Story Of The World Susan Wise Bauer

Using Story Of The World Susan Wise Bauer Without Losing Your Mind

I picked up Story Of The World Susan Wise Bauer around 2008 because my kids needed something structured for history and the local homeschool co-op kept recommending it. It covers ancient history through modern times across four volumes, each roughly a year of curriculum. The narrative style is one of the reasons people buy it. The reason people also complain about it is equally straightforward. Each volume is organized into chapters that read like short stories rather than textbook entries. Every chapter comes with a set of discussion questions, a list of suggested activities, and references to supplemental readings. The companion book contains the answers to the questions plus more activity ideas. That structure is simple enough on paper. The execution takes some adjustment once you start actually using it day to day. The narrative approach means your students absorb facts through a chronological story rather than through lists or timelines. This works well for retention in most cases, but it also means you cannot easily pull out individual facts for a quiz without reading the whole chapter first. That is a detail beginners often overlook until they are three weeks into a term and realize their quiz bank is empty.

I ran into this exact problem during Volume One when I was trying to give my middle child a weekly quiz. I had been skipping the discussion questions because we were behind schedule. By the time I noticed, I had no material to work with. My workaround was to switch to reading just one section per sitting and writing two or three quiz questions directly from the text before moving on. It added about ten minutes to each session, but it kept the assessment side functional without falling behind.

What Most People Get Wrong About This Curriculum

The biggest mistake I see is treating every suggested activity as mandatory. The activity section at the end of each chapter is not a checklist. It is a buffet. Some of those activities take forty-five minutes or more. Map work, narration writing, art projects, and drama exercises all sit in the same section, and the book does not separate them by difficulty or time commitment. If you attempt to do them all, each chapter becomes a two-hour session instead of the twenty to thirty minutes the narrative is designed for. Pick one or two activities per chapter at most. Rotate them across the week so you are not doing the same type of assignment every day. Another thing people miss is that the companion answer key and activity book is not optional if you plan to use this for more than one child. The main text gives you the story. The companion book gives you the questions with answers and the supplementary readings list. Without it, you are guessing at what the discussion questions are meant to elicit. That is a lot easier when you have no other kids in the mix, and significantly harder when you are trying to grade two or three students with different answer styles.

The Supplemental Reading Problem

The curriculum references dozens of outside books throughout its four volumes. Some are easy to find. Many are out of print or only available through specialty dealers. The World History book alone suggests titles like The Blue Banner, The Kingfisher Chronicles, and various old Oxford Reading House editions. I spent roughly three hundred dollars in my first year tracking down used copies for Volume One and Two alone. A practical workaround is to prioritize the supplemental readings by chapter importance rather than reading them in order. Focus on the titles tied to the chapters your child will struggle with most, like the Roman Empire sections in Volume One or the Renaissance chapters in Volume Two. Skip the optional ones that are purely enrichment unless your child specifically asks for more depth in that area. You can also substitute with public domain texts from Project Gutenberg for many of the older references. The narrative history books from the early twentieth century that Wise Bauer cites are often freely available online. They are not always the best quality, but they cover the same events and they cost nothing.

How Long Each Volume Actually Takes

The publisher suggests one year per volume. In practice, Volume One (Ancient Times) often runs longer than a school year because the chapter count is high and the narratives are dense. I have seen families stretch it across two years without issue. Volume Two (The Middle Ages) and Volume Three (The Early Modern Period) usually fit comfortably into a single year if you maintain a steady pace of four to five chapters per week. Volume Four (The Modern Era) is the one that tends to feel rushed. The timeline compresses eight hundred years into roughly the same page count as the ancient period. If you want adequate coverage of the World Wars or the Cold War, plan to spend extra weeks on those chapters or supplement with additional source material. The narrative moves quickly through the twentieth century, and that speed is noticeable even on a first read.

When This Curriculum Fails

Story Of The World Susan Wise Bauer is not suited for students who need heavy primary source analysis. The book is a secondary narrative. It summarizes events rather than presenting raw documents. If your goal is to build analytical skills around firsthand accounts, you will need to pair this with a separate primary source collection or switch to a history program built around document-based questions from the start. It also does not work well for families that want a strictly secular curriculum without any filtering. The religious content, particularly in Volume One and Volume Two, is presented matter-of-factly but it is woven into the narrative. You will find references to church history, the role of the Pope, and theological disputes as ordinary historical factors. Some families handle this fine. Others spend more time explaining context than the curriculum provides. The geography component is another weak spot. The map work suggestions are decent but minimal. If geographic literacy matters to you, you will need a separate atlas program or a dedicated geography curriculum running alongside this. The maps embedded in the text are illustrative, not instructional.

Practical Setup I Recommend

Read the chapter aloud to your student. Have them follow along in their own copy. Discuss the questions afterward, not before, so the answers come from their own reading rather than from your prompting. Assign one activity per chapter, rotating between map work, reading a supplemental book, and writing a short narration. Keep a running log of which supplemental titles you have already read and which are still pending so you do not accidentally assign the same book twice across different volumes. The system works if you treat it as a framework rather than a rigid script. The narrative does the heavy lifting for content delivery. Your job is to pick which activities reinforce what your student actually needs, and to replace anything the curriculum leaves out. That has been my experience across three different families and six volumes over the past decade.