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When and how to start history with little ones
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Hi – A brief intro, as this is my first post here! I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s posts for a while, and it seems like such a warm community. 🙂 I’m enthusiastically preparing to start CM method next year… We live in WI and have 4 kids – dd 5, ds 4 (Ethiopian), dd 2, dd 10mo, and hoping to return to Eth in 2010! My eldest is eager to learn, she would be an old kindergartner next fall (Nov bday), so I plan to do a “light” CM year 1, gauging how she does to make it challenging but not burdensome.
First question: I don’t figure history would start with her next year anyway, but I’m just trying to picture what lies ahead: With the kids spaced on average 18 months apart, would we start the first 2 together on the Module 1 when they’re, say, 7 and 6, then back them up and repeat (more in-depth) when the younger ones are ready to join? Would that get tiresome for them to stay in the ancient world so long? Or would they go straight through from Mod 1-6, and the younger ones jump in mid-stream as they’re ready then somehow go back for the early parts? I love the idea of the family learning history together, but need help with how it would work. I know so little history, it will be fun to learn it with them!
Second question: I’m not a fast reader… do you find yourselves under a never-ending load of books you need to pre-read so you know how to evaluate their narrations and help them with comprehension? I can barely read a book every 3 months right now, so I’m not sure what to picture for CM in real life.
Thanks for any help!
-Ellen
Concerning the history modules, the plan would be to start at the beginning with your oldest and continue through all 6 modules, with your younger children jumping in wherever you are as they begin their education. Then, when you’ve gone through all 6 years, you start over – only this time your oldest is now using books listed for the higher grades, while the youngers are going through it for the first time.
It’s a rotation of 6 modules (years) and you would do them twice if homeschooling from the beginning.
My oldest is 11, and my younger two are almost 9 and 7. This is my first year with SCM and I decided to start from module 1. My oldest will get through just one rotation of all 6 modules, while my youngest will just about go through the rotation twice.
As for your reading question, my oldest is just now starting to read her own school literature – in the past I had read all her selections for school to her, so I’m not totally there yet. I’m interested to see how others answer this question. 🙂
Hope this helps!
Rene’
I must admit that I didn’t do a lot of pre-reading of school books when my children were young. I knew that I would be reading the books aloud and could edit or omit as necessary.
Plus, I tried to be careful in getting the book recommendations from people whom I trusted and have similar values as I do. I would try to take a look at the book first and just do some spot reading (contents, first chapter). If I liked what I saw, we started reading it together. If I got into a hairy situation (which was rare), I would stop and scan silently for a safe place to jump back in or I would reword the omitted information and we would continue. I can remember only one or two instances when I decided the book wasn’t worth finishing. And in those cases you have the freedom to set it aside and move on to something else.
You’ll be in that read-together stage until your oldest is at least 9 or 10, and by then you’ll have a good feel for whose recommendations you are comfortable with.
RE narrating: When you’re reading together, evaluating a narration is easy. When the children get older, I have found that my curiosity and genuine interest in what they are discovering from their reading elicits a willingness to tell me all they can remember. We have set the groundwork during the younger years that we are both learning from the books we read. They know that I am learning right alongside of them, and that learning throughout your whole life should be normal. They’ve seen me get excited over learning some new bit of information while reading together. So I’m morphing a little, I guess, into asking for a narration in order to learn more myself. You can tell how much the child remembered, of course, by how detailed and involved the narration is. But my primary role is not so much to judge which details she left out, as to share with her the ideas she remembers.
A long answer to say, no I don’t usually have stacks and stacks of books in order to read ahead. 🙂
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