Does anyone use Textbook for history and add in your own historical Lit?

[Love2Smile]

I cannot decide between BJU or Beatiful Feet for history next year. I love the fact with BJU my dd will learn what is expected of her to learn. History will be covered. I can then add in our own historical fiction using PP guides etc...

I love the looks of BF but do not want to get too bogged down that that is all we are spending time on is history! And if we don't like all the books we are stuck.

Next year, we want to spend a greater deal of our time and curriculum on science and writing and reading great lit.

Sooo, have you done that? Used a textbook history and added in great Lit and had time for other subjects?

[Liza Q]

I usually do this. Right now we are using Notgrass and The Teaching Co. dvds for American History and my own list of Am Lit - it is working well!

[Love2Smile]

I usually do this. Right now we are using Notgrass and The Teaching Co. dvds for American History and my own list of Am Lit - it is working well!
So you are NOT using the lit part of Notgrass? Is it easy to do it that way? Notgrass looked great, but I never thought of doing it that way!

[Liza Q]

The Lit part of Notgrass was not enough, I thought. The Notgrass books themselves are good but not too much, which leaves my daughter time to watch the TTC DVDs. Together they make a nice course! She does the writing assignment each week and just ignores the Lit part.

Here is the list of Lit I have her reading - some we just discuss and some we read with Sparknotes. I do have the Stobaugh Am Lit but we really dislike it...so I am only using some of the short stories and a few of the commentaries.

Moby Dick
Poe - Short Stories
Hawthorne - Short Stories
Walden
Emerson and Melville (Stobaugh)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Huckleberry Finn
Up From Slavery (Booker T. Washington)
Some Short Stories (Stobaugh)
Ethan Frome
This Side of Paradise
O Pioneers!
The Pearl
The Glass Menagerie
The Crucible
Fahrenheit 451
The Chosen
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Some Short Stories (Stobaugh)
Girl Meets God

There are definitely some other books that should be on this list! She begged me not to have to read Franklin and the Scarlet Letter, so I let them go. She has already read several (Little Women, The House of Mirth, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Raisin in the Sun) and some I just don't like (Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men). My Antonia was on the list but I replaced it with O Pioneers! as I thought that it was more directly related to some of the things we discussing. The American Voices book from Notgrass has some poetry and she has already read some Dickinson, Whitman and Frost. We worked on poetry analysis in 9th grade and we will do more next year so I was fine with doing little this year.

I was not crazy about doing American History this way. I used a WTM approach with my oldest, combining World and American History and Literature over two years (Early Modern and then Modern) and I thought it was great! But this daughter asked me if we could focus on US History this year and then do European/World next year and I agreed, as I want her to *own* her work, kwim? In the end she will have learned what I want her to learn.

HTH!

[Love2Smile]

You wouldn't have a "list" readily available for Ancient/World history would you! LOL
The book choices look great!

[Quiver0f10]

You wouldn't have a "list" readily available for Ancient/World history would you! LOL
The book choices look great!


That would be wonderful! :D

[Quiver0f10]

I usually do this. Right now we are using Notgrass and The Teaching Co. dvds for American History and my own list of Am Lit - it is working well!

Which Teaching Co. DVD's are you using with the Notgrass EAH? Thanks!

[Liza Q]

For Ancients I used Susan's book (History of the Ancient World) and Speilvogel (the first half), TTC Western Civ dvds (the first half) and a couple of non-fiction books. I do have a general (not very detailed) schedule for how I assigned these, if you think it would help - I can e-mail it to you. For Literature I used the Smarr Ancient Lit set, with some modifications.

For Med/Ren/Ref I the other half of the TTC set and Speilvogel with a heavier list of non-fiction. I used the Lightning Lit Medieval set and filled in the holes with other books that I thought were important. I am pretty sure that I still have my general schedule - it was only last year!

For years 3 and 4 I had my oldest read The History of the American People (Johnston) and a World History text, the name of which escapes me right now. I used a combination of Lightning Lit sets, Smarr guides and Sparknotes for the books I wanted to cover.

And Jean - we are using The History of the United States, 2nd Ed.
HTH!

ETA - I was looking over your original post and see that you are looking to spend a little less time on history and more on science, reading and writing. We spent a lot of time on History so my plans may not be that helpful for you.

[Quiver0f10]

And Jean - we are using The History of the United States, 2nd Ed.
HTH!

Thanks!