What about the Famous Men books?

[stm4him]

How long do they take to read and do the MP guides? Would you do more than one in a year if it were your main history program? Just curious.....

[Ellie]

I did four of them in a year (Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Middle Ages).

 

However, this was in a small, multi-grade, one-room school. If I were doing it home I might not have done all four, as some of the activities really weren't fun or practical in that situation. I probably could have done more of the activities with just my own coupla dc.

 

Still, it was a good introduction to history eras, KWIM?

[stm4him]

How did you do this? One chapter a day? If you were going to do history one day per week how would you fit this in? Do you think it would be too much to do several chapters per day? Thanks!

[GoVanGogh]

We generally do one chapter a day, plus the five review lessons in the MP guides. We have done/plan on doing a book a year. I personally think it would be exhausting to go quickly through the books. My head is generally swimming after just one chapter. :lol:

 

I think the books have roughly 25-35 chapters each, so 30-40 lessons if you do the review lessons. (Actual table of contents is available on MP's website.) Decide how quickly/slowly you want to work through the books and how many days a year you school and see what works.

[stm4him]

The reason I ask is b/c I want to do a 6 year history cycle and I know for 5 of those years I want to do VP. SOTW would not fit into the one year so we're going to spread that out over 6 years and do 1 chapter per week. But it sounds like FM wouldn't fit into one year easily either so maybe we could just do one chapter per week of that too.....Maybe I'll do American Studies in that free slot but it won't line up with our CC stuff. I'm wanting to do SOTW chronologically (and maybe independently) and do VP more aligned with what we are doing in CC.

 

Year 1A: OT/AE

Year 1B: NT/G&R

Year 2A: MARR

Year 2B: ????

Year 3A: Ex-1815

Year 3B: 1815-Present

 

I was thinking that my 2B year should be something world history or middle ages related b/c that is the topic of that year. Maybe I'll do CHOW.

 

Now CAP is coming out with History for Children (though I know nothing about it). I bet I'm going to drool over that, too. Maybe Famous Men would be the one I want to do together since it is probably closer to the same at all levels vs. SOTW which gets harder.......Any thoughts on that?

 

Thanks!

[stm4him]

Eureka! (Ok, I would never say that word but it was fun to write). I think my Year 2B (and I mean cycle b/c I'm tying it to CC) should be CHOW. That is world history. It doesn't really have activities but maybe I could save activity pages and projects that we don't get to in other years and do them that year with some simple written narrations and illustrations. There are also 6 MP books (D'Aulaire's Greek Myths, American Studies, and 4 FM), so I could put those in with the cycle like this:

 

1A: OT/AE, FM of G

1B: NT/G&R, DGM

2A: MARR, FMR

2B: CHOW, FMMA

3A: Ex-1815, American Studies

3B: 1815-Present, FMMT

 

Wow! So great to have this finally laid out. This year we are roughly doing 1815-Present b/c I kept waiting to have the money for the VP S-P and that hasn't materialized, but I have been reading the literature and at the beginning of the year we did do CHOW. We are currently listening to SOTW 1 in the car too.

 

So in order to put this into practice I'll probably go ahead and start the teacher's manual for 1815-Present and see how far we get by the fall (doing one card per week) and maybe pick up FMMT too (one chapter per week). I can start printing out SOTW 1 pages for my kids to do one chapter per week and see how this all goes.....Then I can either finish it out and start the next year late or just drop it when we start CC next year and get back to it in 6 years....lol.

 

Now watch CAP release History for Children and I'll be on here again trying to fit that in!