History—Doing Life Together

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Our six children are spread out over a sixteen year span, so we have rarely had two students in the same or nearly the same grade level. I guess our first two would be our closest, graduating only one year apart. Therefore, we usually have students in several different grades at the same time. I think the maximum number of different grades with which I was working at once was four, plus a pre-schooler and an infant. Still, four different sets of lesson plans in multiple subjects is a lot.of.prep.time! So, one of the ways we tried to simplify lessons a little bit was to have history together. We would chose a curriculum that could:
  1. Be implemented with a variety of ages
  2. Had multiple supplemental reading recommendations that could be used with the various grade levels
  3. Allowed for “together time” activities (i.e., recipes, projects, read-alouds, etc.)
We try to accomplish our individual subjects that are grade-specific early in the morning, and then by 11:00 A.M. we are ready to gather together for history, as a family. We usually spend about an hour a day on history reading, writing, and activities. Some of our best schooling memories are from history we’ve done together. Curricula we have discovered that can be used in this manner include: Beautiful Feet history books, The Story of the World, World of Adventure, Mystery of History, Drive Thru History, and All-American History. We have found that history works best as our unifying subject, after spending the rest of the morning as individual students in the other core subjects. 

What subject (or subjects) do you most enjoy doing together as a family?

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