When to Teach Ancient History

I too, thought the article had valid points. From experience, I can attest to the fact that history via textbook is pointless. I don’t recall any of my “teachers” being passionate or engaging in this area. In fact, looking back, I remember so many with the attitude of “…check off the requirements, this isn’t that important–just look to the future…” Being immature children, we thought this path of least resistance was great; but now I wish I’d had a teacher who cared more about educating than taking home a paycheck. We learn from the past to make better choices for the future.

I also agree with the thought that early elementary ages haven’t had enough experience with the world to make connections with ancient history. I think we should be letting them alone to discover who God is, letting Him impress on them His character so later they can make the connection of how God was involved in history from the ancient times all the way through today and will be for eternity. The key of course with this is that they get an accurate understanding of who God is.

I try to look for opportunities that come up based on their curiousity. We use the Bible as our base for history in the elementary years and as we read it, questions they have may lead us to a type of ‘spin-off’ study on Egypt, etc. Then in high school do a more ‘structured’ type study of Ancient History. We do keep a timeline on the wall so we can see how the different things fit into history; not necessarily going in order, but adding to it like you would put a puzzle together, piece by piece.

As Charlotte says, eventually their minds will make the connections.

I’m not real fussy in this area; I try to let it come naturally and have quality living resources readily available.

Not sure if this helped, but it’s an interesting topic to be explored.

mj

Hi Cindy,

I have gone through a similar scenario of questioning while planning the history studies for our young elementary children. I love history and so far our children have enjoyed it but, like you, I hesitate to introduce them to the myths and graphic realities of the ancient pagan world. I remember having bad dreams after being introduced to greek myths in early elementary school (I was a very spiritually sensitive child and so are our children). What we have decided to do is to use Sonya’s Genesis through Deuteronomy/Ancient Egypt for 1st grade, Joshua through Malachi/Ancient Greece for 2nd grade, and Matthew through Acts/Ancient Rome for 3rd grade (when it is ready, of course). We will be supplementing these wonderful biblical history studies with selected chapters from The Story of the World Volume 1 in order to give a sense of what else was happening in the world during these important events given to us in the biblical account. I never connected biblical history to the rest of history until bible college and I am hopeful our children will NOT have such an ignorant experience as I did! It blesses me to know that they will be light years ahead of where I was at their age, perhaps not in academic “smarts”, but in the knowledge of who God is and how He has been at work throughout history from the very beginning (and still is!). I figure when we have finished our first complete cycle of history around 7th grade then the children will be old enough to hit lightly upon the mythologies and other less-than-savory ancient people and events with a secure biblical foundation and more maturity than they possess right now at the ages of 4, 6, and 7.

I agree with several of the ideas presented in the essay by Rea Berg, thank you for sharing that, it has raised a few questions that I will need to wrestle with and pray about (as far as American nationalism/patriotism is concerned). 😀

Rachel

I did read the BF article a couple of yrs ago and it made a lot of sense to me too, but I just couldn’t shake the fact that I wanted to dig into the bible, and flesh it out a little more w/ history. I just wanted to start our homeschool off with BIBLE, in more ways than what we had been doing. So we do bible w/ some fleshing out of history added in, BUT I do not dig into too much at this point. For example, my children know that God sent the plagues against the Egyptian false gods, but I’ve never glorified or given the Egyptian culture the ‘cool’ factor. We’ve never dug into learning about their gods, what they looked like, what their “powers” were, our focus has always been on God.

I think ancient history can be taught tastefully, but for us right now I guess it would be considered more of an overview vs. how other homeschoolers may teach ancient history. But that’s OK for us. I just really want to focus on God right now, so this is what we are doing.

I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer here, its all in how you do it.

Ginnie

From reading this thread, am I correct in assuming some of you do not follow the modules as laid out on SCM? I ask this b/c We did not start out in Genesis and move from there. We fumbled around with things and found that we were CMers 🙂 After 3 years of HSing, I am regretting not having started there with history and moving forward. I have a 6 and 7 year old and we will be doing Heart of Dakota CM-style but we will be in the 1500-1800s. How did you all make a plan to be sure to cover all areas of history?

Thanks!

M