SCM guides or Truthquest

I’ve use TQ for 2 years….SCM guides weren’t completed yet for the time periods we needed them.  Love TQ, but am also planning on buying the SCM Mod. One guide next year.  Both may sound crazy:)  But I’m drawn to SCM to have it laid out for me.  The TQ commentary is wonderful and I want to keep it.  The TQ booklist can be overwhelming, so I narrow by using mostly SCM books.  The SCM guide does not look too hefty for Module One, so my plan is to use it as my guide, add in a few more TQ books, and jot notes in my SCM guide as to when to read what pages in my TQ guide. Clear as mud?  🙂  Hopefully trying to get the best of both worlds won’t be too confusing!  Blessings, Gina

P.S. I haven’t used the SCM guides yet, so can’t adequately give a pro/con list! The main neg. of TQ vs. SCM that I see is that you have to plan it all yourself. I tried winging it one year and it didn’t go very well…crammed at the end, the guides are so full.  But this year I made out a day-by-day plan w/TQ and it went great. I love the biblical commentary. I’d just like SCM to do the planning for me next year…for $11 I figure it’s worth a shot:)  And I’ll just add a bit to it.

I also think that combining the two is a nice option.  The SCM guide alone didn’t give me enough options for further books to read.  I have some voracious readers!  I like to have literature selections that go along with our history studies, but don’t have time to pre-read everything, so I appreciate the TQ guide.  Also the commentary in TQ helps me to see the ‘thread’ of history.

Robin, that’s so neat to hear!  That’s what I really love about TQ. Just this week we’ve been talking about evolution, socialism, Hitler, etc. and how turning from God and the value of human life and from believing God created us shaped the worldviews of leaders….even disguised under the guise of a better ‘democracy’ because people don’t like the word socialism.  And this was in the elementary guides. I can’t wait to read Francis Schaeffer’s works, etc. and delve into this more in high school!  This is great education for me as well as my kids:)

TQ can be used stand alone, but I appreciate the work put into the SCM guides to narrow my choices to have a good feel for the amount of books to schedule for a year.  And I like the flexibility to be able to add my own book choices (usually from AO/TQ) and don’t think it will be too difficult to add to the SCM list or occasionally make a substitution, if needed.  HTH some:)  Gina

I’m not Robin, but I can tell you how I’ve done it. I try to decide how much I’d like to cover in a year.  For instance, next school year we’ll cover the Middle Ages first semester and then Renaissance and Reformation in the second semester.  I think that each of those guides are divided into about 50 sections.  I page through the guide and decide how many sections I need to cover in a week to get it done in the allotted time.  Now, some sections are much deeper than others, so I plan to adjust as we go along.  Then I pencil in the readings from the spine that I want to use (usually the spine listed in the TQ guide) and check to see what other resources I own and what looks good to me that I want to include.  My goal is to have a history reading that we do all together that will work for my younger readers, a history reading for my independent readers, a literature book for all the different levels of readers and then a family read-aloud.  We usually do the together reading time as one of the first things in our day going over the TQ commentary as it fits, then I assign the independent reading for the different levels and have them come and narrate to me from time to time.  

If you join the HIStory questors yahoo group, there are some files of schedules that others have done.  Those can really help as a starting point and can be adjusted to use with your own resources.  

Yes, I’ve heard that critique of TQ, too.  The style of writing is very personal and could come off as maybe a little too much w/ the exclamation points and some slang.  But the overall content is SO good, that I’m fine w/that.  I’m on the TQ yahoo group and Michelle Miller (author) is on there all the time and is a very personal, warm, Godly woman and I think that personal touch in the guides is just part of her personality.  The guides are very rich and deep. I’m very thankful to have these to guide our biblical worldview of history.  AO also rec. them as a supplement. And I believe it was Karen Glass who said that if CM used history guides these would be it:)  Gina

P.S. As I’m typing my nearly 10yo commented out of the blue that Obama wants to let a man marry a man and how it’s still going on since the World War (yesterday we’d talked about liberal views in Europe at the time of WWII creeped into America because of Immigrants coming here….and bad beliefs make for bad trouble).