Anyone do SOTW two days per week?

[Just Kate]

Next year we will be attending a co-op that meets on Friday afternoons, so I would like to take the other four days of the week and split them up between science and history. Has anyone done SOTW just two days per week? Can it be done well in only two days? It will be our only real afternoon subject, so I imagine that we can spend an hour (or more if there is a fun activity that we want to do) on it.

 

Would love to hear your feedback. :)

[Miss Tick]

My schedule has us doing science twice a week and history 3 times, but that doesn't always happen, so there are some weeks where we do it twice.

 

The only thing to keep in mind is that SOTW has 42 chapters, so if you want to complete it in a typical school year, you probably want to do more than one section on the days you are reading history. My dc don't have a problem AT ALL listening to and then talking about two sections in a sitting. Depending on your child you may want to alternate - you narrate one section and have her narrate the other. Frankly, if you think through the process out loud it would probably be helpful. I've been thinking that I need to do a little more of this myself. "Hmmm, well the beginning was about x, then there were some details related to that - I don't need those, then the Y's invaded, and in the end ____. So here's my narration...." If you think you will do some of the activities, you might leave the second section of the week for map work and activities, since the activities (by their nature) can take a little while to do.

[Mommy22alyns]

My schedule has us doing science twice a week and history 3 times, but that doesn't always happen, so there are some weeks where we do it twice.

 

The only thing to keep in mind is that SOTW has 42 chapters, so if you want to complete it in a typical school year, you probably want to do more than one section on the days you are reading history. My dc don't have a problem AT ALL listening to and then talking about two sections in a sitting. Depending on your child you may want to alternate - you narrate one section and have her narrate the other. Frankly, if you think through the process out loud it would probably be helpful. I've been thinking that I need to do a little more of this myself. "Hmmm, well the beginning was about x, then there were some details related to that - I don't need those, then the Y's invaded, and in the end ____. So here's my narration...." If you think you will do some of the activities, you might leave the second section of the week for map work and activities, since the activities (by their nature) can take a little while to do.

 

 

:iagree: When we did SOTW, it was 2 days a week, but it did take longer than a school year to complete SOTW 1. I didn't mind it, though. Just something to keep in mind.

[5LittleMonkeys]

Something to think about is that if you follow the four year rotation you will come around to Ancients again.

 

When dd9 was 7 we did ancients but spent very little time on the chapters that covered the Americas, India and Africa. We used those chapters as bed-time stories. The next time around we will spend more time on them and less on Greece and Rome. Remember, you're creating pegs on which to hang future information...not looking for mastery.

 

If you don't plan on going through all the time periods again then you might want to just plan on working consistently through the whole book even if it takes you into the summer or into your following year. If this is your plan then I think you should extend the study of all 4 volumes of SOTW into 5 or even 6 years. You will want to go through it more thoroughly since your dc's next exposure to many of the topics will be a final run-through in highschool.

[chepyl]

Next year we will be attending a co-op that meets on Friday afternoons, so I would like to take the other four days of the week and split them up between science and history. Has anyone done SOTW just two days per week? Can it be done well in only two days? It will be our only real afternoon subject, so I imagine that we can spend an hour (or more if there is a fun activity that we want to do) on it.

 

Would love to hear your feedback. :)

 

We did three days a week in the fall. We were on track to finish it in one school year. I have had to completely revamp our schedule for the spring and we took a two month break from history. Here is what we did:

 

Day one: read first part of chapter or all of short chapter; discussed and did the narration questions; did color pages and maps while listening to story

Day two: read the second part of the chapter or started a second chapter; discussed and did narration questions; did color pages and maps while listening to story

Day three: Did test (as a worksheet together) and the lap book page for chapters finished in the week. Usually this was just one chapter unless we did two short (one section chapters)

 

We generally spent 30 minutes the first two days, listened to the story 2-3 times on the CD, and one hour on the last day. Sometimes the lap book took longer.

 

I think you could easily do it two days a week if you were spending an hour each day.

[staceyobu]

We have done it in two days a week. We have dropped a few chapters and combined others. Typically one day we read a section or two and do a coloring page. The second day we read a section or two and do an activity. We usually read at least one additional book each of those days that go along with the chapter. It seems to be working fine. I fit the schedule to 36 weeks between the chapters I dropped and combined. Also, our coop doesn't meet a full 36 weeks, so that has given us a bit of wiggle room some weeks.

[lea1]

We are doing SOTW two days a week and Apologia Astronomy two days a week with coop on the 5th day. We normally spend at least one hour on history/science. We enjoy it so much that it does not seem too much, although it does make for a much longer day overall.

 

We started off doing it in the afternoon but I found it too easy to skip it if something came up, we were just tired or we were having a bad day or something. We switched history/science to mornings, usually one of the first things we do, and we really do a much better job of it now and we are having fun with it.

 

I knew I would not skip doing any of the language arts or math type subjects so this is actually working out pretty well for us, although our days do seem long these days.

 

We need to get an earlier start. We tend to get started around 9:00am and go to 11:30 or 12:00 but we have a 30 minute break in there somewhere. Then we still need to do another hour or so after lunch, depending on how the morning went. I have one son who is sometimes a bit difficult and makes things take a lot longer than they need to. If that happens, we don't finish until around 3:00! Thankfully those days are usually not very often.

 

As for what we do on the two history days, it really just depends. We actually ended up doing the chapter on China in one sitting, for the most part. I decided not to do an activity for that one so I just read the chapter while my sons colored the Chin coloring page and the small reminder card. We did the map work on paper and also looked at our large wall map to see where we were studying and compared it to those areas we had already studied, noting how we were moving eastward and how far apart the areas were. We went through a couple of library books on China and I have one final one I found on my shelf that we will read the next time we sit down to read together (we read a lot of books). The boys answered the questions at the end of the sections and I had them each narrate one section. That was pretty much it for that chapter.

 

I was thinking we would spend more time on China so I now need to get on the ball and order more books from the library for the next couple of chapters. HTH

[SonshineLearner]

We do Co-op on Fridays, and we do SOTW there. We are using 6 years to cover the 4 books. That's about 1 chapter each week. Course... you could do it however you want :) I think 1 chapter a week is perfect and then reading about History on the other days, as a side thing :)

[TheCoffeeChick]

We do it only 2 days a week. Day 1 is reading a section or two out loud, do the review questions orally, ds will sometimes do a narration, and then the kids do a color page that goes along with what we read. Day 2 read a section or two, do the review questions orally, and do the map that goes with the chapter.

 

Also, at the beginning of each week, I assign a short book that goes along with the chapter for the week for ds to read and write a short summary about it. It's normally a picture book, sometimes fiction, sometimes nonfiction. There are some weeks it takes him 2 weeks to write the summary because I'd rather he take his time and write something well rather than turn in a sloppy mess. He does the extra reading and writing on his own, so I don't count it as a day of doing history since he doesn't need me to do it.

[serendipitous journey]

We are doing (and I make no claims that this is ideal) SOTW as an audiobook in the car. We listen to each section at least 2 times, usually 4 or 5, and I do the comprehension questions from the AG and assign any mapwork, and usually have Button narrate something and/or do a picture. That's it; no historical fiction, except for things that have literary/cultural value to me which we interject into our evening read-alouds or other storytime: Gilgamesh, for ex., or retellings of Old Testament stories or Homer (though those may end up being audiobooked as well). And no encyclopedias.

 

We also do read-alouds from AO history and Eggleston's American books.

Edited April 7, 2012 by serendipitous journey