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History Odyssey/History Quest offers secular full-year history courses for students Grades 1 through 12. History Quests and Odysseys are broken down into three levels to support elementary, middle, and high school students.
- Level One (grades 1-6) offers four year-long courses coordinating age-appropriate reading books, blackline maps, activities, craft projects, art projects, cooking, and coloring.
- Level Two (middle school) courses are designed to transition your student into independent learning through the use of information organization, literary analysis, research skills, and writing. Students will also learn outlining, timeline analysis, geography, and critical thinking through daily lessons with worksheets and blackline maps included.
- Level Three (high school) study guides offer step-by-step lessons guiding students in tackling rewarding literature, writing persuasive arguments, forming a thesis, and creating research papers. Students read historical fiction, biographies, and relevant classic literature to get a more complete view of the period. Level three offers American history and two World History courses. (Ancient and Middle Ages).
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Website: History Odyssey/History Quest
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(1 Reviews)
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Contributor Reviews
Reviews are solely the opinions of the contributor.
Cons: too many questions per lesson, not enough concrete examples and too much "how do you feel about..."
Grades Used: 8, 10, 12 (all together - works well for a group)
I am the homeschooling mother of four daughters and a long-time and happy user of the History Odyssey series. Therefore, when I saw that they had released a new series to teach "historical thinking" I was quite intrigued and ordered it immediately. I consider myself to be somewhat of a history nerd and I have one daughter who has picked that up from me as well. So we seemed like the perfect family for trying out a curriculum designed to cultivate thinking about history and historical connections.
I decided before we began that we would complete every activity and use it as our only history course and that I would spread it out over an entire year. I have had our children write a full-length thesis paper every year of high school, and I was intending to use the "long essay" at the end of the course as our thesis paper of the year, and didn't want to rush them through that. I used it for three students at the same time - grades 8, 10, and 12. The 12th grader has already completed all four levels of History Odyssey (spanning from grades 6-10 because we took two years for Middle Ages.). The 8th and 10th graders have finished the first three levels and intend to finish Modern Times next year. Therefore, you can see that our children are not exactly at the levels expected for Pandia Press history courses to begin with. (They all have some form of ADD or dyslexia - or both.)
We did History Compass twice a week. The plan was to do two lessons a week, with the idea that we would have time to spread lessons out if needed. I allowed four weeks for the long essay at the end (which was closer to a thesis paper for us). I deliberately wanted a "light" year in history because we were focusing on science, and I thought this would be a perfect solution. However, even with completely skipping the recommended project idea in Lesson 30, it still took us a full school year to finish the whole course. And many of the weeks we ended up doing history every day! If you want to finish it in one semester, all I can say is, allow plenty of time every day for history, or else plan on skipping a lot of activities and bonus assignments.
I love the premise of History Compass. I love all the topics covered. We had many good discussions and the girls truly enjoyed several of the projects throughout the year. However, if I were ever planning to use this course again, I would modify it quite a bit. I freely recommend History Odyssey to other moms, but History Compass I would only recommend with several caveats.
For starters, as a course advertised to be a "prerequisite" for History Odyssey, the actual content did not at all match my expectations. I do realize that it says on the course description that it is written at a 9th grade level. But I would not recommend this to any 6th grader unless I knew that they were an advanced learner and already possessed good reasoning skills. So many of the questions focus on thinking about why people act the way they do, and expect the student to already have a fairly strong historical background. For example, from Lesson 21: "Write a paragraph about a historical event or person that you have strong opinions or feelings about. Include why you feel the way you do and the impact that event or person has on your thoughts, on history, and on society." You find me a 6th grader that can do that, and I will show you a 6th grader with an excellent teacher and a well-developed brain!! I simply don't feel that your average 6th grader has enough human awareness to properly appreciate a lot of the content in this course.
Having said that, I will say that my 8th grader dashed off a strongly worded essay about Napoleon Bonaparte with no trouble whatsoever, while I needed to sit with my 10th grader and methodically sort through some very low-hanging fruit. "Do you have strong feelings about the Holocaust?" "Do you have strong feelings about the Salem witch trials?" "Do you have strong feelings about the impact of Mahatma Gandhi?" We figured it out eventually, but if you have a child who doesn't really have strong feelings about history, or if you are unwilling to be this involved with every assignment, you should carefully consider whether this is the course for you.
Don't even get me started on Lesson 18's question, "Can you think of an example in history where systems and privilege overlap, creating a complex intersection of experience and point of view?" Many adults that I know would struggle with that one!
Prior to this year, my 10th grader was not a history enthusiast by any stretch, but she liked all the stories and people of history because she is a storyteller. History Compass made her pretty much loathe history. Critical thinking is not her strong suit, and trying to assess how the passengers headed to Ellis Island felt about immigrating just really turned her off entirely. I repeat, I feel that it was "good" for her to have to march miserably through this course and have to think about different concepts in new ways. I did my best to help her along and took this as an opportunity to encourage her to think about life instead of just floating along, which I think is the point of a good education anyway. But know what kind of student you have and what you are willing to bring to the table as a teacher before you sign up all your students for what you might think is a 6th grade course in foundational historical concepts. Not here! Expect hard work and long assignments!
I am not trying to be dramatic about the long assignments. I created worksheets for every lesson in the course, which I frequently do for my dyslexic daughters who become overwhelmed when instructed to write answers into a blank notebook. There are 32 lessons in History Compass. I ended up with 112 worksheets. All I did was copy every question from the course onto lined pages with blank spaces to write in the answers. You can do your own math on how much writing is expected in every lesson!
I would honestly love to see a 5th/6th grade version of this course. I would love to see these concepts taught at a truly basic level, because I think a lot of students could use that, and I was really hoping for that for my own kids. Now that I have completed the entire thing myself, I feel that it would not be difficult to adapt History Compass to have different levels for different learners. I would love to see it released with a color coding system that would assign just the basic lessons, or select questions from each lesson for younger learners. If I were to repeat this course (I have no more kids, so I don't plan to use it again myself) I would pick and choose maybe only 3-5 questions from each lesson to keep the students from getting bogged down in the weeds. And several lessons I would skip completely. It would be nice to have that option laid out for us so that we home instructors didn't have to go to the effort of reinventing the wheel.
In my personal opinion, this course the way it is written now should be described as a 9-12th grade course, which could be adjusted to suit a strong 8th grader. As someone who has used all four levels of the current version of History Odyssey, I feel it would very appropriately fit in-between Early Modern and Modern Times, because I feel that Modern Times is the level where it would help to have research and writing skills "pre-loaded" (to use Samatha Malone's terminology) before beginning. I feel that trying to learn all these skills in middle school is apt to kill off any spark of joy in learning history that a student may have after reading through the History Quest series.
I have never found another course like History Compass. I think it is a needed course with a focus that I really appreciated. However, I would like to see its true grade level more accurately reflected in the course description, and I would like to see some built-in options for adapting it to students who have never studied history in-depth before (ie, many students who are about to begin History Odyssey).