How do I choose where to start?

Hi, Thank you for reaching out with your question! One consideration for your high schooler is that in the U.S. students need credit in American History and World History for their high school transcript. With SCM’s history/Bible/geography guides, students get their credit for these courses in history by completing the “Early Modern & Epistles” and “Modern Times & Epistles, Revelation” guides. We always encourage you to check your state’s specific requirements for high school as well when making curriculum choices to ensure that they will have the required number of credits in each subject area as this can vary slightly by state. Assuming that your 14-year-old will be in ninth grade this coming school year, you will then want to make sure that they complete these two guides at some point during the next four school years.

SCM’s history/Bible/geography guides are meant to be used as a whole family, so you will all be studying the same time period and then assigning grade-level books to your students to read as well. Therefore, it can be helpful to sketch out the grade levels of your students over the next few years to see how to best coordinate your children to complete “Early Modern & Epistles” and “Modern Times & Epistles, Revelation” in high school and hopefully together as a family if that is possible. This post gives some great examples and tips on how to do this. One other factor is that in looking at the guides you will see that one of the grade level groupings for the history books is 7th-9th grade, therefore you can give high school credit for a student using this group of books, however you would also want to be sure that your student was demonstrating high school level work with the material and with their narrations both oral and written in order to assign them this credit.

https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/using-the-6-year-history-cycle/

That consideration aside, you can start anywhere in the cycle that you would like to! You may want to also consider what time periods your family has already studied together. Wherever you decide to start, we recommend that you then proceed forward in chronological order. Charlotte Mason recommended that students study history in chronological order to help them trace cause and effect. You can read more about these ideas as well as more about the progression of SCM’s history streams here:

https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/using-the-6-year-history-cycle/