History with 6 year old, over their head??

My kiddos who are still schooling are 5yo and 6yo, both having a birthday in the next 4 months so they will be 6 and 7 soon. We also started Ancient Egypt in September. My son, who is younger doesn’t get much out of Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors but my daughter literally BEGS for this book every day.  I got them both a coloring book of Ancient Egypt, (the one from Dover is a little graphic, I like the Belleraphon book better) and they color while I read- it helps them to keep their hands busy. We are also doing Visits to Africa and using the books Hungry Planet and Material World. It is a highlight of the week for the children to do the maps and look in these books and see how people live from so far away, but we really don’t do much except look at the books and color in the maps. After the holidays I plan to have my daughter start writing the names of some countries on the maps rather than doing it for her, my son will probably use the pre-printed names and paste them on or something.

We do not do the commentary, we do not read out of the ESV, we do nothing that seems onerous since they are so young and at this stage learning needs to tantalize them, and woo them and light a fire in their hearts and minds rather than be an exercise in discipline. I am happy to just hit the high points knowing we will cover all this in much more depth later and if the curiosity is there they will learn more than I can imagine when we get to that point.

Using the Ancient Egypt materials is more for me than for them at this point, to remind me daily to set the feast, expose them to things that wouldn’t normally be part of our daily routine, and provide a structure for our explorations as we move forward.

For Bible we use shorter selection from a NIrV bible, or the Jesus Storybook Bible.  My son has a speech delay and possibly some processing difficulties so we are staying simple for now, to make it more accessible to him. Eventually, maybe somewhere around grade 3 or 4 we will graduate to the ESV Bible for our family readings.

I had the same issue with dd8 when she was in first and we started Ancient Egypt.  I stopped reading straight from the Bible and started doing Catherine Vos Bible Story Book.  – That helped immensely for dd to enjoy Bible time.  Then, Boy of the Pyramids was a big hit even though she didn’t care for most of the other Egypt readings. (They were different as it was edition 1 of the guide)  I would suggest subbing out Ancient Egypt and her neighbors for some activities like making your own papyrus paper, writing in hieroglyphics, building a play doh pyramid, etc. and getting simple books from the library to touch on those topics.  Then MOVE ON!  Don’t get stuck in one spot because you have a list in your head of things your child needs to know or understand before you can progress through history.   If you were only 2 weeks in, I might stop for a year.  But if you’ve made it half way, learn the wonderful art of relaxing your expectations of what a certain subject should look like and tweak it to make it work for where your child is right now.

Just wanted to share how I tweaked the plan to make it work for us:

• We eliminated the “Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbor” reading.  (I read the chapters on my own so as keep learning myself and be able to answer any extra questions my son had.)
• We kept “The Stuff They Left Behind” portfolios.  I read the paragraph for the picture and we discussed the questions on the portfolio insert.  (I recommend starting the following week’s discussion by pulling out the picture again and stating, “Tell me what you remember about this picture.”)
• We kept “The Great Pyramid” and “Pharaoh’s Boat” readings.  (I recommend breaking each book into two weeks, as it takes a while to read through each book, especially when stopping often for narrations by young children just learning to narrate.)
• We kept “Boy of the Pyramids” – AMAZING!!
• We added some of the living books listed in the back of “Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors” and my son narrated as we read.  I cannot recommend enough to utilize this amazing resource (the book list, that is)!!  I tried to generally sync the books with the topics of the portfolio pictures, but it really doesn’t matter.  I looked on Amazon for age recommendations to make sure I was ordering appropriate books for a 6-year-old.  We did “Mummies Made in Egypt” by Aliki, “Seeker of Knowledge: The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs” by James Rumford, and “Life Along the River Nile” by Jane Shutter.  The last one we broke up into several weeks and for narration, I asked him to tell me one interesting thing per page spread as we went.  They were all great!
• We added the CD “Egyptian Treasures: Mummies and Myths” by Jim Weiss of Greathall Productions.  We finished all our pictures and books halfway through Term 3, so I finished the term by playing one CD track per week and having my son narrate to me.  These CDs are so fun!

For Bible, the simple solution is to read and have narrated the correlating stories (or parts of stories) in the Catherine Vos Children’s Bible.  However, we use that Children’s Bible as part of our nighttime stories and I wanted to do something special for “Bible History” (as we call our school-time Bible lessons).  So we started through the Picture Smart Bible for K-3 and we love it! I read a lesson (short paragraph and Bible verse), then my son colors/crafts the appropriate part of the picture for that lesson, then narrates by explaining the picture.  At the end of each Bible book, I have him use the picture to explain the whole book, and then we move on.  I calculated how often we need to do a lesson to get through the K-3 Bible in 3 years (grades 1-3), and my plan is to go through the Picture Smart Bible for 4+ in another 3 years (grades 4-6), then go through the whole Bible as outlined in the SCM materials during grades 7-12.

I hope this helps someone!!