I was given the opportunity to try out the Heritage History Curriculum. I have used the online Heritage History previously and also had a link to it on my website sidebar. I realize that many families are struggling to make ends meet while the mom is home to care for the children and to homeschool. It is possible to homeschool without buying any curriculum. There are multitudes of free online sources and with some work good resources in many libraries. The Heritage History online site can serve as a source for many free history resources. There is enough information available to teach history for years just from reading the many books available. A creative parent can easily put together a valuable unit study on different time periods of history or different cultures. The problem is it takes a creative parent and it takes time.
The Heritage History Curriculum meets the need for parents who find developing a unit study challenging or find having time to gather resources challenging. The curriculums gather related books and provide extra resources such as timelines and maps to help the reading be more integrated with the other books. The Young Readers Curriculum contains 86 books and a teacher’s guide. The other curriculums contain 40 to 50 books, maps and timelines.
The Young Readers Curriculum contains books which can be easily read by my second grader who is a good reader. Some first and second graders would do better with being read to depending on their reading ability. Books can be printed from the cd, read from the computer directly, read in PDF format or transferred to an electronic reading device. The other curriculums contain a variety of books from easy readers to advanced readers. The study guides show which books are better suited to what levels. Thus one curriculum can cover multiple grades simultaneously.
Several years ago I read Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall aloud to my children. The first chapters have more myth and legend then actual history but the later chapters have a brief story of history written to a level easily understood by children of multiple ages. Each chapter is just a few pages and easily read in a short time. While not written from a specifically Christian perspective most of the books in the curriculum are written from a moral perspective and were written at a time when belief in God was common place albeit flawed in many ways. I found I even enjoyed reading the book and learning better how names in history fit together.
My older children are studying Romans, Reformers, and Revolutionaries for history. Thus the books available in the British Middle Ages Curriculum fits right in with their other studies. They can read a living book about the subject matter that is covered in the other history curriculum. The older children have been reading off of handheld devices long before kindles and nooks were around. PDA’s have ridden in the car with us for around 10 years or so. The children learned a PDA was easier than hauling several books and a book light. Now with a kindle I can use the read text feature to have books read aloud in the car while we are traveling. It isn’t perfect but much better than text reading was years ago. I must say using the curriculum CD to transfer books to my kindle was so easy. Normally I find free books from place such as Gutenberg Press and then I have to download them and send them to my kindle. This time I just copied and pasted from one folder to another, 86 books at a time.
Thank you to Heritage History for providing me copies of the curriculum to review.