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Need help for fall planning please please!
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I have spent so much time looking at curriculum my head is spinning. Our children are 14, 12, 9, 6, 5, 5, and 4. I have always kept them together for history using Veritas and All through the Ages, focing on living books. Then I discovered SCM and love it. Oldest is starting 9th in the fall and we want to do ancients in a year. I was thinking MFW AHL, but that does NOT include Rome. Also looking at BF or tweaking AO and SCM. But how can the first three modules of SCM be combined in a year as someone suggested earlier? I’d love to keep us all together studying history and with MFW she would be on her own. I’m also concerend about the littles getting to much info on pagans too early.
Her 12 year old brother is pretty able to stay with her on studies, but the BF Ancients cuts off at 8th grade and he will be 7th. She is particulary sensitive to godlessness and it would be nice to either have her with her brother or with the whole famiy for the Ancients.
Thanks fo sticking with me this far! Any help is appreciated. 🙂
JFG
Biblioplan might be an interesting option for you to use to pull it all together, and does incorporate Old Testament history. They schedule a ton and you may need to pare it down a bit to make it more CM friendly.
We also found Heart of Dakota’s Creation through Christ to be a fantastic beginnings course full of living books (including two from SCM), with very little emphasis on pagan gods and legends. We used it last year (with my own modifications) for our two 5th graders, and with extensions for our fairly advanced 8th grader (14). I think it could be used for high school, and the HOD message board has hints for beefing up a program for HS. I used readings from other books for my then 8 year old, and am planning on doing something similar for the coming year, using a mix of resources and using TQ to help me choose books.
Blessings,
Aimee
I believe that if you do your Bible Seperate, you can do the History (and Geography?) items in the SCM modules roughly in a term… so that gets the ancients done in a year.
I just bought the Module One guide, so haven’t seen the rest….but since so much is Bible I think it would likely be doable to complete 3 in a year for the older children and maybe adapt for the youngers.
I have looked at Modules 1-3 fairly extensively and if you take out the Bible to do as a seperate study, you can easily get through the other material. The first three are lighter in history due to it being so “ancient”, pun intended. 😉
In each module there are 180 lessons, divided into 3 terms including exams every term. Bible is taught 3 days a week in those lessons, history 1 day a week and geography 1 day a week. So divide 180 lessons by 5 days = 36 weeks. That means Modules 1-3 contain 36 history lessons and 36 geography lessons. Since each term is 60 days divded by 5 = 12 weeks, that means that you have 12 weeks to study history and geography for each Module. Divide 36 lessons by 12 weeks and you have lessons in each subject to cover each week.
So in summary – in order to cover Modules 1-3 in one year you need to:
Do Bible as a seperate subject.
Plan on 3 terms of 12 weeks.
Each term is a Module. For each term:
Schedule 3 history lessons per week (this includes 2 mid-term exams, which you can opt out of.)
Schedule 3 geography lessons per week (this includes 2 mid-term exams, which you can opt out of.)
Hope I didn’t screw up my math in there. LOL HTH
Sheraz, just curious if any of those geography lessons can be pared down or combined somehow, so that it’s not 3x a week? We’re not in Modules 1 – 3 this year, but your schedule is interesting to me for the future possibly… so I’m taking notes 🙂
~ Jenn
Sorry Sheraz, but I do believe your info is mistaken. While mods 1 & 2 cover Bible 3 days a week, geography and history once each per week, Mod 3 covers bible 2 days, ancient Rome 2 days and geography once. This would mean your term 3 would have to cover 6 history lessons per week. For the most part, however there are only 11 weeks of lessons and one week set for review/exam/projects or catch-up, but I figure you’ll need it.
I am planning to do mods one and 2 this year, though we’ll see how far we get. I am planning to treat Bible as a seperate subject and aim for 5 days a week. Many of the lessons are pretty short and connected, so I may try to double up a Bible lessons here and there. I’m not worrying much about it. If I get in 5 Bible lessons each week, then I would only carry 36 lessons over to our Mod 3 year which only has 72 Bible lessons, so it works out fine. I plan to do history 2x and Geography 2x. I will be substituting some of the books (looking for a good geography substitute — I’m not crazy about Letters from Egypt), so that may mess a bit with reading schedules, but all in all, we are going to try to follow the guide as closely as we can. I do think that geography could be less frequent if you double up your readings or use a different resource. I might try something like 3 history, 1 geo lesson one week, and 2 history, 2 geo the next. As you can see, I’m still working on this one.
I would just read a Bible storybook to the youngers daily and call that their Ancient History study. You can add in anything that the older ones are doing if you find it pertinent. I think it is good to have the younger ones grounded in the Bible first and just add some secular history to it if you find it appropriate for your children. It is good IMHO for them to see that the Bible stories are History before they add in the last millenia. It is good for them to see the Big picture of time first and then add in more details next time they go through the history cycle.
