We have been using Veritas Press Bible and History since the beginning of our homeschool journey. As a matter of fact, I used Veritas Press History as a private school teacher! It was then I first fell in love with it. It is really simple and inexpensive to use, if you do it right. All you really need to purchase from the company are the cards and the memory song. I have mentioned this before, but I advise not wasting your money on the teacher book. The teacher book has comprehension questions, a couple of activities, and a quiz. I’m not interested in comprehension questions or quizzes, so those were a waste, and the activities were hit and miss. The same is true with the Bible teacher’s book. You are much, much better off skipping the teacher book and just finding activities online. I also don’t recommend trying to do an activity with every single card, but more about that in a minute. Each card in both the Bible and history set have a fine art picture on the front and a title. On the back, it gives you the date of the event, and for the Bible cards, the scripture reference. The main text gives a brief summary of that Biblical or historical event. At the bottom of the card, resources are listed for further study. For Bible, we only use The Child’s Story Bible by Catherine Vos and a Bible in a simple translation for our “further study.” Most of the cards have a corresponding chapter in The Child’s Story Bible. I have really enjoyed this children’s Bible because it is written in a conversational tone that kids can understand while also being extremely thorough. Almost the entire Bible is covered. For history, our main texts are A Child’s History of the World and The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia. I also highly recommend The 100 Most Important Events of Christian History because it has information on historical events that are difficult to find elsewhere. For the final two sets of cards, when the focus shifts to American history, I can not recommend enough the series A History of US by Joy Hakim. It is incredibly well written and fascinating, with tons of photographs and primary sources. The cards list this resource often. I know it’s pricey, but I found a great deal on a used set. If you purchase the books listed above, you have pretty much everything you need to do a basic overview of Bible and history with the Veritas cards. You’ll use these almost weekly, so you’ll want to invest in your own. (Plus the library will probably consider these encyclopedias and may not let you check them out.) The cards list other resources, but I only use these to supplement when we want to dig deeper into a subject. For that, I head to the library. One word of caution about A Child’s History of the World before we continue: it was originally published in 1924 for a boy’s school in Chicago. Therefore, it assumes the reader is a white male and has sections that come across as sexist and racist. I use it because I like the conversational style that makes history easy to understand for my kids. It also covers parts of history that very few children’s books do anymore. However, I read it out loud to my kids and self-edit the offensive parts. If you simply don’t want to use it, be aware that finding kid-friendly resources for certain historical events may be difficult. The Veritas History Cards, like most classical curriculum, teaches history chronologically (for the most part - more on that in a minute). However, where other curriculum covers history in four years, Veritas Press takes five. Here is the order: Year One: Old Testament & Ancient Egypt Year Two: New Testament, Greece, and Rome Year Three: Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation Year Four: Explorers to 1815 Year Five: 1815 to the Present In my opinion, there are two problems with this order. For one, if you’re using their Bible curriculum as well, years one and two are extremely repetitive. Many days, you’ll be doing the exact same thing for both subjects! I get that they are trying to instill in the child that the Bible is historical and true, but it gets really tiresome. Second, I am very confused as to why they separated Ancient Egypt from Ancient Greece and Rome. That’s actually not chronological, despite their claim. Here’s what I do: I pull out all the Bible events from the history cards, then I combine the year one cards and year two cards in chronological order. You won’t be able to follow the numbers in the top corner of the cards, so be sure to write down the order somewhere or label them with your own numbers. This way, you can combine years one and two. Veritas Press recommends waiting until second grade to start this cycle, and with my oldest, I did. However, my other two joined in as soon as they showed interest. Some days, we had a two year old Ian participating. I have a picture of all three kids wearing Egyptian crowns at ages 7, 4, and 2. History is a great subject to do together, and you can just start over again when you reach the end of the four year cycle. We do history and Bible twice a week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (Our formal Bible subject is separate from our family devotions, which we do at breakfast.) We start out with Bible, and it looks like this: Day One: We review the cards like flashcards. I hold up the picture, covering the title with my hand, and the kids take turns calling out the Biblical event. Then, I read our new card for the week. Finally, I read the corresponding chapter from A Child’s Story Bible. Day Two: I mix up all the cards and see if the kids can put them in order. Then I play the Bible memory song so they can check their work. That’s it. That’s Bible. I want my kids to be Biblically literate, and by the end of the four year cycle, we have read the entire child’s story Bible. It’s a foundation for their faith.
Then we do history, which looks like this: Day One: We review the cards just like we do for Bible. Then, I read the next card in the pack. If the event is covered in one of our main resources that I listed above, we read from that. The kids love to look at the pictures in the Kingfisher encyclopedia! Day Two: If I found a library book to supplement, we’ll start by reading that. Then, I mix up the history cards for them to sort like we do for Bible and they use the song to check their work. And that’s history! What about activities? Crafts? Hands-on learning? Listen, all that is great, but I also need to think about my own sanity. There’s only so much time and money you can spend on that sort of thing. Not every card lends itself to activities anyway. (Have you ever tried to make a craft for The Monroe Doctrine?) On the other hand, there are cards that you can linger on for weeks. When we get to those cards, we stop and do a unit study. Here are some cards that are great for that:
One other critique I have of Veritas Press while we are on the topic of unit studies: I don’t like that the cards shift focus to just America once it gets to the age of explorers. I added in units on several other things going on around the world like the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Russian Revolution. It’s also extremely strange that there is no card on the Civil Rights Movement, so I added in a unit about that. Overall, though, this curriculum is extremely simple and flexible, which is why I love it. You can go in depth for weeks on one topic, or you can just read the card and move on. Using the cards as a deck of history “flashcards” also means your kids will have a great foundation for future study. And keep an eye out on my blog for unit study resources and activities! (The unit studies marked with a * I have already blogged about. Use my search bar to find them!)
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AuthorHi, I'm Melanie! I'm a homeschooling mom of three kids ages 13, 11, and 9. I have a BS in English Secondary Education from Asbury University plus 30 hours of gifted certification course work. I've taught in just about every situation you can imagine. Public school, private, homeschool hybrid, and private tutoring. The most important thing I've learned? One on one, individualized instruction can't be beat. Archives
July 2022
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