussion. Mystery of History would be a great option for that. You open, read together, discuss, do the activities.

-realize he hates history because it's his personality and give him an efficient, in and out, get it over with textbook. BJU would work for this or the high school level text of Human Odyssey by Spielvogel. BJU has a really terrific gr 7 history complete with dvds. If you don't know what to do and like christian materials, it would be a great, albeit expensive, starting place.

-don't do history and instead go a Great Books/discussion route. Omnibus from VP does this and has a text aimed at gr 7 and up. There are online classes for it, but it's late to sign up. Again, he needs the reading comprehension to do it (or else you listen to audio of all the books). You read Great Books and classics of the past (the table of contents and samples are available on google books) and then read just selections from a history textbook to give background and context. It's a very different way of approaching things, if he happens to like discussion like that.

-give up on formal history for the year and just watch History Channel videos from the library. You might rekindle his enjoyment this way.

-study your state's history via field trips . If you google your state's name and state history, lesson plans, that sort of thing, you should be able to pull up field trips to interesting sites. You can find lists of authors (or scientists or athletes or whatever interests him) from your state and read about them or read books by them.

 

VP offers a Transitions class ideal for 7th graders, but I think it's a full year, not something you jump into mid-year. I have my 7th grader doing the VP online, self-paced courses. The first one (Old Testament, Ancient Egypt) is young, as is New Testament, Greece, and Rome to a degree, but from the Middle Ages up the courses are fine for this age. She did the MARR (middle ages) last year in 6th and is doing the two american history courses for 7th. They're fun and very well-done. They're distinctly christian, so you'd have to be ok with that.

[Carol in Cal.]

Either way, if you organize a great deal of your language arts studies around your history studies, you can have a pretty efficient homeschooling day.

 

Personally, I did a combo of the two approaches you mention. I did not have DD do all of the memorization called for in WTM, but we did use SOTW and a lot of extra living books. The reason I didn't organize ALL literature around history as WTM suggests is that I had a lot of great kids' books that I wanted DD to read and enjoy, and I didn't want to limit us to the ones that went with her history studies exclusively. However, I did add a lot of coordinating ones, and when a favorite was reached in history as well we always either quickly reread it or at least talked about the relationship between it and the history we were studying at the time. So, for instance, I read her "Ben and Me" when she was 6 or so, and she loved it, but we really didn't get to Ben Franklin in history for quite a while. When we did, we quickly reviewed "Ben and Me" but didn't emphasize it too much.

 

What this did was bring about some semi-continuous review, which was really nice, but it also fostered general historical and literary literacy and familiarity, which has been immensely valuable (DD is now a sophomore in a pretty academic high school, and has learned that her 'general knowledge' is pretty extensive and unique.)