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As with science, last year I learned that the mother’s brain works much, much better if all children are studying approximately the same history topic.  Kolbe’s high school curriculum covers world history from a western-classical perspective over the course of four years: Greek in 9th, then Roman, then middle, then modern.  The readings for high school literature coordinate, which I absolutely love.

Now remember I have special accounting powers, which means I must a) plan ahead far into the future, b) seek to maximize efficiency and utility, and c) involve a spreadsheet in that process.  With distractions like that, you can see where my house gets to be such a mess.

And here was my challenge: My children did not think ahead.  They were not born four grades apart.  Result: I expect to spend six years of my life with two students in high school.

–> I could handle it if I had three younger ones on their young-person topic, and just one child doing his own high school subject thing.  But there was no way I was going to apply my brain to both the Illiad and the Cantebury tales in the same year.  Just not.  Not.

Good News:  The people at Kolbe have this problem too.  I sniffed around the forums, and learned that in their day school, which is small, the entire school just cycles through the four time-periods together.  I confirmed that a 9th grader could confidently do lit & history of some later grade.  My trick would be to go ahead and get the kids on the G-R-M-M cycle right now, so that no matter where in the cycle the newly-minted 9th graders landed, they’d have the background info they’d need to get going.

And I had one secret weapon that made it all massively, massively easier: #1 is a certified History geek.  So we could pretty much do whatever we wanted with him, and it would be fine.  In this case meaning that I ordered the complete set of elementary Greek history and literature offerings for him to read the summer before we launched into Ancient Rome in the fall, and he polished it off in about two weeks.  Like I said.  Secret weapon.

I requested the 5th grade Famous Men of Rome course plans for both big kids.

After browsing through the book, I determined my rising 4th grader was going to find it a bit overwhelming.  She likes history, but not in a pour-through-pages-of-military-history kind of way.  More in a dress-up-like-a-Roman way.

I decided she’d do better if we spent the fall warming her up to this whole Rome thing, and conveniently my local crack dealer had the History Pockets series in stock.  She worked through those the first two quarters, and now is underway with the Famous Men, and that was definitely a successful plan.  Having been introduced to the general ancient roman lifestyle, form of government, founding legends, and so forth has made it much easier to for her to follow the text this spring. Amazon has a preview of the Famous Men text so you can see what I mean.

What you need to know about the Famous Men of Rome and Greece books:

• The text is great.  Nice narrative style, Christian worldview without being in-your-face about it, and overall the amount of reading is not too much, if it’s spread over the course of a year.  If you have a struggling reader, plan to read aloud together.  The illustrations are goofy.
• The workbook (“Student Guide”)  is very useful for helping the kids learn the material and prepare for exams.  Recommended.  You could treat it as a consumable, but it’s pretty easy to just have the kids do the work on a separate piece of paper.  You can look at the Amazon preview here.
• The teacher’s guide = the workbook with the answers filled in.  Smart money says you’re going to want this if you get the student guide, unless you just know a lot about Rome and/or have the time to study along.

About the Course Plans:

• The Kolbe course plans do not mention the student guide, you just assign the pages to go with the lesson.  The way the course plans divide up the work across the year, sometimes only part of a workbook page will apply to a given day’s or week’s work.
• In some places the course plans give additional guidance or assignments, and in other places they just indicate what pages to read which day.
• The course plans do include quarterly exams and answer key.

–> With my fourth grader starting the book mid-year, I found it very simple to just assign one chapter per week, and have her do the two-page spread of workbook pages that go with the chapter.  If you aren’t enrolled with Kolbe, I would skip their plans and just do that.

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What about the Land of Our Lady Series?  I know nothing.  It didn’t work with my masterplan.  If someone finds a good review, please feel free to put a link in the combox.

What about the study of non-western cultures?  See “history geek” above.  That child was not spawned from gravel.  I assure you, my children could no sooner miss out on world history than miss out on ice cream.  But if you lock your child in a closet outside of school hours, yes you’ll need to shove a few library books under the door to make sure they find out about the existence of China and all that stuff.

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Any other questions?

Next week I’ll review the Latin I think (is that what we said, Tracey?), and after that, name your subject if you have one you want me to do next.

I forgot to include in my science report about how it all fits in for the littles.  Here you go.

Last year, I experimented with having all four kids study the same subjects for history and science.  They weren’t necessarily reading the same books or doing the same assignments, but they were on approximately the same topics.  I loved it.  Totally sold.  The sanity factor is just there.  100% there.

–> I’ll discuss the elaborate strategy I worked out for Kolbe’s history courses in my next installment.  But what about science?

I decided to let the boy — 6th grade, and very comfortable reading for information on his own — do his own thing with the purple book, and not worry about coordinating him.   The independence (translation: labor saving) we gained by going with a textbook and student-readable course plans was worth the loss in academic camaraderie.  He tends to be studying his own thing anyhow.

For the girls, I used the 4th grade text as my outline for the year.  I went through the course plans and picked out the main topic week by week, and used it to write up a general outline of subjects to study with the littles.  I  have enough odds and ends of science-y books that mostly I can work out of the home library to find some read alouds on the topic of  the week.

