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TQ Users and Year–Planning/Pacing Issue???
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Hi Everyone:
Would you please help me as I try to sort this out in my mind? I am desperate for any insight as I feel ~~STUCK~~ w/ planning history. Last year we did TQ Renaissance and Reformation (loved it)! The guides are AMAZING! (We’ve also done Tapestry of Grace and the SCM guides….been at this a while, and seem to switch every couple years).
I would like to stay with TQ, however, I am stuck in trying to figure out how to widdle down the size of the next guide, Age of Revolution I, as it has 87 topics. Last years guide had maybe 50 or 60, (and it was hard enough to get through the year w/ that!). I would like to complete one guide per year, in order to get the proper pacing. If there are 36 school weeks, HOW are you supposed to cover 87 topics? Many of the topics have an a, b, c, d ect….too! I am feeling discouraged and thinking I might have to bail on this curriculum too?
Do YOU have any suggestions how to make this work? I understand you don’t have to do every topic. Let’s say I skip 17 topics, I still have 70 to do in 36 weeks?
When we are trying to check out living books from the library, the books are long and detailed (enjoyable, yes; but very time consuming to read). So, it seems to me, if I am going to cover 60 or 70 topics this school year, I will not be able to do the longer living books. Therefore, I am left w a choice, less topics, and rich books; or more topics (as the guide lays out) and spines…..? Hoping to gleen valuable insight! 🙂
Thank you for listening!
Kelly WrightHi Kelly! We have used several Truthquest guides and are using Age of Revolution I right now. 🙂
The answer is that you aren’t supposed to cover every, single topic. You’re supposed to cover the main highlights and delve deeper when you come across a topic that interests you or a book on a topic that is not to be missed!
Here’s how I do it: I choose a spine first and then I know that we will get a nice, broad overview of the time period via that so I don’t have to worry about huge gaps. Next, I look through the guide and mark books that I really want my child to read and subjects that I want them to delve into a bit more. Then we simply start working through the guides.
I’ve come to a place where I really don’t focus on completing a guide in one year. History is a subject that one never really finishes with so we just keep going in chronological order and don’t worry about when we finish. That said, we always end up finishing a guide in a year. I just don’t stress about whether or not we will. I don’t really plan out how long each book will take us or how many pages to read or any of that. We simply work on history every day for 30 minutes or so. I sit down each weekend and plan a week’s worth of lessons. I will schedule specific pages from the guide and specific chapters from our spine to be read on certain days. After that, I assign 30 miniutes a day of reading from chosen books that go deeper into individual topics.
If I wanted to plan it all out like more formally, I would just go through the guide selecting books I want to use, then look up the page counts and keep paring down until I had a doable book list. The SCM planning notebook does a wonderful job of walking you through this process.
In our homeschool, we just do the next thing, read the next chapter, move onto the next book, etc. It is more relaxed and works well for us.
I have had similar issues with TQ and am planning it differently this year. While I like to just take my time to go through a guide, I’m dealing with a bunch of young boys who aren’t as content moving slowly and taking their time. They complain if I read about the same thing in different books. So, what I did was look at the topics covered in the curriculum I used to use (MFW) and marked them in the TQ guide. Just doing that helped me not feel overwhelmed. I then made further adjustments by adding and taking away based on our interests. Then I looked at the chapter books and historical fiction in the guide and on my home library shelves and made a book list for each of my boys that can read well. I looked at the number of chapters and length of them to figure out how many days it will take them to read each book. I also put the book list in chronological order.
So my plan is to read a spine, together, for each topic we cover and each older child will read from their book list almost daily. Of course I also reserve the right to tweek things as we go. I’m willing to hang out on a topic of interest for a while or skip something that doesn’t appeal to us once in a while. It’s just nice to have a framework.
I hope you find what works for your family! TQ is awesome!
The availability of books helped me narrow down TQ planning. I’d check the guides and mark if we owned a book or if we could access it from the library. Then I made decisions about which other books were important enough to purchase.
I’m not using TQ now, but when I did, I think there was a Yahoo group or a FB group that I was part of and some people would post their schedules to the files section. I had a pretty elaborate schedule in there for Renaissance and Reformation that covered several age ranges. There might be some schedules floating around somewhere that you could tweak.
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