SOTW Wins--What are yours?

[hs03842]

What have you really enjoyed about doing SOTW this year (or any year)?  What field trips have or will you do?  What projects, resources, etc. are worth it to you?  What tips, tricks or generally fun things have you found about using it?

Edited June 8, 2020 by JoyKM

[Miss Tick]

I made a book style time line with a card for each section of the book (more or less) which we update every 5 chapters. This has been a great short-term review and visual record of progress.

For the first two books we made lapbooks with a thing for each chapter. Every 3 chapters we would spend a day assembling the lapbooks parts.  This is what they would pull out to show grandma when she visited. Fabulous! The files were free on the internet, so I only had to tweak a few of them, I did all the prep so they just got discussed and glued in, and most of the pieces have pictures of some kind to look at.

[lmrich]

My daughter, a senior, still remembers SOTW, and we have her completed timeline. In one of her college essays, she even stated that she learned to love school in our history class when she pretended to be a cave painter. That was her first lesson in first grade! Enjoy those years and know they are impactful!!

[lots of little ducklings]

The Jim Weiss audios.  ❤️ 💗❤️  My children love SOTW, and the audios (plus oral narrations) made consistency possible during all my baby years.  History is hands-down our favorite subject around here.  

[Mbelle]

I'm doing SOTW for the 3rd time.  My first two kids reread the books on their own in late elementary and early middle school.  Third kid begs to do history and he just likes the activity book coloring pages and maps.  He did also have a narration journal and he actually loved it.  He had a couple of sentences and then drew a picture.  He had me reread the journal all the time.

[klmama]

I don't remember if it was recommended in the  SOTW activity guide, but one of my dc built a great seige tower from Legos. 

Edited February 13, 2020 by klmama

[Terabith]

We used SOTW volumes 1-2 in second and third grade.  When my kid started public school as a ninth grader, she had to take a world history pre-test.  She was the only kid to ace the pre-test, based solely on what she remembered from SOTW.  

[Chris in VA]

Mine is a college sophmore, lol, but we LOVED SOTW. We kept a notebook each year and when we left our

home of 17 years, I couldn't bear to purge the notebooks and timelines. We enjoyed the projects. Favorite that first year was the Nile in the foil pan, and dying a tee shirt with cabbage like the Phoenicians. (We really enjoyed Year 2, also.)

I used a set of notebooking pages I found online that someone had posted. They had a space for a drawing and lines for narration (I scribed for dd most of that first year), as well as the encyclopedia readings and chapter (Sotw chapter) numbers in the heading. 

Such fond memories!

[Michelle in MD]

We didn't always do many extras since I had so many littles back in the day, but I never missed reading aloud through the volumes and they got a lot from "only" reading.  My firstborn (now 29) adored history and read Volume 1 in its entirety in a day after it was published (circa 2001)… later went to Princeton on a full scholarship to study history and always credited SoTW and SWB for his early interest and ambition.

 

[sweet2ndchance]

On 2/12/2020 at 6:37 PM, lots of little ducklings said:

The Jim Weiss audios.  ❤️ 💗❤️  My children love SOTW, and the audios (plus oral narrations) made consistency possible during all my baby years.  History is hands-down our favorite subject around here.  

We have the original Barbara Allan Johnson audios for Vol 1 and 2. I really wish they would get her to do Vol 3 and 4 as well. Even though I only have one more kid to go through SOTW, I would buy them lol. My kids and I just prefer her voice for some reason. Even though I have the Jim Weiss SOTW 3 and 4 audios, we usually switch over to reading aloud or letting the kids read it for themselves at vol 3. That's how much we prefer Johnson's readings lol.

We love to listen to the (vol 1 and 2 of course lol) audio books on car rides just as a review of sorts. We just listen to it straight through, pausing as needed when someone wants to stop and discuss something.

[hs03842]

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Edited June 8, 2020 by JoyKM

[Terabith]

SOTW 3 is still pretty fun.  4 is much more business like and the content is kind of a bummer.  

[73349]

We have left our wall timeline up and continue to refer to it. I used other people's cards on it for 1 and 2, but made my own for 3 and 4. (The link for 4 says "public edition" because I actually made cards for our neighborhood's construction, DH's and my wedding, and DS's birth for our own use.)

We didn't do a lot of activities, but DS loved the books (and still loves history). I would request library books to go with many chapters and let him pick which ones we read.

Edited February 16, 2020 by whitehawk

[goldenecho]

So, as far as tricks the biggest ones that helped me with my very short attention kiddo were....

