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kristinannie
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| Posted: April 28 2011 at 9:05am | IP Logged
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I have been looking at using this for later in my HS plans: Paths of Exploration. I love how it is CM in nature and it looks really solid. My only worries are about spending three years on US history (that may be too much), combining kids since the window for using it is rather small and whether or not the books are acceptable to Catholics. If you have any experience with this, I would love to hear about it! Thanks!
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Eleanor
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| Posted: June 11 2013 at 3:10am | IP Logged
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I know this is an old post, but wanted to say that I'm using Paths of Exploration right now, with my 7 and 9 year olds. If you're still interested, I'd be happy to answer any specific questions.
When I first got it last year (after much internal debate about buying non-Catholic materials), I had a case of buyer's remorse, stuck it all in a box, and didn't look at it again for months. But we still needed to do American history, and the do-it-yourself approach wasn't working for me. This is partly because I'm an immigrant to the US, and this is my first time formally studying the history myself. But it's also because I was having a hard time figuring out appropriate expectations for workload and writing requirements. (Translation: the poor darlings complained that everything I asked of them was simply impossible, and I gave in.  ) So I went back over all the options -- which, by this point, included putting me in a rest home, and packing the children off to boarding school on another continent  -- and it seemed like the least terrible choice.
And after some modifications, we are enjoying it. The children love the emphasis on art, wildlife, and geography, and they don't writhe too much in agony at the writing assignments.
On the down side, the whole curriculum is desperately lacking in Catholic content (almost as if they'd taken American history and sprayed it with a can of "Catholic-Be-Gone"), and several of the books are written from an obviously Protestant perspective. For instance, the Bennie Rhodes biography of Columbus, from The Sowers series, has him going to "services" in church on Sunday, and telling Queen Isabella about "my personal faith in Jesus as my Saviour." Then he meets his cabin boy: "Pedro told me that he was a Christian and that he too shared my faith in Jesus as a redeeming Lord." Wow, what an amazing thing -- to find out that a 15th century Spanish boy is a Christian! I was half expecting the two of them to form a praise & worship band on the deck of the Santa Maria. 
So we skipped that book -- and we'll be skipping most of the Pilgrim unit as well, and filling it in with heroes of the Catholic Reformation. But because the curriculum is supposed to be secular, the bulk of the material isn't so much objectionable as deficient. And at the same time, because the authors share many of the same values as Catholics, it isn't quite as deficient in some ways as a completely secular approach might be. There's a lot of good material on character-building and virtue worked in to the lessons.
The curriculum has no core text, which works out well for us, since we're able to use our own. Right now, it's How Our Nation Began, but I might change to a different one later. We're also blessed to have a collection of Catholic junior biographies, which I was planning to use as supplements, but I'm finding that those are often too long and a bit heavy for the little ones. (At one point, I realized that between the New World missionaries and the English Reformation, my tentative schedule would have us reading about five horrible martyrdoms in a row.) So I've been reading more short sketches from Seton's elementary history books and Hugh Ross Williamson's Children's Book of Saints. To go along with those, I've made up some of my own activity sheets with pictures of the saints and either some brief copy work of their own words, or map work of their journeys.
We're also studying Canadian history at the same time (since the children are citizens of both countries), and I have to do that part pretty much from scratch, because there isn't much available. So there's more than enough scope for my own creative impulses.
We now have Paths of Settlement as well (I'm going to overlap the two series, in order to do the units chronologically), so I'm hoping to continue on this way for about 1.5 to 2 years. But I'm not at all interested in the third year, Paths of Progress. The whole focus, on inventors & technologies improving the American standard of living, just seems bafflingly materialistic for a company that's supposed to be going for a Biblical worldview. I wish they'd chosen a theme such as "Paths of Peace," "Paths of Justice," or "Paths of Charity" instead.
Argh -- now I have to force myself to go to bed, rather than stay up all night jotting down ideas for a junior high modern history unit study curriculum based on Catholic social teaching...
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kristinannie
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| Posted: June 11 2013 at 9:45am | IP Logged
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Thank you. I would love to hear how you made it more Catholic! Let me know how you like Paths of Settlement!
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Katherine Elizabeth 8 months
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Eleanor
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| Posted: June 17 2013 at 3:32pm | IP Logged
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Update...
For the main narrative, we're switching to Benziger's "Bearers of Freedom" -- and actually going back to read it from the beginning -- because it's more explicitly Catholic than Sadlier's Christian Social History Series. The Sadlier books would be great if I were putting together the whole thing myself, but after doing some review with my children and seeing what they remembered (and didn't remember) from our studies so far, I'm convinced that we need something more "hard-core" in terms of Church history and social teaching, to undo some of the secularism and materialism in TGTL and various supplemental materials.
I'm going to be reading this text instead of some of the read-aloud books, and will make my own activity sheets to replace the ones we'll be skipping. So we'll be using parts of Trail Guide as a supplement to the Catholic textbook, rather than the other way around. I don't quite regret getting into this, but I wouldn't recommend trying to adapt "Paths" unless you have no other alternative. It's not convenient to fiddle with in practical terms -- given all the many lessons and sub-lessons, and how they line up -- and on a philosophical level, it's often disturbing to try to deal with such a different worldview.
For instance, in the first unit of "Paths of Settlement," they teach that the people who came to the New World fell into one of four categories:
Explorers
Settlers
Entrepreneurs
Soldiers
There's a description of the traits and activities of people in each of these groups. Then they have the students write which of the groups they would belong to, and why. There's even a card game based on the four groups.
Hmm, let's see, what's missing from the list... um... how about *missionaries*?  By leaving out their contribution, there's the implicit message that all the "action" consisted of finding ways to make a fortune from natural resources, and taking up arms against one's neighbors. What a clunker.
Anyway, we'll keep on with it. But I suggest you look into other options.
If my eldest were 7 or 8, I wouldn't have considered a packaged curriculum at all. To me, it would have been enough just to read some books, do a little copywork and discussion, and maybe add in some activities from the Internet or the teacher's store. As it is now, my rising third grader can't do nearly as much of the work as my 9 year old does (he's a bright child, but it's simply too much writing), and the little ones basically just sit and doodle. So, even if it didn't have all the other issues, I would only consider it worthwhile for my eldest.
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4Real Forums : Across Time and Place
Topic: Has anyone used Paths of Exploration?
