How we do history: Story of the World

This year Noah asked me for more history specifically the Romans, Medieval time and Vikings so I changed up a lot of our schooling.  I decided that we would use the Story of the World vol 1 as our main history text as it is an amazing resource! It is a chronological history text starting from the first peoples and continuing to the Modern Age. There are four volumes in total that cover most of the major historical periods and people, including religions.  The books are designed to be used chronologically started with Vol 1 and progressing to Vol 4, but you can use them however you want really. Similarly STOW suggests 3 hours a week of history meaning that you cover 1-2 chapters a week over several sessions of 1 hour blocks, we are going to cover 1 chapter a week hopefully in 2 hours in a single session. We will also be rearranging the lessons to focus on Romans only. As with all plans these are subject to change and will be tweaked.

We have used the STOW before when we were using charlotte Mason methodology as our spine. It’s funny how it has come full circle, whilst STOW is definitely on the more classical side of things it still requires narration.  I have to say that I definitely favour STOW over A Child’s History of the World by Hillyer. We have used both and whilst they both cover similar topics, I just think that the text is more engaging and up to date in STOW I also like that you have an accompanying activity book and CD. Another point in favour of STOW is that it is easy to combine several children’s learning at once. When we used CHOW I had to hunt around the web searching for projects and crafts to do and often ended up looking at blog posts about STOW.

This year to make my life easier I bought the Vol 1 Activity Book which includes all the review questions, narration suggestions, colouring pages, maps and craft activities. This means that I will not constantly be searching around for projects/crafts etc for Noah and Zany to do. As always we will add in other projects or handwork that we see fit and will do our own narrations. I bought the PDF version of the Activity book for several reasons one it is cheaper, two you can download it and three you can print out as many copies of each page as you need. 

History is a family subject round here which means they will do history together.    As we are starting with Romans we will drop in at chapter 27, the Rise of Rome.  I cannot wait to learn this section of history alongside my kids as I did not really learn much about Romans whilst I was at school or if I did I cannot remember it. Ha! 

A typical history lessons goes as follows:

Narrating and review

I hand the children the colouring page from the activity book that corresponds to that chapter, whilst I read the chapter they are free to colour or just listen.   I always begin each chapter by asking them if they remember what happened last time. I try to pre-read the chapters in advance so that I can have explanations of words to hand, but to be honest STOW is pretty good at providing these. This means you can open and go with only a little prep of printing out the necessary pages. 

Colouring page here!!!!

Helpfully each chapter is broken down into sections and the Activity Book is the same so I read a few pages then stop and ask the review questions.  In our house correct review questions earn a chocolate raisin, that’s right I am not above bribery to ensure attentive children! I also ask one of them to narrate the chapter back, they take turns for this otherwise an argument breaks out over who is telling back!! That is how much they like this curriculum, they literally will fight over narrating, oh the trauma. LOL

Copy work & Note booking

When I have finished reading the chapter and all review questions answered I then ask them individually to narrate their favourite part of the chapter. I do offer gentle prompting here if needed. Again they take turns over this, so one week Noah will do this first then the following week Zany. I have to make note on my planning pages whose turn it is, otherwise I will forget and all hell will break loose!  Anyhoo whilst they are narrating to me I write it down, I ask for full sentences, they then copy it onto card stock in order to make a note book page. I am also teaching Noah the art of summarising as he gives incredibly detailed narrations which is good, but he definitely will not want to write that amount of information. So after the detailed narration I ask him to summarise, which we work on together.

Once the copy work is complete I rub out the pencils lines and go over it in black biro as this will not run when paint is applied. At the moment I am slowly transitioning Noah into this task. He hates writing so having to do it twice will not make him a happy camper! Once this is done they wash the card with watercolour paint or colour it in with pen. I don’t mind really as long as you can see the writing. Finally they add a drawing to the page, this can be done before or after painting.

Mapping

Sometimes we do the mapping activity set out in the book sometimes we do our own thing. If we do so we will water colour the map, write on the places and look up the place in our atlases. We have 2 atlases, a fantastic book about maps and the Montessori continent globe. A lot of the time though we actually don't do the mapping task provided by STOW. 

Craft activity

Again sometimes we use one of the suggested activities from the Activity Book other times we do something completely different. Sometimes I adapt the suggested activity for instance one of the suggested activities was to build a roman aqueduct, the activity book provides a template which I did consider using but it seemed easier and I think more enjoyable for my two to build an aqueduct from lego, we then used tin foil as a sort of liner for the channel that would contain water.