In our first year of homeschooling we used Sonlight with my nine year old daughter. She LOVED it! I loved the way there was so much beautiful literature used to bring history to life. This year, however, I needed to a) save money and b)combine history for a nine and six year old. I had heard so many good things about The Story of The World, so I did some research and we jumped in with both feet this past week. So far I have spent $30 on our history program (I bought the story book, activity guide, and test booklet), and I don't anticipate spending much more. You can't beat that.
My greatest concern was being able to bring great literature into this history program, and I found a site that makes the connection between Sonlight titles and The Story of The World. I have found Satori Smiles to be an invaluable resource to me.... she has the SOTW chapters coordinated with additional readings, DVDs, activities, and so much more! I simply referred to her site, then got on our library's website and reserved the books I would need. (If you're going to do this, make sure to give yourself 2-3 weeks lead time for the books to arrive at your library.) You can also find a lot of information at Home's Cool - which arranges all of the Sonlight books to coordinate with The Well Trained Mind. Awesome.
Hopefully I can keep a detailed account of our activities with SOTW so that maybe others can benefit from our research and experience. I will be adding a tab on my blog just for SOTW. We are starting from the beginning, with Ancients (Volume 1). I made a notebook for each of my children - and I found these great covers for free at Barefoot Meandering.
I put together a notebook for each child. (After searching for "free notebooking pages, SOTW" I also found some pages for narration and recording our activities.) I also had the activity guide for SOTW unbound and three hole punched so I could put it in our own binder. There are so many maps to photocopy that I wanted to do this with ease.
This week we went through the Introduction, which included "What is History?" and "Archaeology". The kids interviewed their grandparents and completed the family tree section from the activity guide. Yesterday afternoon they spent several hours with my husband's father, who walked them through that family's side of history. What a blessing to have him so close and willing to teach them. The learned so much from him! Miss B also learned from my parents about one room schools and farm life. All of my children's grandparents grew up during the Great Depression, so their stories are very interesting.
The Archaeology section was fascinating for all of us --- here are the books we used:
Miss B also asked the librarian about archaeology and she pulled five or six general books for her. The kids have been leafing through these this week. The Archaeology For Kids book is an exceptional book, with many activities to go along with it. We learned about seriation, the eight steps of archaeology, and lots more. The kids are getting a fascination with King Tut, so I have a feeling we will be spending some time on him in a few weeks!
All in all, I would deem this week a huge success with our new history curriculum. Have you used Story of the World? Do you have any resources you could recommend?
