Note: This post is one in a series on how we prepared our homeschooled children to take various College Level Examination Program tests. The introductory post for this series explains why we take these tests, what parts of the preparation worked for us, and what parts of the preparation did not work.

Other posts: Homeschool: How to prepare for CLEP tests – US History part 1

This post is about our struggle with how to prepare well for the CLEP US History I and II tests. Kelly took the first test when she was fourteen and received a score that was high enough for us to be pleased, but not high enough to be excited. She took the second test when she was fifteen and received a score that was high enough to receive credit for the course, but not high enough to be particularly pleased. She probably studied harder for the second test than the first test. In addition, she had refined her study methods to help her to better learn and remember the material. There is a description of those preparations here. After the second test, we decided it might be good to read a more serious and in-depth treatment of US History than what was provided in our homeschool curriculum. Kelly read A History of the USA by Joy Hakim, but we were very disappointed both with the depth and the quality of the content. Last night, we read the introduction to A Patriot’s History of the United States. We read the preface, an interview between Rush Limbaugh and one of the authors last week. We like the book very much. Unless we run into problems that we will only be able to identify as we read through the book, we plan to use this book as base for Christian’s one year survey of US history. We will talk more about how his preparations for the CLEP test and his results on this blog post as they happen.