• Go by sub-section, not chapter.   I found early on 2-3 subjection a week was our pace, and later on we could do 4-5.    Pacing it by subsection meant we were always reading about the same amount, in stead of trying to do a certain number of chapters per week no matter if they had 2 sub-sections or 5. 
• Supplement with library books DURING THE READING.   For my visual learner, if I could find a few color pictures to illustrate what was happening during the chapter, and point to them when I was reading, it really helped my visual learner remember and engage better.  (I did a little video that showed how I organized that here.)   
• I used YouTube Videos a lot.   Especially Extra Credits History and TedEd videos.   Even when the chapter and the video covered the exact same thing, my child liked doing both and I think the repetition in different mediums helped. 
• While he listened to the chapter, I often let him watch a you-tube video, with the sound down, showing something related to the chapter (especially architecture and geography stuff...like videos of the Nile River, Indus River, Great wall of China, great pyramids, parthenon in Athens, castles, etc.).   If it has soft, cultural music, you can sometimes leave the sound on low...I did that for one video and I felt like I was narrating a PBS documentary (and my kid loved it).   Round.me.com is also a good one to let your child explore on your phone while they listen to the chapter (they have 360 virtual "tours" of places). 

Some of my favorite activities were....

Chapter 1 - First Nomads
We did a bunch of cool stuff for this chapter, all of which my kiddo loved, including a hunter-gatherer hike with friends.  I blogged about it below...
http://imaginativehomeschool.blogspot.com/2016/09/story-of-world-vol-1-chapter-1-first.html
 

Egg Mummies were a hit (and learning about micro-organisms and salts at the same time).

All the writing stuff was a  hit...cuneiform on clay, Chinese characters with black ink,  Calligraphy with real calligraphy pens (cause I do calligraphy anyways) when learning about monks (vol 2)   He loved all the writing stuff.   Might just be my kid.  

 
Aligning Greece and Rome with Science...
So, the study of ancient Greece and Rome lined up really well with earth and Space science.   I laid out how we did that for Greece on this google doc.   While learning about Rome we studied a planet a day (and the Roman god/goddess it was named after). 

This architecture activity for Greece was one of my son's favorites.

For Volume 2, we didn't get that far in, but my son really liked learning about the Vikings.  Favorite activities were...
--learning about Viking Sunstone (optical calcite...bought one for $5 online and it was so worth it). 
--making a Viking boat (from a printable online...just pinterest it and you'll find lots)
--making a tin-foil boat and learning about buoyancy  (we talked about the different types of viking boats...longships for raiding vs wider ones for trading).
--making and fighting with boffer swords (could be done when learning about knights too). 

We got some of the info on Viking sunstones and boats from Experimenting With the Vikings, which is a free curriculum: 

https://edu.rsc.org/resources/experiment-with-the-vikings/1940.article
 

 

Edited February 16, 2020 by goldenecho

[goldenecho]

So, I also did a living history style Vacation Bible School with my church, covering different Bible stories with crafts and stuff from the place/time period, and I can say the following were the biggest historical craft hits... most of these work for any ancient era, and some medieval ones.

Weaving on cardboard looms
Anything with clay
Making Mud Bricks (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley)
Making scented oils (olive oil plus whatever smelly herbs were available at the time)
Tasting or making food from the time period. 
Basket making (hard...but kids loved it).
Seed mosaics (Greece, Rome)
 

Edited February 16, 2020 by goldenecho

[KrissiK]

I think it was volume 2 when we studied the London Fire. They had us make paper stand-ups of the row houses and then we took them out on the drive way and lit them on fire. My boys love that.🤣

[happypamama]

1 hour ago, KrissiK said:

I think it was volume 2 when we studied the London Fire. They had us make paper stand-ups of the row houses and then we took them out on the drive way and lit them on fire. My boys love that.🤣

That just went on my to do list for next year with my 2nd, 4th, and 6th grade boys.  DD age 17 is reading this over my shoulder and is envious that we didn't do that when she was that age.

[hs03842]

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Edited June 8, 2020 by JoyKM

[Chris in VA]

1 hour ago, JoyKM said:

Great blog post, and great idea!  I had been wondering what to do for those early chapters as a field trip.  I like to do once a month focused outings and really like the forage walk.  Your advice on organizing by subsection sounds great, too, especially since I'll have a five year old doing it.  She's used to read alouds but may struggle with something more dense for long periods.  

Reading by subsections is actually how you fit 42 chapters into the school year, too. (You will have some weeks where you "round the corner," so to speak, finishing a chapter and starting another in the same week. 😊

[Bokons]

We love doing the chicken mummy (and used a cornish hen as well), and the Egyptian feast. My kids especially loved the payaya stir fried rice (I think that's what it was called. 

