Thinking "Aloud" about our History Cycle

Time to do a little rethinking here. I had always planned on following WTM and cycling through History in 4-yr cycles hitting each topic three times over the course of a twelve year education: Ancients (1st, 5th, 9th); Medieval-Early Renaissance (2nd, 6th, 10th); Late Renaissance-Early Modern (3rd, 7th, 11th); and Modern (4th, 8th, 12th). I've always had a bit of a pang with this anyway because since Cassia is listening in and participating in The Ancients in her Pre/K4 year. I'm not going to start all over again for her in two years when she's 6 and officially in 1st grade. That would be silly. And then what about Greyson and anyone else who might come along?

I finally decided to relax a bit on the strict year divisions and just cycle through the years as we came to them, folding in whoever is interested at the time. That leaves the History Cycles starting as follows:

• Cameron: 1st, 5th, and 9th
  
• Cassia: K4, 3rd, and 7th with two years at the end of high school to either explore her own interests or to stay on track with the youngers with a more intense study of the first two time periods.
  
• Greyson: K5, 4th, and 8th and one year left over to do the above
  
• Homeschooler-Under-Construction (yes, we are officially TTC so assuming all goes as planned...): PreK3 (though I doubt there would be much interest or activity), 2nd, 6th, and 10th but having to condense the whole thing into 3 years but also with having been exposed to everything 4 times instead of just three.

Wow, that puts me to the year 2025! Talk about long term planning, lol.

But that was the old plan. I'm finding that we are progressing rather slowly through History. Much more slowly than I had anticipated. Double slow, in fact. When I first received our copy of SOTW, I broke it down: 94 stories, 42 chapters, 315 pgs. Assuming a 40 wk school year, that left me to do approximately seven and a half pages or one or two chapters a week. Mmm hmmm. We've been averaging a chapter every two weeks. According to my roughing out of the chapters, we should be starting the Early Greeks next week. It says right there, Dec 17 (which was my scheduled break for Christmas time), be done with Chapter 19. We're still on Chapter 10.

Not that I really think that's a bad thing. I am actually really enjoying our casual pace. We do History two or three times a week (and I'm guessing that it will be three times a week much more frequently now that the rain has come to cancel our favorite park day for several months). Usually our routine goes as follows:

• Monday 1: read SOTW, do coloring pages and maps
  
• Wednesday 1: read Usborne Book of World History and Kingfisher History Encyclopedia
  
• Friday: do craft or read library books
  
• Monday 2: read library books
  
• Wednesday 2: do craft or read library books
  

Now sometimes we don't read all the stories in a chapter in one sitting. Sometimes we will alternate SOTW and the encyclopedias depending on how related the story topics are to each other and how much interest the kids have in listening to me read them. It's a slow pace, I admit. But I'd much rather have them interested through short bursts than bored into a non-listening comatose state by droning on after their interest has waned. So that leads me to my dilema - how do I keep our slow comfortable pace and still cover everything for the Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric stages of learning?

I think I finally figured it out. I'm just going to have to let things unfold as they will and remember that the type of learning that a child does in the Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric stages isn't defined by the time period they are studying. Their brains don't switch into a new way of thinking simply because we've started on The Ancients again. It happens with age and maturity and I'm just going to have to keep an eye on their thought processes to properly challenge the stage that they're in.

But I can also revise our schedule a bit and plan to stretch it out into a 5-year cycle instead of a 4-yr one. Stretching things out to five years gives Cameron two full cycles and then two more years of high school to explore things, in depth, on his own. Cassia will either have three complete cycles (including her PreK/K studies of History) minus the last section of Modern History OR she will have two complete cycles and all of her high school years to research and explore things on her own. I could even assign a year-long research paper on something in one of the original History Cycle Divisions to focus her studies a bit more. Greyson will benefit from this stretch by starting The Ancients in 1st grade (2012) and having two full cycles plus the last two years of high school for independent study, like Cameron. Similarly, any baby born in 2008 will follow Cassia's path.

I like my new plan. It gives me both the structure to keep us somewhat on track and the freedom to take our time on our journey and smell the roses a bit. I know, even though 2025 seems so far away, it will all pass in the blink of an eye and I don't want to waste a minute of it stressing over the details. What do you think?