What Would You Do, if you were me?

Trying to make decisions for what we will do for history next year (starting in Jan – we do a Jan-Dec school year)…and I think I’m making things too complicated…I need some help to sort it out. My dd will be 7 (second grade). I have two preschoolers also who will tag along, but won’t start doing real school work with us for another year or 2.

This year, for my dd6’s first grade year, we’ve basically done a history overview using Famous Americans for Little Americans (Eggleston) and 30 Famous Stories (Baldwin). We read, narrate, and a keep a timeline. This has worked really well for us this year. It’s been simple, efficient, and dd’s enjoyed it.

I’ve been all over the map trying to decide what to do next year. First I was going to start with SCM Module 1. Then I decided to do Module 5. Then I decided to spread Module 5 over 2 years so we could add other things in. Then I tweaked all of the books we were going to use so I could use more of what I have already on my Kindle (I have the YC collection and the Heritage History Young Readers collection). We are overseas so I have to buy and ship everything…so I like to use Kindle books as much as possible. Library not really an option for us either.) Now I’m at the point that I want to tear my hair out because I’ve basically reinvented the wheel and I’ve also overcomplicated things and have way more in our schedule than I want there. I’ve loved the simplicity of this past year and I’d like to get back to that. I’m ready to chuck all the plans I’ve made and start over again.

So…I’ve been looking around. And I started looking at AO’s history rotation. I’ve looked at AO before, but never really considered it, not really sure why. But now the more I look at it, the more I like it. I really love the way that the SCM modules are laid out too, but far more of the AO books are available in Kindle format. I’m having to tweak the SCM module booklists a lot in order to make the most of what I already have, but from browsing the AO history books, I have many of these already. I would probably still do some tweaking, but I think it would be far less.

I know one of the greatest drawbacks to AO is that it isn’t set up to do family studies together the way SCM is. This coming year that’s not a problem since my two littles still have a couple of years before they will join us formally, but it looks to me like the “spine” type of books used in AO are the same ones across many grade levels, so I’m thinking that I could still use AO’s history as my springboard and keep the family together in the same time period a la SCM anyhow without too much tweaking (or at least without as much tweaking) by reading the spines as a family, and assigning supplementary books as age appropriate. Has anyone ever done this using AO as a framework? (I would probably only use the history portion of AO, FWIW, not the curriculum in its entirety).

I know the other big difference between AO and SCM is that Bible is incorporated directly into the SCM history modules…but we actually do “Bible” together as a family as part of our devotional time. I would split up the Bible and hist/geo readings this way even if we decided to stick with the SCM modules. We already add the Bible story characters to our timeline as we go, so I think that my children will still grasp how the Bible events fit into the broader stream of history even if we read Bible and history at different times of the day.

Hmm…now that I’m reading all this, I kind of sound like maybe I’ve answered my own quesion already. =) I guess I’m just wondering if there’s anything that’s missing in my thinking here. Any thoughts? What would you do if you were me?

Thanks,

Jen