History Notebooks....

When drawing up plans for this year, I was going to try using history notebooks to keep track of what we'd done. For some reason, I didn't follow through, which is something I regret a bit.

So here I am, on a trek through the Dark Ages, making a history notebook for Neal and Allie.

I took a few old notebooks and put blank cardstock pages (bought on clearance at Kroger for really cheap!) with the years being studied on each page. The pages start with the 1400s, and have a century per double page until the 1800's, when it goes to a double page per 50 years. The 1900s change to a double page per decade. I used a page from Homeschool Launch for the title page (The BOOK OF CENTURIES.)

I'm in the process of using Timeline Index to make a page for each section that has important people and events from each era , along with a representative picture. After learning about an artist, writer, statesman, etc, the kids can cut the picture out and glue it to their page.

Neal dislikes the endless study of this war, followed by that war, and this other war that was happening concurrently. It's really discouraging to him, I think. So, while we won't totally disregard the conflicts, we'll focus more on arts, science, culture, and how people lived.

Neal saw a 36 part, 50 minutes-an-episode series in the Teaching Company catalog about European History in the 1800s, which he asked for. Somehow, I don't think he'd finish it, so I said that if he still coveted it after we'd studied that time period, we'd think about it. We did order a set of videos about the middle ages done by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. We'll try to pull in more videos and such for later lessons, too. With Neal's video memory, he should learn a lot. Allie is happy about this, too, and Ken says that it might be good to check out some Medieval history....