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Thursday, November 4, 2010

Story of the World

Many of my fellow homeschool buddies use Story of the World (SOTW), so either bowing to peer pressure or capitalizing on a good thing we are switching to SOTW.

Prior to SOTW we used Core Knowledge books for our history lessons. Core Knowledge books had the advantage of having both American History and World History for each year. Story of the World does not really have any American history until the Modern times books. So, I will be completing one Story of the World book and moving on to these for American history. Since we homeschool year-round we should be able to finish one book of each series in a year.

There are so many reviews already out there about SOTW that I do not want to add to them. I just wanted to write a quick post about how I use it. We follow a basic formula: Read SOTW chapter, complete some activities from SOTW Activity Guide Book, and follow up with IL Usborne Encyclopedia of World History.
I like using the chapter book with the encyclopedia, because I think it adds to the "realness" of history. The mummification process was just graphic enough in my kids opinion to be both gross and entertaining. I would have needed to buy the IL Usborne book anyway. We will continue to go through all four SOTW books, but as my oldest one..well, get older, I will let him use the Usborne book more on his own for further research. My kids LOVE the encyclopedia. Especially Tink, she likes the dinosaur pages.





















Here is the worksheet I made for Optimus, occasionally I feel he "needs" one. In the end we used the worksheet to aide discussion. He put it in his binder without filling it in. I think it will come in handy for review. Speaking of review! There are these handy little review cards in the Activity Book for every four chapters. I let Optimus color these.


Anyway, good program overall. We will be skipping anything in it that does not coincide with our beliefs, but it is very easy to do with this program.


Short Bus helping me take pictures. (No neurotic cats were harmed in the writing of this post)

Happy Homeschooling!
Michele

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