Welcome

Welcome to my Story of the World-themed blog!  Noah and I used SOTW1 and SOTW2 during our homeschooling before I enrolled him in public school, and we enjoyed it.  I know it has its detractors, but I feel that for an elementary school age child, it is absolutely fine.  Yes, it has a Christian bias but hey... ancient history was shaped in great part by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, whether we like it or not.  I might be atheist, but I feel that it's idiotic to want to teach history without including religion in it.  Without a modicum of understanding the tenets of these religions, a lot of the reasons why history unfolded the way it did will remain incomprehensible to our children.  That being said, while I am not in favor of purging the religious aspect of it, but I did spend more time on secular aspects of the curriculum, and I interjected my "some people believe" caveats instead of teaching the religious aspects as accomplished facts.

I used a lot of outside resources to supplement or support SOTW, some recommended by Susan Wise-Bauer, others that I found on my own or created from scratch.  This is what I used during our studies, but of course it is far from being exhaustive or authoritative!  But I thought it might help those of you using or considering using the curriculum and who might not be interesting in doing so much research, lol.   I used a lot of online resources. I'm not so much into doing projects but if you are so inclined, the SOTW Activity guides are replete with them. They're also a great resource because they reference exact pages from several encyclopedias and titles of suggested reading and supplemental reading.  Some of the reading resources I used came from the SOTW Activity Guides, but a lot of times those weren't available at my library so I substituted with books that were because I'm cheap :)

I will be revising the posts once in a while to add resources or delete links that have been reported to me as dead.  I plan on dedicating one post to each chapter so it's easy for readers to search the archives.  This is a lengthy process so thanks for being patient :)

Caveat: I accumulated my Reading A-Z.com resources through the years thanks to their generous "free download day" that usually takes place around Mother's Day.  So you might want to make a list of the books you'd like to download from there, because you are only allowed a few free downloads each year.  The quiz would count as a second download.

I am providing the ISBN number for books we used so you can quickly search your library's website for it or input it in Homeschool Tracker and I am also linking to the book on Amazon (or other site) if you wish to read more about it. Please note that I found the vast majority of these books at my library or did Interlibrary Loans for them.  Sometimes the ISBN at your library will be different from the one I provided (I used the one for Amazon) so you might want to search by title and author as well as ISBN if you don't get the result you want right away :)  There is really no reason to buy those books unless you'll be using them with several children and you're rich!

I might post downloadable documents on another site and link to them from this page.

For now I will work on presenting resources that I researched for SOTW1 and SOTW2.  Later on I will add resources for SOTW3 and SOTW4 so bookmark me or add me to your Google Reader!