K12 Human Odyssey student pages & TM - what are these like? Online samples of them?

[Annabel Lee]

I've been having my logic stage child read the appropriate section in K12 HO to go along with his younger sibling's SOTW chapters. I keep wondering if we're missing anything by not having the K12 Student Pages and Teacher's Guide that I've read about here. What are the student pages like? What sort of questions, activities, etc. are included? What is the Teacher's Guide like? Is it helpful? I can't find samples to look at anywhere online, so your input is much appreciated.

[3andme]

If you're trying to line up Human Odyssey with SOTW, I'm not sure they'd be that helpful. If you were doing HO alone, it might be more helpful as a scheduling guide since it does break down the work into 180 lessons. For each lesson, the teacher's guide has a list of objectives, materials used, and keywords. It also has some brief notes about the activities for each lesson and the pages to read. It also, has answers to the offline worksheets or assessment. Most of the time it just has the answers without the questions.

 

The student's guide has the objectives, keywords, and assignments like the teacher's manual but also all the offline worksheets and assessments. These guides were designed to go with the online course which includes a lot of online activities and tests. Over half the activities and many of the assessments are online so the worksheets and tests in the student's guide are not comprehensive and kind of hit or miss.

 

I guess my recommendation would be not to buy it unless you need specific guidance on scheduling or activity suggestions.

[TarynB]

I don't think the K12 student and teacher guides are absolutely essential, but I do find the teacher guide useful for the following:

 

1 - It gives an overview (usually a brief paragraph) of the material covered in each lesson, which is handy for me if it has been a while since I pre-read a particular set of pages in the text.

2 - I appreciate the keyword and pronunciation guides. (I often get tripped up on correctly pronouncing lengthy Greek names, for example. I do want to try to get them right, LOL.)

3 - Most (or nearly all?) lessons we've done so far (halfway through Vol. 1) have both online and offline questions. The offline Q&A printed in the guides (we're not using the online program) are plenty sufficient for us in assessing comprehension AND discussing the material. Even if you don't have the questions in front of you, the short answer sections are written in such a way that the gist of the question is easily inferred.

4 - I also was pleasantly surprised to find sections that often go beyond just basic fact regurgitation, into deeper connections. One example is the compare/contrast charts over various aspects of the different cultures that have been covered so far and their connections to modern cultures.

 

This week, the sections I used in the teacher guide included the answers to questions like these:

Who was Pericles and what are some things he is remembered for? What were the main causes of the Pelopennesian War? What was the Delian League and why did Sparta not join the Delian League? What could Athens have done to avoid war with Sparta?

 

The teacher guides do have suggested scheduling for lessons, but I find we don't need it. We just read a chapter or two a week, depending on the length of the chapters.

 

Also, the teacher guides have lists of third-party (not K12) web addresses covering details specific to each lesson in case your student is interested in learning more about a particular topic, like the Persian Wars or ancient Hindu art, for example. We've used those from time to time and found most of them worthwhile.

 

The guides looked to me to be a lot of busy work at first. I do still pick and choose what parts of the guides to use. If you want to use Human Odyssey solely for WTM-style narrations, outlines, etc., you definitely don't need the guides. But, especially since they are usually inexpensive to buy used, I do not regret purchasing them. Hope that helps you! Feel free to ask if you want more details.

 

ETA: I have never seen online samples, either. (I'd be surprised if K12 provided samples online.) Also, my understanding is that student and teacher guides are only printed for Human Odyssey Volumes 1 and 2. There is a print text for Volume 3, but I'm not aware of any offline student or teacher guide for it.

[Annabel Lee]

Thank you both! I hadn't thought about the fact that using the guides would impact how we study history. For now, I think I'll just have him continue reading corresponding material in his K12 book because we do history a la WTM logic stage, with outlines, summaries, fact lists, etc. I want to keep him on the same weekly SOTW topic as his little brother for ease and for shared projects & discussions. Next year when little brother enters logic stage, I might revisit the idea of letting K12 with the guides drive the bus instead of SOTW. The questions do sound useful to me.

[DarlaS]

Thank you both! I hadn't thought about the fact that using the guides would impact how we study history. For now, I think I'll just have him continue reading corresponding material in his K12 book because we do history a la WTM logic stage, with outlines, summaries, fact lists, etc. I want to keep him on the same weekly SOTW topic as his little brother for ease and for shared projects & discussions. Next year when little brother enters logic stage, I might revisit the idea of letting K12 with the guides drive the bus instead of SOTW. The questions do sound useful to me.

 

Do keep in mind that they don't have these for the 3rd volume.

 

I just started the 1st volume with my 12 year old. I do like the questions and assessments so far, but am going to have to come up with another plan by the time we get to vol. 3.

[kalanamak]

Not essential if you feel you are getting enough meat and mileage out of the book alone, but nice to have is you'd like more sitdown stuff and want some insight as to what the kids taking the program formally are looking at. I google to find something to replace it, and this often works.

 

However, as time goes by, and we are doing most of our writing from our work with Mosdos, I have backed off using the student guide other than to quiz him verbally after we do a section to see that it stuck. Especially now we are in the religion survey part, which is less about dates and digs and how civilization started and more about philosophy and for us, at our stage, this is more couch-discussion material than quiz-for-knowledge material. But that's just me/us. I think when we get past the "What were they thinking" chapters, I'll go back to the discussion questions.

 

BTW, my son loves this book and asks to do it.

 

Also, I got all texts and guides off Amazon used, for prices I found decent. Just kept my eyes out.