Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Preliminary Planning for Truthquest

There are many people who use TruthQuest without a schedule and love to just meander their way through from one topic to the next spending as much or as little time as they wish along the way. Unfortunately, I just wasn't made to work that way. I LIKE to plan ahead, to have lists of library books to put on hold or to ILL, to write down ideas for projects or lapbooks. Plain and simple, I just like to feel organize. I need a framework to work in or things simply don't get done. To me the beauty of TruthQuest beyond its wonderful booklist and engaging Christian commentary was the fact that I get to make the schedule from start to finish. No scrambling for extra resources if I want to spend more time on a topic. No feeling guilty when I breeze through or skip entirely portions of someone else's schedule. That to me is the most beautiful part of TruthQuest.

To create a schedule from scratch, I came up with the following plan of attack:

1. I need to know what resources are available at my library.
Solution: Copy the alphabetized resource list from the back of the guide. Using the online catalog work my way through the entire list highlighting all of the resources at my library.

2. I need to know how many resources are available for each section.
Solution: Take my highlighted list and go through each section of the guide marking what books are available.

3. I need a starting framework.
Solution: I went through each section of the guide, looking at how many books were available and came up with a very rough estimate of how long each section might take and which sections might be combined. Here is what I came up with:
# of WeeksTopic NumbersDescription
32Explorers
13-4St. Augustine and Roanoke Colony
15Jamestown
26Pilgrims
17-8Colonies & Puritans
19More Colonies
110Indians
111-12Mississippi River & Peter Stuyvesant
113-15More colonies, Pirates, & King Philip's War
116Pennsylvania
117Daily Life
118-20Colonial Wars, New Orleans, & Georgia
121-22The Great Awakening & Growing struggles
123-24Slavery & Spanish America
125-27Events, Pioneers, Frontier Indians
128-29French & Indian War & Chief Pontiac
130-31Conflict and Daniel Boone
132-33Captain Cook and Williamsburg
134-35Blood and Tea Spill & A mad king
236-37War of Independence & 1775
1381776
1391777
1401778
141-421779 & 1780
143-441781 & Peace
345People to Meet
146-47Special Topics & Fiction
148-49Art & The Constitution
150Firsts
151America Grows

It actually adds up to 36 weeks, although this was unintentional on my part. Now I was ready to start putting together an actual schedule. More on that later.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have used 3 TQH guides in the past, but was never able to determine how many weeks for which topics. Your system makes it really easy and economical. Thanks for sharing.

Beth in TN