Mystery of History, Volumes 1 & 2
Testimonials
I'm starting World History this year, my children are 8, 7 and 5. We have come from Five in a Row. We have homeschooled all along. I wanted to introduce myself and give this review for those considering the program but not sure. We are to start in the fall. I hope my thoughts bless someone.I got [Mystery of History, Volume 1] a few days ago, in the mail. I can't stop reading it because it is filling in those gaps about how the Bible fits into history for me. Linda is clearly on an inspired mission.
It is conversational and she has the gift of storytelling. About half the content is Biblical events and people and the other half world history people and events. There are 108 lessons/readings in all. It is for younger, middle and older students and laid out that way with one activity maybe two to chose from for each lesson. The lesson is a reading. The reading is a page, or at most two.
Her reading is like a conversation and story combined, it is fact-filled and interesting. Clearly the youngest children will not have the questions about biblical history that us adults do but it is like a Pixar movie ( Ants, Incredibles, Bugs Life ) she is writing to the children and the adults are addressed, too.
The activity after the lesson is like a memory jogger or scrap book entry, not some big project that requires the famous household materials you surely should have around but don't.
When I got the book, I went right to her lesson on dinosaurs. I really avoided dinosaurs with the kids because I didn't know if they fit into history... She of course cleared that up for me right off and I feel a relief about it all.
Her suggested activity for that reading for the youngers was to draw Noah's ark with Dinosaurs coming on board. To me a natural extension would be labelling or writing a sentence about your picture.
The middles are to cut apart a dinosaur coloring book, or an old picture book about dinosaurs. They are to categorize the pictures they cut out by: horned dinosaurs, plated and armored dinosaurs, bone headed and parrot-like dinosaurs, meat-eating dinosaurs, big plant eaters, flying reptiles, marine reptiles, light weights, clawed dinosaurs. Also they might learn more about the dinosaurs by studying the pictures to do the activity.
The olders are to research the Loch Ness Monster or other modern sighting of strange beasts and identify which dinosaur most resembles it. She sites a book for olders called After the Flood by Bill Cooper about how the earliest Europeans like Noah and Japheth kept meticulous records and knew all about Creation, the Flood and had encounters with dinosaurs. The other suggestion for the olders is to research fossil fuels and explain how the dinosaurs contributed to them.
The book is volume size like a Konos manual. It has some neat features. She spends some time showing you with pictures and dates how to make a time line. She suggests different ways, a folded sewing board or poster board and explains how to make the lines. She has mapped out a system for color-coding the pieces for all the characters and has templates for making your own.
She has the kids when they are old enough making their own memory cards and for the youngers she has Mom do it, they are brief and easy to make. She has pictures and shows you how to make the best card and how to store them.
She has a review built in to every third lesson and a quarter review project that ties in all the lessons and uses the book and the notebook you make. The questions are cumulative in that they go from the beginning of the book and work through so in the middle you are still remembering those first lessons. The questions are not obscure and she suggests using them for discussion starters with the youngers.
She has a grade chart for record keeping with the oldest students for getting high school credit. She has included in the back a unique feature, it is a bibliography of suggested resources to make the study into a unit study if you are so inclined.
She has instructions, very detailed for making a notebook that is geography based and includes maps. She tells you how many maps you will need for each student for the year and suggests two other resources - a Bible Atlas and a World Atlas - which you actually need to fill in the maps she has given you.
The kids make a notebook and it's not just a scrapbook, they use the notebook to interact with the course.
There are black and white photographs of famous art and objects through out so the youngest readers can see the pictures.
S. in AZ
In the MOH I, 55 of the 108 lessons are about history that is NOT in the Bible. And even in those chapters that are directly related to the Bible, the lessons relate how that particular event or person related to other things going on in History. It's kind of like how we usually study American History--we study these events that happened--like WWI and WWII from an American perspective--because we are Americans. We don't ever think to study what WWII was like from a Japanese viewpoint! MOH is studying history and how history relates to God's Kingdom, before and after Christ---both how God's chosen people affected the world around them, and how the world around them affected God's chosen people.
In MOH II, 69 out of the 84 lessons are ones that I would not consider to be Jewish or Christian History. Many of the others are about missionaries, saints and popes and the Catholic church. There are lessons about other world religions, also.
I had wanted to do World History and Biblical History together. Before MOH, I was pulling my hair out, trying to figure out where Deborah fit in to World History and what about Abraham? One web site said 1900 BC for Abraham and some said 2100. I was bonkers! I had copied all kinds of timelines, trying to mesh it all together. Little did I know that Linda Hobar had already done all that for me!!!
My dh is a Pastor with a Bachelor of Arts in Religion and a Master of Divinity. If I ask him where "such and such" is in the Bible, he can tell me, down to a chapter or two. Linda brought out things that he
didn't even know about the Bible and Church History!
We've only done a few lessons so far, but we are well pleased!
D. in AL
MOHII is a must read!
WOW, WOW, WOW!
As a former public high school teacher, who left to homeschool my children, I am so impressed with MOH II. I purchased MOH II and have not been able to put it down. It is great! It is a curriculum that can stand alone. I will bet that it covers more history than any of us ever learned in school! I think that sometimes we are so hard on ourselves about worrying if we are covering everything for our kids, but I know that this history course is more than I ever learned in my years as a ps kid. If you want to add to it, then check out the library books in the back of the book for each unit.
I just wanted to say thank you to Linda for her great work! I am looking forward to her other works!
J. from WA
Thanks, Linda, for a great product!
Seventeen years of homeschooling, and I've used all sorts of approaches. MOH has an easily do-able amount of work, with plenty of ideas for delving deeper, and I end up feeling accomplished instead of guilty. I've used some "harsh taskmaster" curriculums, and even been over-ambitious in designing my own.
What I love about MOH is that even doing just the bare bones provides my kids with a WEALTH of information and insights on history. They also get some writing, drawing, and geography in the process. And the schedule of three lessons per week keeps us moving along. Mon. and Tues. we read the three lessons and do memory cards, then review on Wed. with timeline figures (I just have the kids cut them out of the History Through the Ages page and stick them on the laminated Mark-it Timeline of History, map work, and the exercise or quiz. The reinforcement and review built into the program makes the information "stick" and brings out major themes. And if we miss a day or two, we can still wrap up the work by the end of the week.
I usually assign other independent reading to my 15 and 13 year olds, but don't feel obliged to test them on that material. Since they're getting the basics from the MOH readings, I consider the rest enrichment. Most weeks I have them research something from the "Activities" and use that as their writing assignment--starting with lists of facts, working up to crafting paragraphs, and will later give some essays. As I'm able, I read from other books to my 11 and 8 year olds.
I'm sure this approach will give them LOTS more useful knowledge and understanding than I got in school. Having had an A in Honors World History in high school, all I could remember later was that there was something important about the date 1066, but I couldn't remember what that was. I could study and pass the test, then promptly forgot everything. Pretty sad. Homeschooling is filling in the gaps from my public education!
Judy (MOH Yahoogroup member)