When we do hands-on work, all three girls end up participating, regardless of who the assignment was intended for.  (And usually there is a boy lurking in the background as well.)

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Separate note: What happens on all those Mondays that the kids don’t do the goofy “investigation” called for in the textbook? The boy likes to use that as his excuse to play with the microscope.  Which means the girls want to look, too.  The kids are big fans of using educational activities as a delaying tactic to avoid their other assignments.  I think I spend 25% of my parenting time telling the kids to quit helping each other and do their own work.

First thing to note: I 100% agree with Erin Arlinghaus’s seminal blog post on everything elementary science.  The way she teaches is the way we’ve done science in the past, though maybe not with quite such organizational flair.  Keep that in mind as you read my comments.

The Texts

Kolbe uses Harcourt Science 4^th Grade for 3rd and 4th grades, and Harcourt Science 6^th Grade  for both 5th and 6th grades.  [Both from Harcourt Publishing, 2005.] The units are divvied up so that you do half the units in each grade — if you have used part of one of the books on your own already, you’d want to figure out which course plans cover the sections you haven’t already studied (call and ask), or if you are enrolled with Kolbe,  just request a copy of both grades, and use what you need.

The textbooks are fine.  Colorful, informative, full of things you’d want to know.  I try not to read them too closely, and I’m sure that helps.  Each chapter opens with an “investigation” (like an experiment or a project), and these are almost always goofy.  If you’ve seen and felt and played with real tides in action, swishing around blue colored water pales.  We skip these 98% of the time.  Sure makes Mondays easier.

The chapters themselves just teach you science-y stuff, and in all the books are a nice compendium of technical facts and concepts.  Basic model science book, no complaints.  Does what we need it to do.  I have not felt the need for an answer key to the review questions, because it is very easy to quickly find the answer in the text if I don’t know it.

–> The textbooks are pricey – $87 (4th) and $95 (6th) retail.  It helps that you use the books for two years.  Also, these are very durable, school-edition hardbound textbooks, so there’s a good chance they’ll survive ten or more kids before they retire.  But if you are comfortable with handing your child a pile of library books and saying, “Write me a report when you’re done,” that is definitely the cheaper route.

[We’ve also had years that I handed my independently-reading child an ancient freebie textbook someone gave us.  I loved that.  Can I say Abeka was writing some nice stuff in the late ’70’s?  Yes.  Yes they were.  And back up to the ’60’s and you get some seriously good science books for children.  I honestly think something has been lost in the art of science writing lately.]

The (optional) workbooks are goofy and sort of annoying; neither of my big kids liked them.  But my currently-a-second-grader is begging to “do Kolbe,” and she loves workbooks, so we’ll save them for her.  The Kolbe course plans don’t call for the workbook; all the reading and assignments are from the text.

The Kolbe Course Plans

The Kolbe course plans provide a fair amount of guidance and instruction.  For each day, the ‘parent guidelines’ give a summary of the key points to discuss with the student — basically, how to teach the chapter day by day.   My kids just read the info themselves (or not), and do the assigned reading and questions from the book.  So far the only time I’ve needed to step in and explain something was when the 4th grader was studying the effects of the tilt of the earth’s axis.  We carried a globe into her bedroom and walked it around the big light on her ceiling fan until she got the hang of what was going on.

I bet the kids would score better on their exams if I sat down with them every day, but for now we’re satisfied with what they are learning independently.  My on-grade-level-for-reading 4th grader has no difficulty following the plans and studying on her own, though both kids do come up with interesting pronunciations for the new words they learn.

–> If you aren’t enrolled and would have to purchase the plans a la carte, you could just divide the book up by the day or week, type it up in excel, and thus tell your kid what page numbers which day.  Or do that a day-at-a-time with a bookmark.  The plans do provide some useful info, but you could live without it if you are comfortable just working through the book on your own.

(I would do that myself, though I like the ease of having all the typing done for me, which was a big reason we enrolled in the first place.  I also like that by following the plans, it stops arguments: The kids can’t accuse me of being the meanest, most slave-driving mother on the planet, when we have printed proof that I’m no meaner than the sadists at that horrid Catholic school in California.)

The course plans do include four end-of-quarter exams.  Answer key for the exam is in the course plans, not in the separate answer key book.  [That is, it might be also in the book, but if you own the course plans themselves, that suffices.  This is true for all the Kolbe course plans — if the plan includes an exam, it also includes the answer key for that exam.]

The Verdict

This science program is a good choice if either:

a) You aren’t comfortable teaching science on your own, and want a formal curriculum that walks you through a  traditional text step by step.

or

b) You need to just shove a formal plan in front of your kids and say, “Do science!”

You might get a very good science education, and worst case scenario, you won’t get a bad one.

I’d recommend purchasing just the textbook; for most people, skipping the workbook would be fine.  I’d skip the answer keys as well, unless you’re sure you’ll need an answer key — for example if your students are going to be checking their own answers, or you need to grade at maximum speed.  I’d be inclined to start the course with only the text (and course plans if desired), and only go back and purchase the optional extras if you felt something was really missing.

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Any questions?  Any votes for what subject to cover next week?