Alternating between World and American History, or taking them a term at a time.

I am planning to cover the Module 5 time period next year, and will probably loosely follow the SCM guide, although we may take it at a slightly slower pace. Anyhow, i know in the guide it is scheduled to do US History 2x per week and World history 2x per week, so my initial thought had been to just do that. However, this year we’ve sort of done our own thing for history and I found that I didn’t really like switching back and forth so often. (We were switching between a book of American history stories and a book of World history stories a couple times a week each, and finally decided to just finish one book before going back to finish the next.) So…I’m thinking to somehow try and tweak the schedule a bit so that we do some portion of American history and then go back and talk about things that were happening in other parts of the world at the same time. I’m not sure if we should just do this a term at a time – ie alternate a term of US history, and then a term of World history, or by topic – ie, study the colonial period in the US, and then go back and study the topics from world history during that period or what. (I’m probably over complicating this…) Anyhow, has anyone else tweaked their schedule this way? I would love to know how you did it. =)

FWIW, my target student will be 7 when we use this material, with a couple of preschool tagalongs. Doing only US history is NOT an option for us. We live overseas and to us giving our children a big picture scope of the world is VERY important.

Thanks for any ideas.

Jen