History Cycle Brainstorm

There will always be “gaps” and things missed, but that is ok because learning is life long. I am having so much fun learning and re-learing along side my children. You can never get to everything, but if they grow to enjoy learning, they will continue reading and learning for their lifetime 🙂

Unless you choose to do what some other CM groups choose – keeping each child separate for history so you can follow a set sequence (ex: ancients in 1st, middle ages in 2nd, early modern in 3rd  and so on.) then it will not work out in a ‘perfect rotation’ from beginning to end for each child. They simply join the history rotation when they are old enough to participate in the family studies. As a mom of 10, I choose to keep history studies family centered for my own sanity until high school.

I will say, from experience, that in high school my kids often are independent of the family and choose their own history rotation. My oldest lined up with us for some years and not for others. Her choice. (She is a college freshman now). My current high schooler (9th) chose to do something separate from the family – the history of science from Einstein to the present day. The next high schooler (next year) likes doing history with the family, so I expect she will stay with everyone else time period wise. And I have 7 kids younger than these.

We have always homeschooled and I’ve graduated one. We have generally done history in a chronological rotation with a random interest based study thrown in sometimes (Ex, if we are in early modern times but a child is suddenly very interested in Ancient Greece we will add in some books on that even though they don’t fit chronologically with what we are doing that year.)

Now I do something different, that we all love. We do history chronologically, covering  creation to modern times every year. It sounds crazy, but is really simple and gives my kids a great overview of how things fit together in history. The school year begins at creation every year. Then we begin moving forward in time chronologically and each year stop in different times/people/events to study. Last year, for example, we had creation, Ancient Egypt, Middle ages/knights, American Revolution, WWII, the history of flight, the space race, to name a few.  This year we started at Creation, then went to Ancient Greeks, Ancient China, Ancient India, and just moved to Vikings this week. Following this we’ll touch on Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, Explorers, Colonies, Constitution, history of Education, WWI, 1920’s, Great Depression, and Dust Bowl, among other things.

We do use a timeline and refer to it regularly to place new people/events in their position around other events/people we have studied. We review what came before or after a person/place/event. Or at the same time – which is really fun for them to see that nations histories unfold at the same time but in the early ages didn’t interact much due to less efficient means of travel than we have.

Another question would be, do you put together your own plans and books or do you use a specific curriculum for history that way?

Thank you again

Morgan

You can make your own list of important people/places/events if you want. One way to do that would be to look at the table of contents, samples, or book lists for various history curricula and writing them down in order, curating your own giant history list/timeline. Then each year choose things across the entire list to cover (maybe put the year you are doing it by each item, put 2019 or 2020 by this year’s topics). When you have been doing this for 4ish years you may want to cycle back through some of the important topics with your family and go deeper with the kids who are now older than they were the last time you studied this topic.

Personally, I use a curriculum, and then add in a basket of library books that fit with the topics we are in. I use The Good and the Beautiful History. I like that it already does this beginning to end each year history cycle. I also like that it includes a variety of things: teacher’s manual to read information, student reader, audio story woven through the years, book lists for read alouds, student explorers (worksheets/coloring pages/articles with more topics/etc for different grade groupings to make this more in depth for older kids), history game each year, book of maps and photographs that go with different lessons, some activity/craft/hands on lesson etc. You do not do everything in that list in one lesson. Instead, they rotate through several of them per lesson, giving your history a bit of variety in how it is presented. My kids really like it, and my older kids simply dive in deeper on topics, everyone narrates, and we love having a basket of books from the library so we can go further when a topic catches someone’s interest.