School Year Countdown: History

Designing my history curriculum this year was something I felt could not be accomplished by ordering a simple textbook.

The first wrinkle is that I use Connecting with History, which is based on a repeating four-year history cycle, while locally we participate in the CCE program, which is based on a repeating three-year history cycle. So, in order to keep in sync with our local group, I need to squish some years together.

This year, I took what is a year and a half of material from Connecting with History and condensed it, creating my own daily lesson plans. The result is thirty weeks of four days per week of lesson plans, so, while rigorous, it should actually give me some wiggle room for falling behind of 20% each week (as I do have five mornings per week to teach history) plus six extra weeks at the end of the year.

My coming year, I plan to cover years 306 to 1700.

• Review Connecting with History lesson plans unit-by-unit, which suggests lesson plans for four different age groups.
• Pull out which (not all) resources I want to teach and assign.
• Make a chart showing which are read-alouds, which are for my second grader to read independently, and which are for my fourth grader to read independently (and my sixth grader will be following different history assignments through his CCE program!).
• Add in any assignments from my own personal favorite supplements.
• Print out each as a chart to fit on one page each. This lets me look at only one page all the time the entire time we are doing a month-long history unit, and mark off what we've completed.

I'm tickled by finally obtaining a display bookshelf, which I've wanted since the start of my homeschooling, and which will be for our history and geography books. I've stationed it by the laundry room, so that I can access it quickly for doing the read-aloud portions of history at the kitchen table, but it is also behind the baby gate so the baby-who-will-be-a-toddler-this-year cannot be a book marauder. (I know he'll find a way regardless.)