WORLD HISTORY and AMERICAN HISTORY

[Malou]

At which point in the classical education teaching of History does the American History gets more detailed?  Is it adviseable to teach American History separately from World History?  Does American History get taught in detail using the Story of the World curriculum?  Thanks

[2_girls_mommy]

With SOTW, no Am. is not super thorough. But you add to it with lots of books and projects and videos, putting as much emphasis on it as you want. 

 

What I did was pretty much do SOTW 1-4 on our first rotation through history, but took advantage of field trips, unit studies here and there, videos, books, holidays, etc. to familiarize my kids with Am. History as young kids. (Columbus day? Let's stop and learn about Columbus today, back to Ancient History tomorrow, type of thing.) 

 

During our 2nd trip through World History in the modern year, we did World History, but did it much more in depth on American History and State History than on world history. The world needed to be known. You can't understand the World Wars if you don't know what was happening. But we focused on American starting with the Revolutionary War and the Constitution. We might have read a few chapters of SOTW4 that time through about what was happening in other parts of the world, but no work or writing or projects were done on that. We read and wrote about and went on field trips about Am. and State history that year. 

[....]

US history shows up in Years 3 and 4, but for my kids who did SOTW, we took a year off after SOTW 4 and did Notgrass American History.  We did not do the history cycle twice, though.  We only made it through the 4-year cycle once (using the SOTW series).

[Miss Tick]

I pulled together some light weight American history resources to use for a three year history rotation alongside of SOTW 2-4. American History was/is more of a passive content subject. Occasionally we would discuss where we were chronologically in the two class, but nobody seemed to have trouble when they weren't moving together.

[UCF612]

I plan to focus on Am. History next year (3rd year in our 1st rotation) as our main curriculum. Then have SOTW 3 as a background reading to get an overview of what was happening in the world.