From their website: “Critical thinking is identifying and evaluating evidence to guide decision making. Critical thinkers use in-depth analysis of evidence to make decisions and communicate his beliefs clearly and accurately.”
This book can be used as it’s own history curriculum. It offers 78 lessons.
In this book you will cover:
- Prehistory {neanderthals}
- Ancient Civilizations
- Medieval Civilizations
- Early American Civilizations
The first few chapters my 6th grade son mentioned, “they’re talking about evolution.” We have used many different types of history and science books, secular and non-secular. It is a discussion we usually save to wrap-up our lessons. Thankfully, this curriculum does not harp on evolution.
World History Detective Book One, Ancient and Medieval Civilizations Grade 6-12 is set up to read one page of information and then answer ten reading comprehension questions.
Each paragraph and each sentence in the reading portion lists a corresponding letter and number to easily find answers to the comprehension questions. The first nine questions are multiple choice answer and number ten is a written response asking “why or why not”, “explain”, etc. and a printed reminder, “please use complete sentences to answer the question.”
A “concept map” follows majority of the reading comprehension questions. This is the first time my 6th grader has filled out a concept map and I appreciated the new opportunity. The concept map page offers a “word bank” to fill in answers.
Other lessons include a geographical map, timeline, Venn Diagram, and/or black and white images.
My son was a bit disappointed with the history lessons because he focused on the “detective” and the Sherlock Holmes hat on the cover of this book. He automatically assumed we’d be on scavenger hunts, checking longitude and latitude for more clues, or traveling around like Carman Sandiego. He wanted to find clues and somehow crack difficult codes. I had to explain numerous times a detective uses critical thinking skills to solve answers just like he was doing for each lesson.
I did point out he was behaving like a detective because we “analyzed” information from the reading to use our “critical thinking skills” to answer questions and then used that “evidence” to “prove” a point for the written response. However, he is somewhat stubborn and wanted an adventure with hands-on activities like we have studied history in the past. Unfortunately he did not like this book as much as I did.
I think the age range for this book is appropriate. Especially for some slightly graphic details. My son did not like the lesson on China and the description of the Mongols cutting horse veins and drinking blood.
Overall:
- I did feel it was a bit too easy to fall into a habit of relying on the question’s letter and number references than truly build reading comprehension skills.
- The concept maps are fantastic as well as the written response question area. I used that section for our “daily writing assignments”.
- The lessons are thorough.
- Good curriculum to explain how ideas and trade shape our history.
