The Mystery of History is a good choice for homeschooling parents who are looking for a homeschool history curriculum that combines both secular and biblical history.
Combining Secular and Biblical History
History can be one of the more difficult topics to teach. There is even more difficulty when it comes to teaching history and teaching the bible. Most of the time these two views on history are kept separate from each other because of the difficulty of merging the two versions into a cohesive whole that provides both a bible based picture of history as well as the accurate facts.
Presenting History as a Story
The Mystery of History homeschool curriculum presents a number of advantages, which can provide a great deal of benefit to families that want to present both a bible and secular historical perspective. When you look at history one of the best ways to tell it is by telling it in a story, this is how oral traditions have past down history for thousands of years and the bible itself is a history book filled with the knowledge of individuals imparting a particular part of history. When looking at regular secular history it should be told as a story too.
This helps to make historical facts easier to remember. People remember stories told far easier and better than just a time line of facts. While this does make learning history slightly more time consuming the point of learning history is to remember the events of the past, to learn and to grow from them. This is why actually remembering them is important. The mystery of history curriculum does just that. It asks questions at the beginning of each section giving you something to not only work on but focus on and then goes into the story with your mind already prepared to pull from the story the facts necessary to answer the questions.
This can be a huge advantage. It also comes with index cards style study guides to point out the three major points of each story making it even easier to remember the necessary points of each of the story and what it has to teach. It also can make it easier to teach homeschool history.
Additional Help Available:
There are additional supplements available that are really helpful with using this curriculum. There is a CD version of the curriculum in which the author reads the story to you. We found that combining the reading and the listening to work even better than using the text along.
There are also timeline characters available to use to create a visual representaion of the people and places in the study. Kids love coloring the characters and looking back to see who they had learned about in the past.
Difficult to Teach?
Homeschool history can be a difficult topic to teach on the secular level. It is made even more difficult if you are attempting to blend secular and biblical historical events together in a manner that will provide an accurate time line for both histories.
While some Christian homeschool curriculum choices attempt to master it, blending these two time lines can be incredibly difficult to do.
The Mystery of History curriculum does a good job of bringing these two elements together.