momtofive Posted March 9, 2018 Share Posted March 9, 2018 (edited) I'd love to hear some thoughts on teaching history. A little background.....we've been using HOD for a number of years with one year of Sonlight, and one year of MFW in there (a long time ago), but mostly HOD over the last 10 years. We're graduating our oldest this year, and next year I'll have kids in 11th, 9th, 7th, and 5th grades. My 11th grader is already set to use Notgrass Exploring America (per his request). For the rest, I'm feeling a bit of a pull to do something else (instead of HOD) for history. In a way I'm nervous to go with something different, but I know we need to do something less overwhelming timewise. HOD has been so good in a lot of ways, but we struggle with some days having very long readings, and so many parts of the history to accomplish each day. Though I have adapted it at times, it's not always easy to do. I love the CM living books aspect, and definitely want to stick with using lots of good books, but just don't want our days to feel so rushed and overwhelming trying to get everything done each day. I've looked at so many options recently, and am wondering if at this point I should make up my own thing. One thing I loved about HOD (and some others) was the open and go nature of it (I just plain don't have time to pour into designing a plan right now). I love the Christian aspect to HOD, love the books and CM type assignments/activities, but we just can't seem to keep up and are finding it to be too much. I want our day to be a bit more balanced, but don't want to lose quality....is this possible? Some days I think we should just use SOTW or MOH and just add in books. Other times I'd love to get a SL Core and have fun reading together again. When we did that, we missed our HOD-type assignments, and with HOD we miss the time spent enjoying books. And round I go.... It may very well be that I'm over thinking this, but I guess I'm just looking for ideas and perspective. Thoughts or advice welcome! ;) Edited March 9, 2018 by momtofive Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HomeAgain Posted March 9, 2018 Share Posted March 9, 2018 For lower grades, my opinion is to use whatever you like. It's just an introduction. For upper grades, I think you should focus more on teaching how to *do* history, not teaching from a perspective. Teach them to research, to look for primary sources, to read bias in retellings so they can pare it down to the facts to create a conclusion. We ditch history books mostly after the first go round and use them as a bounce off source, but Jackdaws and sites like Letters of Note and Reading Like A Historian provide more for the student and encourage them to think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ktgrok Posted March 9, 2018 Share Posted March 9, 2018 (edited) How about doing Notgrass with everyone for the year? The middle school books would probably work for the 5th grader. There are some projects, some writing, some literature assigned, and it would still leave tons of time for a family read aloud, documentary at lunch, whatever. It's much "less" but still good, especially with the supplement book for each text, the one with the original source documents in it. And it still has a Christian worldview. Edited to Add: You could do American History with everyone, simplifying any projects/field trips/documentaries/etc. Edited March 9, 2018 by ktgrok Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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