A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

I sketched out more details for our summer of history tonight, and it appears that we will finish SOTW2 by or on Thursday, July 10. This is a good spacing; if we have supplemental reading, it can be available for the remainder of July and all of August, and there will be almost two months without SOTW to whet her appetite for more come autumn!

I don’t have history planned out well for third grade. I know that I want to continue doing SOTW and covering world history, but I also know that she needs to have more in-depth study of her own country’s history. Not because I’m particularly USA-is-better-than-everyone-rah-rah, though I do have a healthy dose of patriotism at times, but because I know that the standards for testing and what people are ‘expected’ to know do contain a lot of American history. I also feel that being informed about your country’s history and government is an essential part of being an involved citizen - which I hope all of my children aspire to be.

With that in mind, I’ve essentially decided not to supplement world history, just covering it through SOTW3 with the accompanying map work, coloring pages, and review questions/narration assignments. The difficulty, though, is that I am sure there will be at least a few things for which I’ll want to make exceptions! I did decide to concentrate our reading comprehension and literature primarily on historical fiction focusing on early American history. That will make some decisions easier, but there are still so very many excellent children’s history books. I also have Zinn-for-kids, want to buy Hakim, and have the Children’s Encyclopedia of American History. Oh, and she got The American Story for Christmas last year!

The difficulty may be finding enough time to read all of these wonderful books.

I also am having doubts about grammar. I don’t really want her doing a fifth grade grammar book in fourth grade. While I know she could handle it, there’s no real advantage to it and I don’t want to push push push for it to happen. Ideally, we’ll add in some supplemental workbooks from both Critical Thinking and Evan-Moore (editing, punctuation), and take the remainder of GWG Grade 3 (just Chapters 4 and 5 remaining, so a total of forty lessons and two chapter reviews) a little more slowly. We’ll still begin GWG Grade 4 soon after finishing GWG Grade 3 (around January?), but take plenty of time to finish it. If she absolutely is bored silly, then we can start GWG Grade 5 in late fourth grade. I do want to add supplemental diagramming workbooks, too. So we’ll still do grammar four or five days a week, but only three days will be in GWG, and one or two days will just be supplemental workbooks. I think the Evan-Moore workbooks are designed to be done daily, so we may do those all grammar days.

The big thing is that it puts us ready for grade five, logic stage grammar on target with fifth grade. I will have to decide between continuing with Growing with Grammar in logic stage or switching after fourth or fifth grade to something like Hake (Grammar and Writing, 5-8). I can see the advantage to switching, to make sure that there are no retention-type problems. I can also see the advantage to staying with what works! Two more years before I have to make that decision… thankfully.