This fall will be my first year using any SCM resources, and I’m doing Early Modern & Epistles History/Geography/Bible with my 1st grader. We’re also doing a co-op one day a week, so I’ve determined I have 140 teaching days for the year. There are 180 lessons in the Early Modern & Epistles. Any suggestions for making this work? I could teach that subject on co-op days, but I prefer not to. However, I’m afraid to omit lessons, as it seems the lessons build on each other. Any advice?
This is part of the reason we homeschool year round. We don’t have to rush to fit a certain number of lessons into a certain number of days. And we can take a day off without feeling like we have to make it up.
Do you want to get it all done in one year? If it doesn’t matter then you could push it to a two year study. If you do want it to be a one year study than I would agree with Kelley. Make it year round. HTH
There really is no need to rush through the curriculum. History, Bible, and Geography are areas that we never finish with so it’s perfectly acceptable to take more than a year to complete the curriculum. Just keep doing the next thing and start a new curriculum when you finish the old one.
We have eliminated some of the geography lessons without trouble. Some of my DC dislike tracing the maps (mostly due to fine motor troubles), so I’ve cut some of those out. Other times, we’ve combined the Material World/Hungry Planet lessons with one of the map drill pages. Since one lesson is reading/discussion and the other lesson is more writing-based, I’ve found they don’t find it overwhelming to do both in one day.
Another thought, I purchased the Early Modern guide for the coming year. Many days don’t have a family reading, so they could probably be skipped. If there are assigned individual readings for the grades you have on those days, you can always assign them to be completed over a weekend or later in the afternoon or evening. Another possibility is to schedule it on geography day, since there usually aren’t independent readings on that day…We tend to use geography day as a history catch-up anyway.
You could finish 180 lessons in 140 days if you do what Rebekah suggests. You could do history 4 days per week. You might want to split up the Geography and Bible into two days.
So for example:
Monday: American History
Tuesday: American History and Bible
Wednesday: World History and Geography
Thursday: World History
Friday: Co-op
Catch-up days, exams and projects are also included in the 180 lessons. Given the young age of your child, you don’t have to do extensive projects unless interest is high. Exams could be done orally, and thus very quickly.
We have not used this module yet, but we have used 3 other SCM History, Geography, Bible guides and they were so enjoyable. My 2 older children just finished grades 2 and 3 and sometimes we split the Bible reading in half (took 2 days to do the lesson), because the readings were a little long, but we wanted to take in everything.
In the end, don’t feel bad if you don’t finish in 140 days, if things go long, if the study takes 1.5-2 years. (You don’t even have to do every lesson as is.) Just enjoy the journey!
This is my situation come the fall as well, and we plan on doing geography (we’re using Visits to North America) as part of our Morning Liturgy … like we do with picture, composer, Shakespeare, etc … and the one Bible lesson each week daddy will lead on Saturday evenings. Then, my MTWF (we take of Th) is still American 2x and World 2x. Another idea for you.
We just spent two years on SCM’s Ancient Greece/Joshua to Malachi/Middle East history module. I felt like it worked out much better for us that way to be able to spread it out over 2 years.
Thank you for all these wonderful suggestions! This is only our second year homeschooling, so I may still be a little high-strung about things, but I like the idea of starting SCM History in 1st grade and being able to go all the way through each time period twice, once at the lower level and once at a higher level. So I’d like to get it done in a year. I think I’m going to try splitting Geography and Bible apart and adding them to American History and World History days.
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