[caffeineandbooks]

I think we did two things that turned out to be more important than I realised, and I learned two tricks along the way to help it work well for my kids.

At the end of the year, I collected my son's narrations, colouring pages, photos of crafts etc and had them bound into a book at an office supply store.  It was really meaningful to him to see his work turned into a "real book" that he could show the grandparents and that I occasionally add to a stack of picture books for read aloud time.

We also met every other week with a couple of other families for group activities, and took turns leading.  Every other week was often enough for the kids to become great friends and to do plenty of fun, hands-on activities.  Even with a bunch of toddlers and babies in the mix, we usually got to do 3-5 activities each time.  Every other week also meant that each person only needed to lead every 4-6 weeks, which allowed us to do a good job without getting burned out.

Along the way, I learned to go where the resources are, rather than being a slave to the 42 chapters in the table of contents.  You're probably not aiming for "mastery", but rather exposure and delight.  Give yourself freedom to just read the chapter and move on if there aren't any great books/field trips/activities for the topic - or even skip a few chapters - so that you have time to roll around luxuriously in the things that really catch your kids' interests, and that there are plenty of resources for.  In my humble opinion, they will remember a lot more from activities they deeply engage with - especially if you're able to display them on a wall or create a book or album as a keepsake - than from drilling flashcards for a topic where there wasn't so much as a picture book to be found.  I pre-read the book each year and noted which chapters could be skipped if we were running short on time - there were generally a few "stand-alone" chapters in each book that were included because it's a "world" history but that weren't referred to again in other chapters, and these tended to make my just-in-case "emergency cut" list 🙂  Two years we read 40 of the 42 chapters, but one year there were huge changes for our family and we read less than 30.

By the third book I finally realised I should take notes during that prereading.  For example, for chapter 27 of SOTW 3 my notes read, "New inventions such as steam power with its immense demand for coal (and railways) and cotton gins which drastically increased the output of slave-operated plantations set the stage for major social change.  James Watt.  Steam engine.  Eli Whitney.  Cotton gin.  Replaceable parts."  That's more helpful for me than the chapter title, "A Changing World".  It tells me this chapter is connected to the others around it, and it gives me a starting point for library research - mine or the kids' - or activity topics.  Hopefully, it will also save me time when I come back around to that book next time.

We have loved this series and I hope you will too!  I'm looking forward to starting over with book 1 next school year.

[hs03842]

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Edited June 8, 2020 by JoyKM

[goldenecho]

On 2/18/2020 at 11:14 PM, caffeineandbooks said:

Along the way, I learned to go where the resources are, rather than being a slave to the 42 chapters in the table of contents.  You're probably not aiming for "mastery", but rather exposure and delight.  Give yourself freedom to just read the chapter and move on if there aren't any great books/field trips/activities for the topic - or even skip a few chapters - so that you have time to roll around luxuriously in the things that really catch your kids' interests, and that there are plenty of resources for.  In my humble opinion, they will remember a lot more from activities they deeply engage with - especially if you're able to display them on a wall or create a book or album as a keepsake - than from drilling flashcards for a topic where there wasn't so much as a picture book to be found.  I pre-read the book each year and noted which chapters could be skipped if we were running short on time - there were generally a few "stand-alone" chapters in each book that were included because it's a "world" history but that weren't referred to again in other chapters, and these tended to make my just-in-case "emergency cut" list 🙂  Two years we read 40 of the 42 chapters, but one year there were huge changes for our family and we read less than 30.

By the third book I finally realised I should take notes during that prereading.  For example, for chapter 27 of SOTW 3 my notes read, "New inventions such as steam power with its immense demand for coal (and railways) and cotton gins which drastically increased the output of slave-operated plantations set the stage for major social change.  James Watt.  Steam engine.  Eli Whitney.  Cotton gin.  Replaceable parts."  That's more helpful for me than the chapter title, "A Changing World".  It tells me this chapter is connected to the others around it, and it gives me a starting point for library research - mine or the kids' - or activity topics.  Hopefully, it will also save me time when I come back around to that book next time.

 

Such good advice (all of it, not just what I quoted)!  

I so know what you mean about the notes on the chapter.   I started saving keywords too.   Made it easier to look things up in the library or online.  Sometimes if I couldn't find a book specifically on something, I would find a chapter in a big book of myths or a  section in books like "100 Scientists Who Made History." 

I also used the timeline in the back of the book a lot, for stuffing in little nuggets I found that weren't related to a specific chapter, and kept a notepad for saving links to YouTube videos and other stuff online I wanted to use during each chapter. 

[hs03842]

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Edited June 8, 2020 by JoyKM