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History Cycle
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Hi!
I would love some recommendations on a history cycle that would work to keep all my kids together for the next 4 years. I have a 3rd grader, 1st and kindergartener. Thanks!
Sarah; the history guides on this site are wonderful and you can keep your whole family together for history from K-12 grade. I started using them when my oldest was in first grade and we love them! We are using the fifth one this year. They offer selections of books to read for grades 1-3, 4-6, 7-9 & 10-12 grades. You can add or change books or resources as you go to fit the needs of your family.
SCM uses a 6-year cycle: covering from creation to present over 6 years. I prefer a 4 yr. cycle, so I (essentially) combine SCM modules 1-3 and then do module 4, mod. 5, mod.6 and then start over again. This coming year will be the start of our second time through the 4 year cycle. I LOVE doing history this way – it’s great for my own education.
I combine Modules 1-3, and then keep 4, 5, 6, as they are on SCM only I do Modern for two years instead of one. It makes a five year History cycle. I do not do Bible study with Hisotry. I do let my Geography generally follow the Hisotry cycles I guess?! We do History as a family and will through middle and high school too.
Year 1 – Module 4 – North, Central, South Americas
Year 2 – Module 5 – Africa
Year 3 – Module 6 – Europe/Asia/South Pacific/Australia
Year 4 – Module 6 – Europe/Asia/South Pacific/Australia
Year 5 – Modules 1-3 – Ancient World/Review of WorldI’m not sure why we started in Module 4 except that that was the what appealed to us the first year we homeschooled. We’re in our 5th year this year and so my 8th grader will get one more run through the first four years in this cycle. My younger one will get that and a little more before he’s done.
I don’t care for some of the books in the Modules. But you can easily search out (I say easily because I’m done for this year! lol) other titles using various booklists, ALA lists and reviews, Amazon, your librarian, etc.
What I decided to do this time around (our 2nd time through a 4 year cycle; our last time through we used Story of the World, v.1) is to use All Through the Ages to find books. My intent is to use the spine from Mod. 1 (Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors) and Genevieve Foster’s Julius Caesar’s World as our spines. Other than that, we’re just reading books that I found via All Through the Ages and the sample pages of SCM Modules 1, 2, and 3.
We’re going to keep doing Holling Clancy HOlling books as our geography (because we got behind this year and only finished 2 – and he has 2 more that we can do geography with).
I just bought Planning Your CM Education from another lady on this forum and am going to use that to set up our actual schedule.
@Renee – What do you mean exactly? I don’t use the SCM materials (the booklets that set and schedule for you) so I’m not sure if that is what you are asking about or not? I am simply using a huge variety of books (I’m a library girl) and I set a simple list of the order I’d cover the areas of the world in over our year. We simply read together, read some on our own, do a variety of narrations, explore … etc. etc. etc. It only takes me a little time to pull together what I’d like to read each day, watch, ask of them in terms of narrations or other assignments, etc. So I do that once a week. Honestly, this is a simple study to me. My kids are nuts for History (case in point, today’s 30 minute lesson turned in to over an hour!) … maybe that is part of it. I’m not as loopy as this sounds lol. I just don’t like to stress over it too much. If you ask me more specific questions I’ll be happy to share more!!
Mainly I am wondering how you pace yourself. This upcoming year will be my first with the SCM modules (starting with 5) with my second grader and younger siblings listening in. Maybe once I am familiar with the layout it will make more sense on the flexibility of the schedules.
I’ll be honest with you – pacing is not something I overly worry about here. I select the titles we will cover as a family and then the ones that they will read on their own (my children are middle school ages) and then we go from there. I LOVE and use the SCM planner for my year (with my little tweaks lol) so that helps me to choose the # of times I’ll do History. Right now I do 2x as a family and they do 2x on their own readings per week.
For Modules 4-6, I use Joy Hakim’s books as my spine for American Hisotry and Susan Bauer’s books at my spine for World History. I also step up the frequency of my family History per week when we are in these Modules because there are more books to cover in those time periods. But again, I don’t stress if it doesn’t happen “just right” because there is no sense in that … life happens, right? I still have biographies and Historical literature assigned during these Modules too.
I try not to compare myself to what others are covering in a year. Every child is an individual. Whatever works for your family and your child is the right thing to do. I really don’t know where we fall in terms of how much we cover in a year’s time.
Pacing yourself with how many times per week you do a subject seems to work out well for us in terms of working through our books. Sonya’s planner works beautifully at walking you through that process (look at the number of chapters in a book, decide about how many times a week you’ll do the subject, etc.)
Hope that helps!
Renee, we have been using SCM’s Early Modern and Epistles handbook for the year and have loved it! We did end up dropping the Joshua Slocum part (you will see this as a weekly reading, but it just bored my young ones too much) and did our own Bible Study instead of theirs. Each day there is a history “lesson”–it is all mapped out for you, with one day for geography per week. For Early Modern and Epistles, I also needed to purchase the Stories of the Nations and Stories of America volumes. It is very self explanatory once you look through the handbook. It is nice to have it all planned for me–I only have added a few extra library books when I felt it added to our studies, other than that the book choices have been great–Oh, for my young kids (5 and 7), I took out Toliver’s Secret and substituted Phoebe the Spy.
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