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 Weeks	Topic Numbers	Description
3	2	Explorers
1	3-4	St. Augustine and Roanoke Colony
1	5	Jamestown
2	6	Pilgrims
1	7-8	Colonies & Puritans
1	9	More Colonies
1	10	Indians
1	11-12	Mississippi River & Peter Stuyvesant
1	13-15	More colonies, Pirates, & King Philip's War
1	16	Pennsylvania
1	17	Daily Life
1	18-20	Colonial Wars, New Orleans, & Georgia
1	21-22	The Great Awakening & Growing struggles
1	23-24	Slavery & Spanish America
1	25-27	Events, Pioneers, Frontier Indians
1	28-29	French & Indian War & Chief Pontiac
1	30-31	Conflict and Daniel Boone
1	32-33	Captain Cook and Williamsburg
1	34-35	Blood and Tea Spill & A mad king
2	36-37	War of Independence & 1775
1	38	1776
1	39	1777
1	40	1778
1	41-42	1779 & 1780
1	43-44	1781 & Peace
3	45	People to Meet
1	46-47	Special Topics & Fiction
1	48-49	Art & The Constitution
1	50	Firsts
1	51	America 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.