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American history and world history at the same time?
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Hello!
I’ve become very intrigued with the idea of teaching American and world history at the same time since noticing that Living Books Curriculum teaches history that way. Does anyone else do this? How do you imlement it exactly?
This is a tough one for me too. In a perfect week, we do 2 days of world history and 2 days of American history. However, I’m not completely sure if this is the best way or not. I am interested to see what others have to say about it. Here is a past thread on this subject:
http://simplycharlottemason.com/scmforum/topic/world-and-american-history#post-1862
Have a good day!
Tanya
For 1st & 2nd grade, I taught both and it was fine. I did World on Mon and US on Thurs. For world, we read a ch. in Child’s History of the World, narrated, made a wall timeline card. For US, we read a ch. in American History Stories by Mara Pratt, narrated, completed a drawing and copywork sentence and put in our America folder. We had no confusion between the periods.
For 3rd grade, I’m switching to the SCM framework w/ more integrated Biblical history and a bit slower pace, but I am still continuing w/ the American History Story series, only as readers (actually audiobooks) w/ copywork, but no narrration.
Christie
We do world history k-12, but I feel most of the curricula that includes US history as part of the “big picture” (Ie. History Odyssey, Story of the World, etc) does not go indepth enough so we do US history as a separate subject for middle school and/or high school. For my elementary aged child who wanted to study US history we are just doing it through interest based literature with hands-on activities since my goal for her is enjoyment of history and not just adding to her stock of information. I prefer to wait for the older grades to study US history simply because we can then hit more of the controversial aspects that a younger child would not understand, plus we can study famous speeches and such with more depth and understanding of the events around most of the speeches.
Gina
We always do both. 🙂 If I am going through a world program we add some American books and visa versa. It just makes me feel better to know that we get both in. My kids have not had any trouble with it since they “live” in each book. When they start a new book they just get their bearings and figure out the time in history and take off. 🙂 Right now my kids are narrating from Edward Eggleston books (American) while we go through A Child’s History of the World with Heart of Dakota.
We use Sonlight for History. They have US History and World History separated but I just buy more than one Core Instructor Guide and combine. Currently, we are doing Cores 3, 5, 7 & 100 at the same time so we combine Intro to Am. History, Eastern Hemisphere,World History & In depth Am. History. It isn’t hard at all to do this. We just look at the books and read what comes next. I use the SCM Online Organizer to keep it all straight and have a record.
We are planning on doing both this year. We will be using Module Guide 1 for our World History. We are not using any formal curriculum for American History, though. We are choosing this year to read biographies about each of our presidents, and creating a journal.
I plan on using a Book of Centuries for all my kids (even though 2 of them are a bit younger than what is recommended) to help them see how everything fits.
I just wanted to add that I am liking Picturesque Tales (world history) and the Mara Pratt American History Stories.
We do U.S. History and World History at the same time (sometimes more than one place in the world as well!). I haven’t noticed it causing any confusion. I actually think it’s quite beneficial to do both at the same time.
A Book of Centuries can really be interesting when studying two different places at the same time – even if you are covering different eras.
And, I find having a map in front of us when we study any history is very helpful. (That is probably obvious to many, but it wasn’t to me until I started doing it!)
Caroline4- Out of curiosity, are you finding the Pratt books to be “preachy” at all? I read several of her stories on The Baldwin Project website and it seems like she does an awful lot of moralizing and drawing conclusions for the child, have you found that to be the case? Also, do you find the need to “round out” any of the stories about the explorers, colonists and the native people? For example, she uses words like “savages” and states that all native women are called “squaws” and all their babies are called “papooses”. Perhaps it’s just the fact that her books are 100 years old and she didn’t have as much access to primary source material as we do now, I’m just wondering how you tweek her stories (if you do) to make them more useful and truthful for your children. Thanks!
Rachel
p.s. I posted this question on your Andersen/Picturesque Tales thread just in case you didn’t notice it here
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