180

A friend of mine started home schooling this year. She asked me for any tips I could giver her. I'm still constantly asking for advice, but I had a few tips to pass along. The biggest piece of advice I was given was don't be afraid to stop, reevaluate and do a complete 180 if necessary. It occurred to me that I wasn't following that advice. While Ben seems to be doing really well (most days) in the majority of school, he has not been doing well in history. I chose a series of books that go through history chronologically. We read a couple pages, Ben does an oral narration and answers a few questions. We do that twice a week and then Ben has an optional coloring page, map and activity. We started with the nomads and farmers and moved to early Egypt. Its not very exciting at the moment and Ben has no interest in sitting through the readings. The narrations and questions are like pulling teeth. Obviously this makes history our least favorite time of the week. After reading Prastis blog about Emmas schedule, I remembered the advice.  I've spent so much time trying to stay in reach of Ohio's standards in case Ben ends up in a traditional school, that I forgot the reasons we decided to home school in the first place.  History has not been fun.  He doesn't like it.  I don't like forcing it down his throat. So why am I still forcing it on him when we could be doing it 1,000 other ways?
I put our book aside and am trying a different approach. We have been doing a lot of "fun" reading including  Our Island Story.  I'm stealing a page from Prasti's play book and making this our history lesson.  We have already been doing a lot of the Charlotte Mason reading schedule. We are going to add on some of her history suggestions and make that our new curriculum.  The stories are shorter.  Most of them involve battles with swords and horses and a couple have even tied into some Bible stories he is familiar with. Right now, it doesn't get much better than that!  Ben also really likes maps and is enjoying looking up all the locations we are reading about and following the battle paths.  
While I don't know that this is the curriculum we will stick with for the rest of the year, Ben is finally enjoying history. For now, this is where we're staying.