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Is the History of US (Hakim) Assessment Book necessary if you have the Teacher's Guide and the Student Guide?


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You absolutely do not need the assessment book if you have the OUP guides. In my opinion, the teaching guides are the best choice for tests overall, and I say that as the owner of the single volume OUP assessment book (these are 100% multiple choice, boo!) and the Hewitt syllabus (very good tests, superior even, but only one per book vs one per unit with OUP).

 

The guides are pricey, but I use them for tests, as fodder for discussion, vocabulary, map work, some critical thinking, and writing prompts. I have the full set of teacher and student guides, but I would choose only the TG if $ is an issue. I think they are meatier, and that's where the tests are.

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Of course you can teach history (and other subjects) without guides or tests. The OP specifically said she wanted hand-holding for history instruction and the guides will hold her hand for sure. I rarely use guides, but I do appreciate a decrease in my workload when I do. Also, some kids (mine!) like and benefit from tests.

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I am someone who taught U.S. history to myself as I homoeschooled my kids using Hakim (2 different years).  I was in high school in the early 70s and I can't even express how lame some of the social studies classes I took were, as teachers tried to be relevant (imaginary housing of the future, spirtual world after death, really).  So I needed a lot of hand-holding to teach my kids history, too.  The good thing was that I could spot things that my kids (and I) didn't get!

 

I'd use what you have at first, and then switch things up if you find something isn't working.  Each family is going to be different.

 

I have the whole set of Teaching Guides and they are great, lots of meaty stuff in there, but none of it really got used here.  I wasn't a knowledgeable "classroom teacher" and my kids weren't good at figuring out the core meaning of an assignment on their own while still juggling all the other millions of facts they were reading.  I usually had to figure out which chapter an assignment went with, make sure I remembered I had an assignment to go with that chapter, try to allow for an unknown amount of time for each assignment page, and figure out if their answers were close to being correct.  I did pull a few interesting ideas for my own discussion, and I felt more secure having lots of possible resources at hand, but they were expensive for that purpose.  Not sure if they are the same "Teacher's Guide" you mentioned, because mine were a set of 10 guides.  Yes, I overspent -- the first student I brought home to school was a high schooler.

 

I tried the Hakim tests and found that the only way my students could pass a test after a whole book would be to do a heavy-duty memorize-and-forget study session right beforehand.  Although that skill has its uses and benefitted my oldest public-schooled son greatly in college, it seemed little was retained in the long-term.  And U.S. history is a core concern of mine, in creating knowledgeable future voters and such.

 

In the end, I decided my kids needed to immerse themselves in the text as they went along.  This could be done through conversation, but neither year was a good year for me to sit with them and read/discuss together.  It could also be done via good note-taking and outlining, but that took my perfectionist-dd too long and took me too long to correct in my non-perfectionist-ds.

 

So, I used (1) the Sonlight daily questions.  The kids digested their daily readings using those extensive (excessive?) daily questions on what they were reading.  I liked that the questions showed there is more than one way to look at a lot of things in history, although I ignored most of the over-the-top teacher notes that took that point a little farther than I needed. 

 

Then, (2) they used the Assessment book, with  multiple choice questions on about three chapters at a time, about 10 tests per book.  I don't ordinarily like multiple choice at all, because whenever I try to look up wrong answers, I can't even find them or they are some obscure fact amidst tons of other similar facts, so I can't blame my kid for getting them wrong.  However, the Oxford multiple choice tests were easy for me to find in the text and usually the wrong answers were wrong because of something we could talk about -- would this really have happened in that state? isn't that the name of a black man - would he really have held that position at that time?  If my student had a knowledgeable conversation with me about the wrong answer, I gave him some credit back.

 

Thiese tools did not mean hands-off learning for me, since I would have to find a chunk of time to really read through all their answers (i didn't read the books, but I read their answers carefully and looked up any answers that were wrong or questionable to see what they had read).  But I felt both my students and I needed to immerse ourselves in the material as we went along in order to move it into our long-term memories, and these tools helped us do that.  I also liked that they learned how history is what's happening today, all wrapped up in culture and opinion and lots of names we can't keep straight but really should.

 

HTH,

Julie

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I'm using the Hakim books in a co-op class for 9th graders. We use the condensed version of the books, with 4 books in the series instead of 10. My approach has been much like Julie in MN's above. The students read approximately 2 - 3 chapters per day and are assigned a study guide with 3 - 4 questions per chapter. I get most of the questions from the Sonlight guide, others I make up myself based on what I want the students to know. Our co-op meets twice a week, so class times are devoted to lecture, during which the students take notes, discussion, and critical thinking activities (see Reading Like A Historian). After each unit in the book (usually between 15 - 25 chapters), we do a unit test. I get most of these questions from the Oxford assessment book, which I pick and choose based on what we've covered extensively in class. Yes they are multiple choice, but I've found that the questions are phrased in such a way and the answer choices are thoughtful enough that the students really have to think about the question and what they know before answering. I also add short answer questions of my own where appropriate. In addition, we've spent the last few weeks working on an American Hero project in which the students each chose an individual from American history to study, then write a paper on and give a presentation to the class about that individual. The semester will culminate with the presentations right after Thanksgiving, so I'm excited to see how they do.

 

Note: the Assessment book lines up with the original 10 volume series, not the condensed version. I own both, so I've gone through and marked in my condensed books which chapters correspond with the original series. Then I coordinate the tests, which takes a little extra work and some flipping back and forth but is not too bad.

 

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