Living books for History

Try this:

http://www.redshift.com/~bonajo/history.htm

Petitemom, here is my Master Book List that I refer to when I need an extra book. It has all of the books from Charlotte Mason Help, AO and the book Honey for a Child’s Heart. Perhaps it might help. Also, Jan Bloom’s books, Who Shall We Then Read? are very good for book lists.

Relevant Posts –

http://simplycharlottemason.com/scmforum/topic/missceegees-book-lists-lots-of-them

http://simplycharlottemason.com/scmforum/topic/book-lists-handle-with-care-1#post-24425

On another note, if your oldest will be in 6th grade, you could do six modules of history with an extra year devoted to govt/econ or some other interest area. I would encourage you not to get hung up on how many cycles of history you’ll fit in. Even if you went through it only once from ancients – modern times that’s more than public schools and many private schools do in 12 years. It’s more than I learned in 12 years of ps and 2 years of college! Pick a place to start and just start and go at a comfortable pace. Don’t worry about missing something or not covering it all. It is IMPOSSIBLE to cover it all and much better to develop a love of learning. 

Just my 2 cents.

Christie

petitemom, we just started using the SCM modules a couple of months ago.  I was also worried about a 6 year rotation, and spending so long on ancient history…   

I’m going to give you a bit of MY history on our history subject….

My family started out doing Milestones Academy history (AO for other topics)- so we started with the Synge history book (and others) – so about the time of Abraham and ancient history.  This ended up being too much for us, and we mostly dropped history – just continuing with the AO books we were doing (50 famous stories, for instance)

The next year, I decided to continue AO Year 1 (we weren’t done) – and do the AO history we hadn’t done – so we were doing early British History (about the time of Julius Ceasar).  This seemed to go better but we only doing about 1/2 of the AO year (having done some the year before…) and then I had some major concerns with some things in AO – so about this time, we stopped doing AO, and I started making my own plans.

So with a bunch of planning, using the planning books, I worked out a 5 year rotation that looked like it would work for us.  This gave some options for the extra 2 years, depending where it “hit” for each child.  For my oldest, the extra 2 years was taken up from what we had done the previous 2 years.  But… I was having problems with the planning because I knew I was planning too much – but didn’t know what to take out… I was getting frustrated…

About then, the maker of Milestones Academy, who has been a personal online friend, offered me an opportunity to use a new mentoring service she was creating.  After seeing the first few lessons, I decided to use her History/Geography course.  Her lessons (a new online history book she wrote herself) was definitely a living book, and interesting…. but I quickly found that the other books assigned to read were WAY too much for us… so I swapped to using “A Child’s History of the World” for a bit, but continued to use her Geography – but then realized that the geography gets more and more tied in to the history… so tried swapping back to her history – did that until I practically broke down…. oh, and I had also realized that with the pace we were going, it would take 12 to 18 years to finish her mentoring rotation!  

So with a bunch of looking around, decided to do the SCM module. (I decided to do Module 2, as we had just finished up Egypt with the mentoring program)  I had noticed that with all the years I’ve been on this forum – I had never heard anyone say the SCM module was TOO MUCH… and had seen posts asking if maybe it was too little (which usually got answered with the opinion it was just right by those that had used it for a long time.)

So – here is the reason I’ve brought this all up.  I realized that on my own, I tend to want to do too much.  Many of the other CM programs I’ve seen/tried do way more history than seems to fit me and my family.  We aren’t too far in the SCM module – so maybe I will feel differently in the future – but so far it seems to be just right for us.  We are still doing the mentoring program’s geography for a couple of more lessons (they draw their own maps – a couple more lessons gets us to where the program is drawing maps that go with the history lessons….  at that point I’ll either have to find maps that match the SCM history to draw, or do the SCM geography, or something.

All Through The Ages is wonderful. Thanks for adding that. I meant to put it in with Jan Bloom’s books and simply forgot.