When doing the additional suggested readings for SOTW, do you...

[dorothy]

A. Read only as much as you can before your next scheduled lesson then stop and move on.

 

B. Read all of it and stay on that topic until it is done. Then go on.

 

C. Keep plugging away at both the readings and history chapters even if they stop coinciding because the additional reading is taking so long.

 

We are in this predicament right now. I want to move on to the next topic - Civil War - but we have not finished the additional readings (SOTW4) that come before it: The Jungle Book, The Little Princess, Pinochio, etc.

 

The dc want to read these, but, of course, there is tons to read for the Civil War as well.

 

What do I do?

 

Thanks.

[Kate in Arabia]

Well, for us it would depend on the additional reading. We have reading we do during our history lesson, and reading that I do for them at bedtime. Our bedtime reading I usually reserve for longer storybooks, preferably ones that tie in to our history; so the books you listed would all be nighttime reading for us, which we do every night and therefore are able to get through longer books faster.

 

The reading we do during our actual history period is usually restricted to shorter books, picture books, and non-fiction.

 

This doesn't include level-appropriate books that I've selected for the kids to read on their own time.

 

If we are running over our history lesson, I would probably skim through the rest of the book, or ask my older ds to look through it on his own time, unless it was really important. If it was a nighttime reading book, we'd keep on reading it. There are several chapters in SOTW where we don't have a "nighttime book", so it tends to even out in the end.

 

Does this even help, lol?

[TCoppock]

I tend to order all the recommended books from the activity guide with the knowledge we will not be reading all of them. I pick one or two which I feel are most important and assign them to be read. After that DS is allowed to pick which ones he would like to read. When the chapter is finished we go through the books and return the ones that have been read as well as the ones he has no desire to read. If there are books left over that he still wishes to read they become part of his "fun reading" time. We continue on to the next chapter and the cycle repeats itself. However, if there is a subject he is especially interested in we tend to stop and allow for further time to explore it. We spent almost two month studying the Egyptians.

[Chris in VA]

Do you have more than one read-aloud time at your house? We usually have 2, 3 or even 4 books going at one time. Dh is reading thru the Narnia series with dd8--their reading takes place in the evenings. I'm reading The BFG (Roald Dahl), and a selection of English Fairytales, and dd is reading me Farmer Boy for fun (and because I've been sick). She has a number of independent, fun books going, too. And we aren't even homeschooling her!

When we did homeschool, we read aloud a book for fun, and we usually had a history book going at the same time. If the chapter in SOTW had a number of good picture book or one-day length books, we'd read those alongside SOTW. If we chose a longer book (like Adam of The Road or Castle Diary, for example), we'd just read it at odd times during the day until we finished it--sometimes in place of our fun reading (non-history selection), sometimes with it.

 

I "camped out" on certain topics for a little extra time, but mostly so we could do more activities. It never bothered me to be reading from a previous time period. If I felt we were spending too long on a book and there were others I wanted to get to in the supplemental reading, I'd just add a few more reading times to our day, or suspend our fun reading for a few days.

 

I also found that the summer was a great time to read things like Pinocchio or Secret Garden, or any of the other wonderful books that were not connected academically to our school year.

[Tonia]

I want to move on to the next topic - Civil War - but we have not finished the additional readings (SOTW4) that come before it: The Jungle Book, The Little Princess, Pinochio, etc.

 

Well, I would consider those books literature - not history - so I'd schedule them at a separate read-aloud or read-alone (depending on the child's reading ability) and continue on to the civil war.

[Alana in Canada]

You really can't slow down too much with SoTW--says she who took 2 years to do SoTW1 and 1 1/2 years to do SoTW2!

 

It has cost us, though. It means at least one era of history won't be studied when my oldest reaches the Rhetoric stage--when, actually, I think it matters more.

[Jane]

At this point, these books are assigned reading for my children given their ages. Yes, we continue to move on in history while they are still reading a book on the Irish Famine or whatever topic we just completed. Not all the chapters lend themselves to good extra reading. Some topics my children will spend weeks reading about (ie: Civil War), other topics we just read from SOTW and do the activities (map, timeline, questions, etc.).

 

HTH.

[Stacy in NJ]

We only loosely align our reading with the SOTW chapter. We read one chapter of SOTW IV every week. My dss are assigned a chapter book that coordinates with the chapter in SOTW we're reading, a chapter we've just completed or a chapter we're approaching. I don't assign a book for every chapter.

[Michelle T]

I'm kind of anal about wanting to keep supplementary reading on target with the specific topic we are covering.

 

I'm reordering SOTW to a more geographic schedule, which works with the spine I am using (History of Our World, by Steck-Vaughn). This makes it somewhat easier to read longer books, as we aren't jumping around from culture to culture as much.

 

I try to stick with shorter books that I expect to finish within the time frame I've assigned to a particular culture. This could be anywhere from a week to a month, depending.

 

I tend to get a BIG stack of books from the library, then agonize over how to get through them all! I'm slowly getting better though, and these days I can generally just pick one or two.

Michelle T