When we first began drafting outlines of what we wanted to study (Oh! And the kids too! We do mean to include them. . . . ), we decided to do a four-year rotation of world history, beginning with ancient times. That much, it turns out as I’ve researched various curricula, is pretty common. But our initial idea was to approach the study of ancient history one empire/culture at a time: Egypt, then Mesopotamia, then Greece, then Rome.
It turns out most of the popular history-based curriculums out there don’t do this. They stick to a stricter chronological order: some time in Egypt, skip over for the early Greeks, skip back to see Israel and the Middle Eastern empires for awhile, then some more Greece, early Rome, etc. As I sat down plotting out which history chapters from where we’d have to study, I was beginning to second-guess our plans. Maybe following a stricter chronological order would be better.
After further thought, though, I still think at least for ancient times and for very young children, the cultural approach makes more sense. Maybe it’s relevant to scholars to note connections between pots and weaponry, or speculate on climactic changes that created instability and migration. But for children, it’s easier to see the sweep and the continuity of one people’s story—see their early legends, their rise, and then see the stage shift somewhere else, and look back and note the origins there.
Maybe Homer and Sennacharib did live close to the same time, but that would hardly have been a significant fact to them. People who were in the Late Bronze Age didn’t know they were. But they did know the stories they had grown up hearing.
So I think we’ll stick to our current plans, at least for ancient times on the first time through. Later eras don’t have the same broad power shifts and as transportation improves, concurrent events become more significant. We’ll keep a chart on the wall to help us track how things fit together chronologically. Anyway, that’s the plan until it changes again.
Introducing The World 