Ah now I understand what you are talking about. We did them all in a different way. We covered World Geography with the World History and did the mapping and read about the various countries. We used Runkle’s Geography as a spine and to learn the physical geography and an old college geography book of mine. With US history we have used Map Quest along with various historical and modern atlases – they research various places and do written narrations. We also play various geography games for fun. For government and economics we will use Notgrass as the spine and then lots of other books. We have been studying those two subjects each year and have read a lot of original sources and also a lot on the US Consitution and how the government works – in our final year we will finish up the books we have chosen and then be done. The girls do a lot of reading and written narrations – we have read and studied enough in each of those subjects to gain a credit for each. By that I mean, we have been studying world, US, geography and government and economics since about 7th grade – since 8th grade it has been all at high school level or above.
One piece of advice – I have a couple of the TruthQuest books, and the thing with those is that you can get a bit too carried away on a time period. When we started homeschooling, we went through a year of general history and then the girls had an idea of what interested them, so when we started studying in more depth we knew which areas were going to catch our attention a little better. I had to be quite disciplined in not dwelling too long in each area – there were parts of history that did not inspire them, Eygypt comes to mind – so we skimmed that, did a little more with the Greeks and really dug into the Romans (again at the time we were in England and had the opportunity to visit lots of Roman sittes which added to the enjoyment and interest) – we studied medieval times quite seriously and also the Renaissance – these last two years we are really digging into US and modern history. History is so vast, no-one can do it justice not even in all the school years, it is a lifelong pursuit. In college I was a history and geography major and yet we covered almost no US history and not much ancient – I had my hands full with British and European – so don’t worry, you cannot cover everything and every detail – focus on the areas of interest and keep it in mind that your children, like everyone else will have lots of gaps – that is ok. I still read and study history books today – and I am always learning new things.
Notgrass is a good choice, just don’t get bogged down in all the writings and literature etc, if you are planning on doing other things for that, otherwise you will get bogged down. However if you don’t plan on any extra history reading you could do the course as is. I do a unit per week from Notgrass and at the same time they read their other books throughout the week, then the next week we do mapping and other reading and writing – it is working well that way for us. Does this help at all – perhaps others will have more ideas. Linda
