Story of the World question, skipping activities?

[Janeway]

We had been doing a most of the map activities, just some of the other activities, and always the review pages. But now, Story of the World 1 has gone over in to another year, which is fine. But the kids are super excited to move on to medieval. I am kind of thinking maybe we should spend a week or two catching up on some mapping activities and review cards. But then again, then I feel like we should just finish the stories and get on to medieval ages while they are still excited for it?

[desertflower]

In my opinion, go for medieval. They are excited about it and I would want to get on that wagon. 

History is a cycle. This stuff will be repeated. I don't eed expect my kids to remember everything that happened in ancient history.

Hth

[sweet2ndchance]

Go for medieval! It's not like they won't see the ancient stuff again. If they are bored on a rainy day, pull out the unfinished maps and and have fun remembering previous history lessons. Just don't tell them it's actually history review.

[2_girls_mommy]

We always ended up just reading through the last ten chapters or so without doing any activities, so that we could move on to the next book. 

[Mbelle]

I try to do the coloring page while we read and then the map work.  Sometimes we do narration.  Righ now I feel like I need to catch up so we may just read through several chapters.  

[Momto6inIN]

We never do the activities. 😛

I read the lesson while they color the picture, then I ask the review questions. At the end of each chapter we put stuff on a timeline and they narrate to me about the chapter. That's it.

I am not a crafty person.

[ofthevine]

I look at the activities as a buffet. I choose what works best for my family and move on after that. They learn plenty and it doesn't become a drudgery. I vote for moving on to the Medieval era! 

[Ausmumof3]

I read the books.  We mostly do the mapping.  Anything else is a bonus.  The kids did have a notebook to draw the story while I read.

if you did all the activities and extra reading it would take ages and be almost a complete curriculum.

Edited October 17, 2019 by Ausmumof3

[Garga]

I love love love SOTW, but it was terribly frustrating to try to get through one book a year.  There are (if I recall correctly) 42 chapters in the book, but only 36 weeks in a traditional school year.  Yikes!  How to divide it up?  I had to divide it by sections instead of chapters so that we could get through it in our 36 or so weeks of school, but I never liked it that we felt so rushed at that pace.  Oh well.  They really have learned a ton of history so I guess it worked out.

For the OP: If they’re chomping at the bit for medieval, I’d probably only read the remaining chapters of the old book and have the kids do only the coloring pages while they listen. I wouldn’t do the maps or narrations or activities...just read. Then when that’s done, slow back down for medieval and do whatever you normally do (narrations or maps or activities, etc.)

 

[Carol in Cal.]

Well, I came into SOTW when it first came out.  It was quite an improvement over the first edition WTM recommendation of using the Usborne world history book (the old, thin one) and getting the kid to write a couple of sentences about what you read to them.  Which in turn was quite an improvement over never having world history taught until the high school level (optional, too) when I was a kid.

So my perspective is, it’s gravy.  But it’s really GOOD gravy.  But still, gravy.

So for us, we used the book as a spine, we added a TON of the supplemental read alouds, when DD was an emerging reader I would look for the IR books as an alternative to her reading lessons some days (she found that very refreshing and also she was pretty proud of herself to be able to read something ‘real’.) and that was about it.  I think we did maybe 3 of the activities.  We used very few of the coloring pages, because DD liked to sit next to me in a cuddly way when I read to her, so I never felt like I needed to give her some motor movement distraction to keep her focussed, and she didn’t really love to color.  We did related field trips as much as I could.  (I was darned impressed when she not only recognized conopic jars in an Egyptian display, but also WHICH organ was in the jar based on the symbol on top.).  And on field trips we took our sweet time and thoroughly enjoyed things.  

And behold, it was very good.

One thing I stuck to pretty strongly was finishing each book before starting the next one.  We sometimes rushed some of the chapters, just reading them and not doing any supplemental reading, but we didn’t skip any.  I did intersperse Bible history with SOTW1, and also whenever there was a Bible-based lesson I would read the actual Bible instead of the SOTW version.  I did not worry about whether we took a year or 18 months to finish a book.  We did state history in parallel at the same time in 4th/5th grade, mostly via living history site and natural history park field trips.  But we just kept on chugging through SOTW until it was done.  Once it was finished we kept the CDs in the car to play whenever.  Even DH liked those.  Also, DD would play the CD’s while she was doing handwork—needlepoint or making felt gnomes—for a little background entertainment.  

This all worked out pretty well.  She got an organic, fairly thorough overview of world history that carried forward really well.   My only regret in the whole thing is that I wish I had taught US history more explicitly along the way, parallel to world history like we did with state history; but there just wasn’t as engaging a spine for that and I struggled to figure out an approach and ended up giving it shorter shrift than I would have liked.