Here is what worked and didn’t work for History last year. More to follow soon on how the new school year is going.
We continued with our history group from last year and covered Medieval times. The group decided we no longer wanted to follow Story of the World (SOTW) as a group but wanted to use the Usborne History Encyclopedia as the basis of our studies. However, Big Brother still wanted to listen to SOTW2 so he did at bedtime. This year had less structure and it was difficult to engage the kids, they mostly just wanted to play although Big Brother did enjoy the reading and listening when it was just the two of us. I think removing SOTW as the foundation was a contributor as well as us choosing to probably be too laid back for the kids to feel they needed to be structured enough to participate so as one strayed they all soon followed. We tried a couple field trips with the group and also didn’t feel this worked very well for us. Big Brother and I like to go through the museum slowly and read everything. We quickly got left behind and then Big Brother soon gave up on focusing on the museum. I think museum trips would be better for us alone. For various reasons, history group just didn’t work well this year and all participants agreed so we are probably going to discontinue history group but continue with something different to get the kids together who have become very close. Our family will probably continue with Story of the World on our own. Even though I don’t always agree with the order or what the author chose to focus on, I find it to be a good starting point for us as my son just loves listening to Jim Weiss and the storybook like format.