I am believing God that 2016 will be another tremendous year for me, an unprecedented season of using my small hinges to open big doors. And it starts right here.
“When I Was a Child” is the long-awaited high school history curriculum that will conclude our elementary, middle school, and now high school history studies. I am so very excited to make this available in a few weeks to our customers.
This curriculum has been years in the making. I could have begun it almost immediately after I completed the middle school series, This Far by Faith. I also pondered whether or not to change the grade categorization such that This Far by Faith would become the high school curriculum. But there are several reasons why I am completing this writing over five years later.
The primary reason behind the delay is that, when I completed This Far by Faith, I had no high school-aged children in our home. I needed time to actually live through the experience I wanted to create in my writing, and to see for myself that this project might indeed enhance the learning experience of a student that age. Watching our children develop, and more importantly for this work, seeing their appetites increase for more discussion regarding their school work, was excellent proving ground for me to complete this project.
To be clear, this curriculum is not a detailed moment-by-moment recapturing of American history. My expectation is that, by the time a student reaches the high school level, he or she has heard all or most of the traditional stories. To that end, I have included a 35-week long reading plan of Joy Hakim’s A History of US (used as a spine text in our middle school curriculum, This Far by Faith) for those who need more of a detailed walk through those events that are highlighted and then put together to define a common knowledge of American history. There are no summaries or book reports as these skills become decreasingly useful as a student matures. Instead, a student is asked to explain what he thinks about what he has read and why. For that reason alone, this curriculum stresses discussion through written and oral communication.
When I Was a Child is also not an exclusive look at African-American history. Here, we feature the presence of people of African descent, but our history is presented in the context of all of American history, and to an extent, all of the world’s history. Our history as a people is best understood not in a vacuum, but as an integral part of what was happening all around us.
Each volume of this 2-volume set is a one year study of a period of American history. At the end of When I Was a Child, my hope as the writer of this curriculum is that each student will truly put away childish ideas and embrace the idea that his thoughts matter. His ideas matter. With a God-given anointing and an ability to express himself with self-assurance, there are no limits to his chosen path.
Congratulations on your latest publishing effort. We’ve been schooling at home for 6yr following a classical model but as we approach middle school I’m concerned with a lack of resources that paint a broader, more color (read: not only western/ Greco-Roman) view of literature and history. We’ve enjoyed the Hakim series for U.S. history but I’m still looking for more. Your resource sounds like just what I’ve been looking for. Please let me know where/how I can preview the text, see table of contents or read samples. May God bless your efforts to fill this void.
Thank you !
Thank you so much for the visit AND the encouragement! The high school curriculum should be on the market any day now, and I will for sure let my audience know when it is available.