Notgrass Exploring American History

[Guest]

If you have used Notgrass Exploring American History can you share if you liked it or not?  Also, do you recommend the literature books that they suggest, or do you recommend something else?  I was thinking of either using Notgrass's Literature selection,  Lightning Literature's American History books, or Excellence in Literature American Literature.  Which one would you go with?

Edited July 13, 2017 by Guest

[Liza Q]

One of my daughters used it in 11th grade, so about 7 years ago. I combined it with the Great Courses US History dvds. Since I didn't care for the literature, I made my own program, which included the LL Early American Lit. It was a pretty good year.

 

I'm not familiar with the EiL lit but I do like LL - I've also used the Early British and Medieval over the years.

[MerryAtHope]

I thought it was "just okay" for history. (We liked Notgrass Government a lot though).

 

My oldest used Sonlight 100 for history, but I was frustrated with all the notes on the Hakim books. I had decided to either use Hakim but significantly edit the notes to make things more doable (my kids are not super fast readers and we didn't want to spend all that time on the notes), or something else when I did US history with my dd. DD thought she might like Notgrass, so we tried it. On so many things, it just seemed like cursory information--we missed the depth of doing SL. Granted, my dd really doesn't like history no matter what we used (which makes the fact that she liked Notgrass Government all the more impressive to me. My history-loving son liked Notgrass Government too.) Still...I was underwhelmed with the US history.

 

The lit selections are good (I actually did a combo of the Notgrass selections and the SL 100 selections since I had already read some of the Notgrass selections aloud to my kids when my oldest used SL 100.)

 

 

Edited July 15, 2017 by MerryAtHope

[8Arrows4theLord]

The history part was good, not as in depth as you would get from Sonlight, but it wasn't bad. We didn't like the literature section. It was basically a read this book and enjoy it type of program. They have revised it since we used it, so hopefully the literature section has some structure to it now. Co. Aytch really grossed my Dd out.

 

If you are just looking for an Am. Lit course you could look into IEW's Am. Lit.. We haven't used it, but it seems to have a good reading list.

Edited August 4, 2017 by 8Arrows4theLord