History Curriculum

Before I go into what we're working on for history this year, I'd like to clarify my earlier post. It's important to me to be fair to her school when I talk about our reasons for leaving it. The school did a lot of things right. The staff is dedicated to teaching and instilling faith in their students. R had some great years there with passionate teachers, but also some discouraging ones, with teachers who seemed to be just putting in their time. We have five years of good memories and are grateful for what she learned there. By all accounts that school works well for a lot of kids. We also knew many families who transferred their kids out for various reasons, some that paralleled ours.

One of the first subject areas I researched this summer was history/social studies. I felt a "could this really be true?" excitement when I saw how much we could cover with one-on-one instruction. I went to a Great Books college for undergrad, and I liked the idea of a classical curriculum. I looked at some curricula that we could just unbox and start teaching, and while they were tempting because I am so new and inexperienced in all this, we ended up putting together our own approach and sources. The Well Trained Mind forums were the most helpful source I found for researching and getting feedback from homeschooling parents. (Susan Wise Bauer's book The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home has been the best jumping-off point for us. It's an invaluable book.) 

We decided to use K12's  The Human Odyssey Volume 1: Prehistory Through the Middle Ages as our main text. K12 is a full curriculum, but we wanted to use only this book. I found this, and most of our books, used on Amazon or eBay.

Again based on recommendations from the Well Trained Mind forums, we supplement the textbook with individual volumes from The World in Ancient Times series from Oxford University Press.

 

So far we use these Oxford Press books the most. They have turned out to be perfect, at just the right reading level to be challenging without being so difficult that R gets discouraged. We use the workbooks and study guides from the Oxford Press series for some volumes. 

What we are both loving about homeschool is that we can take our time exploring all kinds of additional sources. My dad is a retired history professor and my mom a retired English teacher, and we have inherited some wonderful books from their library. Others come from our local library, or from thrift stores, library book sales, garage sales or online sources for used books.

We watch a lot of documentaries on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and check others out from the library. We also use our desktop computer and the iPad for interactive presentations, to research new words and questions that come up, and to go more deeply into ideas that R likes. She was interested in the pharaohs' journeys through the underworld, so we watched a National Geographic "Egyptian Secrets of the Afterlife" documentary. It dramatized the afterlife journey of Seti I guided by the Book of Gates, and made the history come alive for her.

I feel nervous all the time, that we are missing important lessons or going too deeply but not broadly enough. When she goes back to school, it will be with students who have been preparing to do well on tests that cover specific material. Whether or not we agree with that, it's the academic world she will have to function in for many years to come, and I wonder if it's a mistake to lead her away from that approach. When we first started, I was surprised to see that R's skills are mostly limited to completing worksheets. She wants to choose from multiple choice bubbles, and gets impatient when I ask her to think critically. "What's the answer? Just tell me the answer you're looking for." That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, that I'm willing to take a risk to try to turn that tide. How will we feel if it turns out she's not testing as highly, because she's learning differently for right now?

D and I agree that we're taking the long view, and we have to be brave about it. In many ways, it's been like watching her brain wake up, and recapture the curiosity and confidence of her early childhood. She will read a textbook in after school hours because she's interested in, say, Mesopotamian cuneiform script. She wants to use it as a guide to make up her own symbol language to exchange notes with her friend E. Is she missing out because she's doing that instead of homework that covers more ground more shallowly, where her knowledge will be measured by a chapter test? 

The fortunate thing about starting this in 2014 is the internet resources that are available now, and the guidance and encouragement from other parents who have been down this road.