Ancient history the WTM way

[Michelle in AL]

My girls will be using Omnibus 1 this fall. To supplement history I bought History Odyssey by Spielvogel, DK History of the World (rec by WTM) and The Timetables of History (rec by WTM). I'm trying to make assignments for the 1st couple weeks and combining these 3 seems like overkill. Especially the DK book & History Odyssey. I like the idea the WTM gives of glancing over the Timetables and DK history of the World and then writing a summary. This is a lot of reading for the 1st 2 weeks though.

Has anyone used A Short History of Western Civilization? Did you like it better than Spielvogel? Is it shorter reading then Spielvogel? I think if I can get a shorter text, than Summaries will be doable.

Can someone tell me what the WTM 2nd edition recommends for rhetoric history?
Thanks!

[LisaNY]

The WTM 2nd edition recommends Spielvogel's Western Civilization, not Human Odyssey. The purpose of the DK book is to supplement what would not be covered in a standard Western history text. If you use HO, then you would not need to supplemet w/DK, since it covers all areas. All that being said, I *like* the DK history, as it provides me with 50-year overviews of sections of history in all areas of the world. It gives my dd and I a good feel for the events in a certain time period, and shows us how things are interrelated.

I really like the Short History text. It is a bit more concise than Spielvogel's Western Civ text, but not much. I find it an interesting read, as it not only explores what happened in history, but also why things happened, and their significance. I used portions of it w/my 7th gr. dd this year, and even assigned readings for her from this text.

[Jan P.]

Michele,
I have both Western Civ. (Speilvogel) and the Short History of Western Civilization. I would think they are both about the same in length. I didn't use the DK book. I personally like the Short History book better than Speilvogel's book. However ds disagreed, so we went with Western Civ. We really didn't do history the WTM way. I think I ended up testing ds over the chapters he read. However, I'm trying to have my dd write summaries. She did a few last year using SWB's Ancient History book. I made the mistake of letting her choose the chapters to summarize. Apparently she was fascinated with China, so most of the summaries were about China. LOL!! I'll be tougher on her this year.
Jan