We did Module 3, 4, & most of 5 in one year. If I was starting with 9th grade, I’d probably start with Module 1 & 2 and see if I had room for Module 3 or not. It wasn’t that hard to cover Module 3 & 4 in one year which you could do for 10th grade and save Module 5 & 6 to each have a full year for 11th & 12th grades.
You are right, 4myboys. I am sorry about that. I haven’t actually spent a lot of time planning in them in the last few months and I was trying to go off my memory.
Anyway – after getting out my tentative plan and looking it over again, the first two modules are fine as I laid out.
There are 72 lessons for Roman History in the Module guide, including the mid-term exams on lesson 59, 60, and 119,120. Most of the lessons are very short – even Camillus, which takes 4 lessons. When I looked it up in my actual Famous Men of Rome spine, Camillus was only SEVEN pages long, including the illustrations and spacing for a larger book size. I read more than that to the kids out of Letters from Egypt for geography. I do not think that it is going to be too much at all for my family to cover 6 lessons per week.
Geography – I still am planning on 3x a week, with map drill once a week. There are 36 lessons, so 1 lesson 3x a week should be fine.
Using notebooking and narration I am confident that we will learn and retain it. We aren’t having too much problem with these subjects…math, on the other hand, is another matter. ugh
Also, I have to say that I am using Famous Men of Greece and FM of Rome from the Memoria Press. It is not that different from the Greenleaf Press version (a few words here and there). But the Memoria Press is full of pictures (some of them full color spreads) that are really nice and will help my children to “get” the history better. And I found Famous Men of Greece and Famous Men of Rome as free audiobooks on librivox.org and will use those too.
Basically I still plan to do history and geography 3x a week, but covering 6 lessons in history and 3 lessons in geography. I am using Bible alongside, but as a seperate subject.
Hope that makes sense. I am getting tired. =)
Yes, I used the Memoria Press versions too. I loved the full color pictures and I also preferred their typesetting and general layout to the Greenleaf versions. We also have the Famous Men of Modern Times and we look at it as we read through our Greenleaf rewrites which cover more people.
Ladies,
Thank you so much for all of your valuable input! I know I had a lot of rabbit trails in my original post and all day I kept thinking about how I am drawn to MFW AHL for my 14 year old. I’m not sure if this would be biting off way more than we/she can chew, but I could possibly continue SCM modules 1-3 for the rest of the kids. I really need to be tweaking as little as possible because of how busy our lives already are. I think Biblioplan and maybe HOD would require too much tweaking from me right now.
I suppose if it is a huge mistake, I could sell MFW and put us all back together for SCM modules…..?
Sheraz thanks for doing the math and redoing for me. It really helps to see it like that.
What about BF? Should that be a consideration?
Thanks again.
JFG
Wow, sheraz and 4myboys, you have certainly helped me to figure out fitting in these modules in less time. Personally, from what you shared, I would plan on 4, 12 week terms for these three modules. Egypt for one term, Greece for one term, and Rome for two terms. If we finish early, I would do some other studies like Ancient China.
JFG: Last year, I covered Egypt, Greece and Rome in one year with my ds7 and dd4 ages at the time. We did not follow any guides for it. I pulled books from booklists here and there and some from the library. Some books that we used and liked: Usborne Time Traveler, Tut’s Mummy: Lost and Found, The Trojan Horse, a library book on the Olympics and parts of SOTW1. We might have used a few more books, but I can’t remember right now. I also used the Dover coloring books and Color and Learn coloring book pages. And we had a family wall timeline. We did a few crafts and these stories worked their way into my dc play time.
We do Bible as a separate subject. We have also enjoyed the Drive Thru History dvds on Greece and Rome and also Turkish Delight. I think it helped them to see that Bible really is history and what the places look like. My son and dh really like them, but my daughter is not very interested. She may be a little too young yet.
@JennNC – I don’t actually have A Travelor in Rome for the Mod 3 geography yet (I only bought the books for the Module we are currently doing due to money, haha) but if it is planned like Sonya has the others, you will read a specific set of pages in each lesson. I would think that it would be very easy to look at the 3 lessons for the week, count up the page numbers and divide by the number of days you want to schedule geography lessons for.
For example: In Letters from Egypt, we were to read about 5 pages per lesson (more or less). If I were doing geography 3x week that is 15 pages. If I wanted to only do it twice a week, divide out to 7 1/2 pages per day. 😉
I have only been able to look at A Travelor in Rome on Amazon’s look closer page. It looks very conversational. I am not sure how many pages to gauge since the Module 3 guide says things like “Read Chapter 2, sections 1 and 2”.
What do you think of this? Do MFW ahl for the oldest 14 year old and do SCM Modules 1 and 2 with the first through 7th graders. MFW ahl stops before the Romans and that way at the end of the year, if she wants to stop MFW if it is too much for her, she can rejoin us in a year with Module 3 Romans. That way Modules 1 and 2 won’t be so rushed and we MAY be able to even supplement with the youngers with AO.
It does throw her off track a bit for high school grad planning (ancients not all done in a year), but I bet it could be made up somewhere later.
Let me know what you think!
Thank you,
JFG
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