Sickness in the Middle Ages

Neal, Allie and I have been studying the Middle Ages, which is hard to do when they are using tissues faster than a crossbowman can reload. They've been laying on the couch watching history videos from The Teaching Company, which feature a high school teacher who dresses up for the time period and does various accents. He's quite witty and entertaining, and he gets the points across very well. The kids enjoy it.

We are also starting Medieval Lives, which is a dvd series by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. In it, he demolishes much of what you think of when the Middle Ages pop into your mind, which probably isn't often.

We have plans for projects, like adding to our timeline books, painting with egg paints like Giotto, making foil pictures, listening to Medieval music, reading Chaucer, etc., but that will have to wait until Kleenex usage has declined.

Ken asked what he needed to do to graduate, probably with inspiration from his lovely friend Ashlynn, who's homeschooled and graduating in a few months. I told him that he needed a bit more math and some type of committment to learning to make a living: i.e., taking his A+ Computer Tech exam, and/or starting college. He rather liked this idea. He says that he's ready to take the exam now, but I encouraged him to study up, since the exam costs over $200.
More info as it becomes available....

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....