High School History

Beautiful feet is one idea, but doesn’t include Bible.  Their Ealy American and World and Modern American and World can be done in two years.

Also Train Up a Child Publishing has a World History I and World History 2.

Makes sense about BF since you’re in Israel.

I own the guide for World History I, but we opted for a modification of ancient history only this year.  I did use a lot of ideas from it.  I love the assignment choices.  There are lots to choose from and a variety and many, if not most, are CM friendly.  Love, love, love the mini research topic idea which we are doing.  Other assignments might be essays or projects or expanded narrations.

I’ve looked at Stoubough’s materials and they are simply too textbooks for my liking. Living books have made me enjoy history since I started homeschooling 11 years ago. Textbooks from Highschool and college are what made me think I hated it!

I am using James Stobaugh’s American History course with my daughter this year. I chose it because it is challenging, written from a Christian worldview, quotes lots of original sources, and has questions and assignments that really force the student to think critically about history.

I also chose it because the lessons are short so we still have plenty of time to fit in living books for history. We are using it for our spine.

The text is challenging. Stobaugh’s vocabulary is very advanced and even I regularly come across words I’ve never heard of! However, my daughter can handle it and it stretches her which is a good thing.

The original sources can be very difficult reading.

For some people these are drawbacks but they are plusses for my purposes with my daughter. I would have never used this with my son however. He would have hated it. My daughter enjoys the challenge.

It is definitely a textbook but more engaging than any textbook I had in school. While I would prefer a more living spine for history, I find there isn’t much out there for high school. There are spines written for children and overviews written for adults but not much that is worthy in between. Books like the Bennett books, Paul Johnson’s books, etc. often go into adult details that my daughter would not want to read about. The other problem is that there is so much information packed into each page that these books almost become a bit textbookish themselves. I also wanted a spine written from a Christian worldview.

Here is how we are using it in a more CM way. The lessons are short-1 to 4 pages each. Most even out at around 2 pages. My daughter reads one lesson a day, narrates and then reads from a living history book. Once a week she chooses one of the assignments as her writing assignment. I’ve been very pleased with the assignments. We choose the essay style questions for the most part. I don’t have the teacher’s manual as it is not necessary for my purposes.

For literature, she reads an assigned portion from a classic each day. We use a lit guide with one book a year. We also do one Shakespeare play a year and read poetry here and there. We use The Power In Your Hands twice a week for composition.

We also use SCM’s Visits To series for geography once a week.

This covers our history, geography, and English studies. I thought I’d share in case you might find anything here helpful and since you specifically asked about Stobaugh’s history books.

I hope you find the right fit for your teens!

Melanie, I love how you do history.  Very inspiring to me!