When the kids were elementary school-aged, we went through Early Modern & Modern Times (modules 5 & 6) “as is” and covered both American and World History each year. My remaining home educated student will be entering 10th grade this fall, and I was set to teach Early Modern History for the year as we did before. Then a thought occurred to me: should I consider just teaching the American History portion of both modules 5 & 6 next year and then teach the World History portion of those modules during 11th grade? It isn’t required to do that in our state…..in fact, only 1/2 credit of American History is required during all of high school! (What a pity….)
Doesn’t early modern and modern times teach American history in a world history context? If your son has already down 2 past history modules that focus on world history, I would think that to be enough for an American history credit and a World history credit once he has completed the next 2 modules.
Most of us just plug our children’s learning experiences into the proper slots that the colleges are used to seeing on a transcript. I don’t so much worry about when I teach a subject and I sometimes stretch a credit over several years and then just put it all into the usual format on a transcript. After all, colleges don’t really care which year your student received a credit. They simply want to know that your child covered the material sometime in their homeschooling years.
Some moms do a subject based transcript instead of a year based but I’ve found the year based to be the more widely used of the two.
Am I making any sense or did I totally misread your question?
I do want to teach both parts of Early & Modern Times, and it doesn’t matter where they fit on the transcript, but I was really just wondering if anyone had gone through just the American History part in one year and the World History part in the next instead of covering them both in two years.
I cover World and American History so that we can understand the dynamics across the globe at various times in history. Because I prefer to do it that way, we did 1860-1920 this year, and next year we are going to do 1920-current – covering World and US together.
I just read something from the SCM blog series that Sonya wrote, Teaching History: Subject by Subject Part 3. Her Teaching Tip said, “Charlotte recommended that history be taught in chronological order, which makes sense since so much of what happened was based on cause and effect.”
So, I am pretty sold on the idea that I am going to stick with the modules as designed, and teach World and American History together. If they both appear on her transcript as a 1/2 credit each in both years, so be it. I can always provide the college admissions office with course descriptions if they ask for them, which they probably won’t since her major is not going to be history-related. We never asked for course descriptions at the college I worked for unless the course title was too vague.
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