More advice from Lea to a homeschool mom.
“Okay, History, Literature, and English do not all go together. But we did it all together. I always got so frustrated in school because I had paper in English, science, and other classes – and they all graded the grammar – even if it wasn’t in English class. So for the girls I put it all together.
We read Literature books that were set in historically correct time or biographies of historical figures from the time period we wanted to study. Then they would do a paper on that topic and add a few other sources off the internet – grade the grammar and spelling on that and call it three subjects. Not so frustrating, not so much work and still get the knowledge without hating it so much. This one is harder to get your hands on unless you want to do a strict history text book – my girls didn’t. Here are some of the things we tried and what I thought of them.
1. Learning language arts through literature – Type that phrase into google and you’ll see lots of places to learn about this book. Its also available at most Christian book stores that sell homeschool supplies. We used the lower grades for Catrina in 6th – 9th grade. Cassidy used the Gold books – American Literature and then British Literature. Cassidy also took a literature class though a homeschool group one year. When we did this we grouped Literature and English together for the work and Cassidy got two different credits. – Lit and English. When we did this we used a separate course for history and I think it was Greenleaf Press. It worked well for a while. Cassidy thought the high school courses were not challenging enough so as we went along with Catrina we moved to other things.
2. All through the Ages – History through Literature This site has other good advice too. This worked great with Catrina because she loves to read. This is a guide that shows you great literature from specific time periods, specific countries, etc. It was a great guide since I didn’t know much about literature or history as to what books to read. We read these books and purchased “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White (a writing reference book) as a guide for writing. Sometimes she would pick a topic and write a one page summary other times she would write longer papers. We even tackled a research paper once – but only once. I think we supplemented this with the DK History of the World (from Amazon) just to keep everything together on a time line.
3. Beautiful Feet Press - This is the US and World history pack. Catrina enjoyed a lot of this, but it has a lot of work (it’s a four semester course) and she got kind of tired of the same things after the first year. We didn’t do all the suggestions for each book. The joy of homeschooling – we only did the parts we wanted to. We only did the first year and then moved on to the All though the Ages above. But this was a good place to start because it has a guide that tells you what to read, questions to answers, papers to write, projects to do, etc. It even recommend movies that go along with the subject. It has all the “teaching” done, so it helped me know what then to do with the All through the Ages later. I don’t think I could have started there.
4. Learn to Write the Novel Way - Catrina hated “grammar” workbooks so each year we tried to find ways to learn grammar/spelling/etc without the workbook. This year she found this workbook and because she has been trying to write a book she really learned a lot and this was very useful. She found this one in one of my catalogs and I let her try it – it worked out great because it fit her. This is one of those times its great to have the child involved in picking out stuff.
5. Writing Strands / Reading Strands We have never used this but lots of folks have told me its good. We looked at it every year, but always wound up picking something else.
There are lots of other ways to do History, English, and Literature. Poke around on these sites and maybe others and you’ll probably get some ideas that fit you and your daughter best. I made a rule with Catrina – she could pick her own books to read from the guides or I could pick them and she had to read two of my picks before she could read her fun books. This worked, but she still has to be reminded to read her school books before her fun books. “
