When we began our homeschooling journey I was super excited to teach history. I absolutely loved history, but I quickly began to realize that my daughter did not share the same enthusiasm as I did. Even though I studied history in college, I was unsure of where or how much to introduce to my daughter and when. As my daughter is beginning to enter her high school years I was looking for a curriculum for history and was given the opportunity from Timberdoodle to review The Nomadic Professor.
Teaching History Beyond The Book
The Nomadic Professor is not your average history curriculum. Long gone are the days of just opening a dusty textbook. The Nomadic Professor contains short video lessons, audio content, reading content and guided notes for your child to follow along with the lecture. While the curriculum is designed to give students not only a knowledge of history but also works on critical thinking skills.
Overview
Before you get started be sure to give yourself some time to get used to the dashboard and enter your student so they can access their own portal. This is good for students who can work independently. However, since this is a very new for both me and my daughter we just worked through on my dashboard.
When you start a unit you will see a Unit Map on the starting page for the unit. On that page is a map, this map will show where the Professor is during the video. This is great way for your child to see on a map where the history took place.
Before starting a unit there are list of terms/people/events that your child will learn about in the lessons. I think this is good for children who need some help focusing on certain aspects of reading material. There are a lot of details in history and it can be hard to remember them well during a reading. Having the list can help your child focus during the reading making sure they understand the term in the list.
Each session has guided notes that can be printed out. This printout can be filled out by your child, or if you’d like have them discuss the questions with you. I like that not only are there questions, but they also give a prompt to help your child answer the question effectively. I know when I was in school it was too easy to just give the simple short answer instead of thinking through the answer.
Take Your Child’s Thinking Further
Okay, this has to be my favorite part of this curriculum, I wish I had this in high school and actually even in college! The Document Lesson is such a great aspect of this curriculum as it allows your child to further their knowledge. What a great thing it is to have children investigate historical documents instead of just accepting it without looking at several aspects of the content.
Document Lesson Information
If you have your child complete the sessions independently, they can upload their assignments on the site. This might be needed for homeschool documentation, the site will also check off each session that was accessed.
Final Thoughts
Overall Nomadic Professor is a great history curriculum for a high school student. I like that you can tailor it to your homeschool needs, even though it has structure. The structure allows the child to follow the course, learning the material and using their knowledge to develop and practice skills for historical literacy. Check out the Timberdoodle site for Nomadic Professor.
Disclosure: Timberdoodle provided this complimentary product for my review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
The Life We Build 